"Congenital" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... monarch, along and unaccompanied, himself go to the forest and live with the sons of Pandu. For then, if the Pandavas, from association, feel an attachment for Duryodhana, then, O king of men, good fortune may be thine. (This, however, may not be)! For it hath been heard that one's congenital nature leaveth him not till death. But what do Bhishma and Drona and Vidura think? What also dost thou think? That which is beneficial should be done while there is time, else ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Newspaper Man, a cheerful, affable young man who is disabled for ordinary business pursuits by a congenital erroneousness which renders him incapable of describing accurately anything he sees, or understanding or reporting accurately anything he hears. As the only employment in which these defects do not matter is journalism ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw
... not a disease, but a congenital condition in which the intellectual faculties are either never manifested or have not been sufficiently developed to enable the idiot to acquire an amount of knowledge equal to that acquired by other persons of his own age and in similar circumstances with himself. Idiots, as a rule, are ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... the umbrella, or ran away, as Herbert Spencer tells us, from the stick which had hurt him while he was playing with it, it was because an unusual movement or pain produced by an object to which habit had rendered him indifferent, aroused in the animal the congenital sense of the intentional subjectivity of phenomena, and this is really the first stage of myth, and not of its subsequent ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... Lawrence guilty than any other person—except perhaps Barker—with whom I have come in contact since this investigation began. He has one of the most unpleasant personalities I have ever known. He is a congenital grouch. But he told his Nashville story so frankly—and then became so panicky with surprise when my questioning showed him that his alibi was rotten—that we must not ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... become born as men possessed of great intelligence. Every kind of felicity and auspiciousness becomes theirs in consequence of that intelligence with which they are born. Those men of foolish understandings who cast wicked eyes upon the wedded spouses of other men, become cursed with congenital blindness in consequence of that sinfulness of theirs. Those men who, impelled by desire in their hearts, cast their eyes on naked women, those men of wicked deeds take birth in this world to pass their whole ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... congenital absence of some faculty which I ought to possess which withholds me from adopting this summary procedure. But I am not ashamed to share David Hume's want of ability to discover that polytheism is, in itself, altogether absurd. If we are bound, or permitted, to judge the ...
— Hasisadra's Adventure - Essay #7 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... an alcoholic inheritance which have been traced by careful observers are: Morbid changes in the nerve centers, consisting of inflammatory lesions, which vary according to the age in which they occur; alcoholic insanity; congenital malformations; and a much higher infant death rate, owing to lack of vitality, than among the ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... different races people the earth—on the one hand, unintelligent and cannibal negroes; on the other, the proud, handsome, and intelligent, though selfish and cruel white race. Again, from a moral standpoint, who can explain congenital tendencies to crime, the vicious by birth, the wicked by nature, the persons with uncontrollable passions? Wherefore are thrift and foresight lacking in so many men, who are consequently condemned to lifelong poverty and wretchedness? ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... the reproductive organs in one individual. True, the term hermaphrodite is often applied to certain persons in whom there is some malformation, deficiency, or excess, of the genital organs. These congenital deformities consisting of combined increase or deficiency, supernumerary organs, or transposition of them, which usually render generation physically impossible, have been called bisexual hermaphrodism and ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... that research. Viewed thus, customs, laws, institutions, sciences, arts, codes of morality and honor, systems of life, become inventions, come upon, tried out, standardized, established until scrapped in everlasting search for more and more perfect means of freeing body and soul from their congenital thralldom to a host of innumerable masters. Indeed, the history of all life, vegetable and animal, of bacillus, elephant, orchid, gorilla, as well as of man is the history of a searching ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... method alone. He (with M. Cousin and other philosophers who take the same view) does not apply the analytical method to inquire whether his necessity of belief may not be a purely acquired necessity and nowise congenital. It is, indeed, remarkable that these philosophers do not even seek to apply the introspective method as far as that method will really go. They are satisfied with introspection of their own present minds; without collecting results of the like process as applied to other minds, in different ...
— Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' • George Grote
... soldier: his mother a woman of fashion, and attached to the court. According to M. Colmache, he came into the world "without spot or blemish," and we are led to infer that his lameness—the cause of so much suffering and injustice to him in after-life—was not congenital, as has been generally believed, but the result of want of care in his childhood; for, as it was not the custom in those days for women of rank to nurse their own offspring, or even to rear them in their own houses, the future diplomatist ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... that "fools are the game that knaves pursue," and no well-informed member of the community needs to be informed that the victims captured by quack advertisements are not among the wiser portion of the community. Many of them, however, lie open to be allured into the quack's net, not by mere congenital and absolute folly, but because of the inexperience of youth or lack of knowledge of the world, or perhaps in some cases from a natural deficiency in the faculty of deciphering characteristic expression. There ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... grim routine, perished, just as Patricia's mother had done, in their first maternal essay. There were many hideous histories the colonel could have told you of, unmeet to be set down, and he was familiar with this talk of pelvic anomalies which were congenital. But he had never thought of Patricia, till this, as being his kinswoman, ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... this veracious enumeration would think that Spencer must have been a rich and exuberant human being. Such wide curiosities must have gone with the widest sympathies, and such a powerful harmony of character, whether it were a congenital gift, or were acquired by spiritual wrestling and eating bread with tears, must in any case have been a glorious spectacle for the beholder. Since Goethe, no such ideal human being can have been ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... hump-back or a couple of club-feet, that I sometimes feel as if we ought to love the crippled souls, if I may use this expression, with a certain tenderness which we need not waste on noble natures. One who is born with such congenital incapacity that nothing can make a gentleman of him is entitled, not to our wrath, but to our profoundest sympathy. But as we cannot help hating the sight of these people, just as we do that of physical deformities, we gradually ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... third and terrible element besides her congenital and conjugal inferiority which contributes to make the figure arid and gloomy; to reduce it, narrow it, distort it fatally. Is not one of the most flattering unctions a woman can lay to her soul the assurance of being something in the existence of a superior man, chosen by herself, wittingly, as ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... produced no great impression at the time. Not so, however, when he had listened to Bartley's proposal, Hope's answer, and all that followed. Then he put this and Colonel Clifford's communication together, and saw the terrible importance of the two things combined. Thus, as a congenital worm grew with Jonah's gourd, and was sure to destroy it, Bartley's bold and elaborate scheme was furnished from the outset with a most ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... institution, coeval and congenital with man. The first home was in Eden; the last home will be in Heaven. It is the first form of society, a little commonwealth in which we first lose our individualism and come to the consciousness of our relation ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... told her," exploded Diana, with more than her congenital exasperation. "I have told her, and she doesn't seem to mind. She still says she's going away ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... of reverence resulted from her husband's vacillating viewpoint, the doctor could not fathom. More than a little, he surmised. Had Brenton never wavered in his theology, Kathryn would have clung like a limpet to the bed-rock of her congenital Baptist faith. And yet, the doctor could not hold Brenton altogether responsible for Kathryn's development. The germs of mental cheapness were in Kathryn's nature, as were the germs of more or less illogical doubtings just as surely inherent ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... keep a good reputation; a young man a little apt to be misled by overweening vanity and the ill-advised flattery of his friends; but I hope that neither of you gentlemen will be hard upon him, but will consider his youth, and perhaps his congenital moral and intellectual deficiencies, even when you find your watches—on Mr. Campbell's person.' He leans forward, rubbing his hands, and smiling upon Campbell, 'How will that do, ...
— The Garotters • William D. Howells
... on the fertilization of orchids. He had held at one time the family living at Borlsover Conyers, until a congenital weakness of the lungs obliged him to seek a less rigorous climate in the sunny south coast watering-place where I had seen him. Occasionally he would relieve one or other of the local clergy. My father described him as a fine preacher, who gave long and inspiring sermons from ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... aware of the frequent dependence of menorrhagia upon anemia, not only acquired, but congenital. The existence of anemia, or of an imperfect elaboration of the blood and vascular system, previous to the occurrence of the first menstruation, is a possible condition of menstrual disorder that must always be very carefully eliminated before any other cause be assigned. It is, ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... and it is possible that natural selection, as well as sexual selection, has been favorable to the development of the blush. It is scarcely an accident that, as has been often observed, criminals, or the antisocial element of the community—whether by the habits of their lives or by congenital abnormality—blush less easily than normal persons. Kroner (Das koerperliche Gefuehl, 1887, p. 130) remarks: "The origin of a specific connection between shame and blushing is the work of a social selection. It is certainly an immediate advantage ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... young birds of the same year. By the way, I have just used the forbidden word "nature," which, after reading your essay, I almost determined never to use again. There are very few remarks in your book to which I demur, but when you back up Asa Gray in saying that all instincts are congenital habits, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... or "kinked" tail, that is, one having congenital dislocations at the joints, but such appendages are not desirable in the ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... was neither. Its cringing contour showed an injudicious mingling of races, and its meagre coat betrayed the deplorable habit of sleeping in coal-holes and subsisting on an innutritious diet. In addition to these physical disadvantages, its shrinking and inconsequent movements revealed a congenital weakness of character which, even under more favourable conditions, would hardly have qualified it to become a useful member of society; and Millner was not sorry to notice that it moved with a limp of the hind leg that probably doomed ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... is an experience universal at one time of life or another; but the reaction to it is infinite in variety; and while part of it depends upon the congenital dispositions which are the common property of humanity, a larger part is contingent upon the psychogenetic factors which have stamped ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... congenital] or those very slowly acquired of all kinds [decidedly evince a tendency to become hereditary], when not so become simple variety, when it does a race. Each{41} parent transmits its peculiarities, therefore if varieties ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... chiefly aliens from the United States, plunged into the wilderness of Athabasca without hesitation, and without as much as "by your leave" to the native. Some of these marauders, as was to be expected, exhibited on the way a congenital contempt for the Indian's rights. At various places his horses were killed, his dogs shot, his bear-traps broken up. An outcry arose in consequence, which inevitably would have led to reprisals and bloodshed ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... appeal. He buttoned the forlorn kitten inside his old jacket, and, feeling the grateful warmth of his body, it cuddled and purred. The wise little cat didn't care the tip of a mouse's tail whether or not Peter was the congenital dunce his teacher had declared him to be, only that morning. The kitten knew he was just the sort of boy to show compassion to lost kittens, and trusted and ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... slightest possible shrinking in Harcourt's eyelids—the one congenital likeness to his discarded son—but his otherwise calm demeanor did not change. Grant went on more cheerfully: "I've told you all I know. When I spoke of an unknown WORST, I did not refer to any further ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... medium in which I have said that the human spectacle goes on for Mr. Abbey have been a county of old England which is not to be found in any geography, though it borders, as I have hinted, on the Worcestershire Broadway. Few artistic phenomena are more curious than the congenital acquaintance of this perverse young Philadelphian with that mysterious locality. It is there that he finds them all—the nooks, the corners, the people, the clothes, the arbors and gardens and teahouses, the queer ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... from the slightest misconduct to the most flagitious crime, Pantocyclus attributed to some deviation from perfect Regularity in the bodily figure, caused perhaps (if not congenital) by some collision in a crowd; by neglect to take exercise, or by taking too much of it; or even by a sudden change of temperature, resulting in a shrinkage or expansion in some too susceptible part of the frame. Therefore, concluded that illustrious Philosopher, ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... truculence and incivility. Neither the influence of politics nor of religion sufficiently accounts for these differences in character. They seem to rest rather upon obscure and remote causes, such as racial and congenital tendencies. All this is especially observable in the South of France, where the present population has been formed from the blood of so many races, which is very unequally mixed even to ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... wish, I wish," he exclaimed, "that for the honour of our name, and for the sake of those who love us, I could prove you had congenital, hereditary tendencies that made you not responsible! Why could not I have watched over your upbringing? Why has fate decreed that I should only see my son three times at most in eighteen years, and come home to find him—a criminal? Oh, if science could but establish the ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... "Temporary Mechanical Substitution for the Left Ventricle in Man," pp. 642-644, and "Pulmonary Volvuloplasty under Direct Vision using the Mechanical Heart for a Complete Bypass of the Right Heart in a Patient with Congenital Pulmonary Stenosis," ...
— History of the Division of Medical Sciences • Sami Khalaf Hamarneh
... be made to burst by tying all the venous outlets from it. I have seen very high intra-ocular tension develop in a few hours after general thrombosis of the orbital veins. The absence of the canal of Schlemm is noted in congenital buphthalmos. The enlargement of the anterior perforating veins is an old symptom of chronic glaucoma. Obstruction to outflow of blood through the vorticose veins, by the increased intra-ocular pressure, has long been a recognized explanation ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... looked contemptuously at Bjerregrav's congenital club-foot—he had received his own injury at Heligoland, at the hands of an honorable bullet. "If one's sound of limb," he said, spitting on ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... man. My sketch shows the right side of his face, the other was drawn down almost beyond the lineaments of humanity. Beg pardon, madam, but would you be so good as to tell me whether this freak of nature was congenital, or the result of some ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... enlightened state simply did not know how many children were born dead, how many died the first month or year of life, how many went to school later on, how many were not able to profit by instruction because of congenital defectiveness, how many needed special care and training by reason of some special handicap, and how many ran away from such public institutions as gave poor harbor to those without family protection. One of the fundamental rights, surely, of every child is to be counted, to ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... family had lived in the country, and for that brief period she had known a more wholesome life than she was destined ever to know again until her marriage long afterwards. She was not, as is the general popular idea, absolutely a congenital invalid, weak, and almost moribund from the cradle. In early girlhood she was slight and sensitive indeed, but perfectly active and courageous. She was a good horsewoman, and the accident which handicapped her for so many years afterwards ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... came bounding into the old minister's study, he glanced up from his manuscript, and, as his eye fell upon her, it flashed across him that there was nothing so very monstrous and unnatural about the specimen of congenital perversion he was looking at, with his features opening into their pleasantest sunshine. Technically, according to the fifth proposition of the sermon on Human Nature, very bad, no doubt. Practically, according to the fact ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... our respect. Women admit all this in demanding the "single standard of morals." It is doubtless true that many women are less amorous than their lords— are to some extent the victims of the latter; but before assuming that this defect is congenital it were well to inquire if there be not an efficient post-natal cause. It is no compliment to woman to urge that she contributes unwillingly to the world, would fain ignore the God-given law to "be fruitful and multiply." Regardless of the affected horror ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... living, and ignorance as well as carelessness in the parents. All this we have known, but now we learn from the doctor that the evil effects of these causes do not stop at the clothes and skin, but go a little deeper. Yet probably they have not hurt the essential nature of the children. Congenital defects are rare; the doctor discovers even a high average of constitutional fitness, due, it may be, to severe "natural" selection weeding out the more delicate. It is certain that the village produces quite a ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... furnish any possible opportunity for circumcision. Such a case is reported in Virchow's Archives, vol. cxxi, No. 3; also in the British Medical Journal of December 6, 1890, and in the Satellite for January, 1891. It is one of congenital absence of penis. "Dr. Rauber records very briefly the case of a shoe-maker, aged 38, who complained of pain and trouble in the anus. On examining him, Rauber found a well-formed scrotum containing ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... BRIDE and BRIDEGROOM): I require and charge both of you, as ye will answer in the dreadful hour of autopsy, when the secrets of all lives shall be disclosed, that if either of you know of any lesion, infection, malaise, congenital defect, hereditary taint or other impediment, why ye may not be lawfully joined together in eugenic matrimony, ye do now confess it. For be ye well assured that if any persons are joined together otherwise ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... that was snatched from the burning; no sot who picked himself or was picked from the gutter; no drunkard who almost wrecked a promising career; no constitutional or congenital souse. I drank liquor the same way hundreds of thousands of men drink it—drank liquor and attended to my business, and got along well, and kept my health, and provided for my family, and maintained my position in the community. I felt ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe
... lip. Laxness of the muscles and ligaments in young animals is a predisposing factor. Hard work that tires the muscles and causes them to become relaxed, strains, unusual movements, as kicking in the stable and slipping, may cause this accident. Congenital displacement results from imperfect development of the external lip of the trochlea. Such a deformity subjects the ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... to this, Lysander argued that the oracle really warned the Spartans against making Leotychides king; for the god was not likely to allude to actual lameness, which might not even be congenital, but might arise from some accidental hurt, as disqualifying any one for the office of king, but rather meant by a "lame reign," the reign of one who was not legitimate, and not truly descended from ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... had certain permanent effects. These this chapter is designed to show: but first, since the development of the victorious civilization on alien soil depended primarily on the continued political supremacy of the men in whom it was congenital, it is necessary to see how long and to what extent political dominion was actually held in the East by men who were Greeks, either by ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... of the different regions and organs, with learned and critical explanatory observations. He verified the observations that in the foetus the testicles lie in the abdomen, and showed that their descent into the scrotum may be complicated with the formation of congenital hernia. Some years after, when he had retired from his academical duties at Gottingen, he published between 1757 and 1765 the large and elaborate work which, with singular modesty, he styled Elements of Physiology. This work, though professedly devoted to physiology, rendered, nevertheless, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... their birth ([Greek: tous ek genetaes paerous] [Endnote 280:2]). The word [Greek: paeros] is used specially for the blind, and the fourth Evangelist is the only one who mentions the healing of congenital infirmity, which he does under this same phrase [Greek: ek genetaes], and that of a case of blindness (John ix. 1). The possibility urged in 'Supernatural Religion,' that Justin may be merely drawing from tradition, may detract from the force of this but cannot altogether ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... Every advance in civilisation is synonymous with a progressive diminution of the differences. Carry your thoughts back to primitive conditions, when the individual, in his struggle for existence, was almost entirely shut up to the use of his congenital appliances, and you will find the differences were very great: only the strong, the agile, the cunning could hold their own; the less gifted were compelled to give way. As the growth of civilisation added to men's appliances, ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... the Justice of God, which is Severity or the Female, alone reigned, creation of imperfect beings such as man would from the beginning have been impossible, because Sin being congenital with Humanity, the Infinite Justice, measuring the Sin by the Infinity of the God offended against, must have annihilated Humanity at the instant of its creation; and not only Humanity but the Angels, since these also, like all created by God and less than perfect, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... are more frequent. I have seen numerous cases of goitre, and very often the so-called hare-lip. Webbed fingers also are frequently noticed; while inguinal hernia, both as a congenital and as an acquired affection, is unfortunately all too common. The natives do not undergo any special treatment until the complaint assumes alarming proportions, when a kind of belt is worn, or bandages of home manufacture are used. These ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... unexampled prosperity" in which you indulged during the latter part of 1904 and the following year? Of course you do. Everybody was talking about prosperity, and a stranger visiting the United States might have concluded that we were a nation of congenital optimists. Yet, it was precisely at that time, in the very midst of our loud boasting about prosperity, that Robert Hunter challenged the national brain and conscience with the statement that there ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... beginning, nascency, genesis; extraction, lineage; (new birth) regeneration, renaissance, regenesis, palingenesis. Associated Words: natal, native, pre-natal, post-natal, ante-natal, abortion, congenital, connate, connascent, connascence, horoscope, genial, genethliac, genethlialogy, genethliacs, sooterkin, uniparous, biparous, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... exclaimed impatiently; but the writing-table was never bought. The library remained as it was, and so did the contention between Halidon and myself, as to whether this inconsistent acceptance of his surroundings was due, on our friend's part, to a congenital inability to put his hand in his pocket, or to a real unconsciousness of the ugliness that happened to fall inside ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... the crib containing a baby of a few days, suffering with a congenital heart disease. The infant's lips were blue, so was the body blue, and the gasping for breath and heaving of the small chest were pitiful ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... man, began to ask questions about Helen. Was she normal? Was there anything congenital or hereditary? Had anything occurred that was likely to alienate her from her ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... us to take over the actual population of the world with only such moral and mental and physical improvements as lie within their inherent possibilities, and it is our business to ask what Utopia will do with its congenital invalids, its idiots and madmen, its drunkards and men of vicious mind, its cruel and furtive souls, its stupid people, too stupid to be of use to the community, its lumpish, unteachable and unimaginative people? And what will it do with the man who is "poor" all round, the ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... avowed purpose of its framers, their own practice and the practice of their successors, without being absolutely convinced that this whole fabric of opposition on constitutional grounds is as flimsy as a cobweb. This country of our love and pride is no malformed, congenital cripple of a nation, incapable of undertaking duties that have been found within the powers of every other nation that ever existed since governments among civilized men began. Neither by chains forged in the Constitution nor by chains of precedent, neither ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... a degen'rate,' declar's Peets, explanatory, 'he's easy an' soon to loco. His mind as well as his moral nacher is onbalanced congenital. Any triflin' jolt, much less than what that Silver Phil runs up on, an' his fretful wits is ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... more than the faculties—the laws of thought and feeling—which, under conditions of development, actually give birth to thoughts and feelings. These faculties and susceptibilities are, no doubt, congenital with the mind, —or, rather, are the mind itself. But its actually manifested phenomena wait the of the external; and they will be modified accordingly. It is absolutely dependent on experience in this sense, that it is only as it is operated upon by the outward world that the dormant faculties, ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... persons, happiness is congenital and irreclaimable. "Cosmic emotion" inevitably takes in them the form of enthusiasm and freedom. I speak not only of those who are animally happy. I mean those who, when unhappiness is offered or proposed to them, positively refuse to feel it, as if it were something mean and wrong. ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... world. There are soldiers who make ideal first sergeants and are ruined and ruinous as second lieutenants; and there are soldiers who are worthless as first sergeants, but irresistible as major-generals. Eddie was a born first sergeant, a routine man, a congenital employee—doomed, like fire, to be a splendid servant and a ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... instinct. To be perfect, an instinct must be carried out successfully by the animal when his organism is ready, without any instruction, any model to imitate, any experience to go upon. The "perfect" instincts are entirely congenital or inborn; the nervous apparatus only needs to reach the proper stage of maturity or growth, and forthwith the instinctive action is performed as soon as the external conditions of life are such as to make ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... exterior as the scorch of a sunbeam. And there is no sin existent that a man may not repent of! And there is no honest repentance, Eve, that a wise woman cannot make over into a basic foundation for happiness! But a trait? A congenital tendency? A yellow streak bred in the bone? Why, Eve! If a man loves, I tell you, not woman, but the pursuit of woman? So that—wherever he wins—he wastes again? So that indeed at last, he wins only to waste? Moving ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... acquainted with psychological laws to be able to explain and account for the characteristics of the type, by the peculiarities of the circumstances: the residuum alone, when there proves to be any, being set down to the account of congenital predispositions. ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... "There is some strange congenital want. I am certain of it. And if I gave way, Anne, I should be a madman for days, perhaps weeks—a beast—oh, you have not the faintest suspicion; and all I am living for in the wretched present ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... branches of the service. Combatant officers are, or used in those days to be, one in heart when discussing the Staff. I never met a doctor who did not think that the medical services are organised by congenital idiots. Every one from the humblest A.S.C. subaltern to the haughtiest guardsman agrees that the War Office is the refuge of incompetents. Padres, perhaps, express themselves more freely than the others. They are less subject to the penalties which threaten those who criticise ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... a quiet setter of a good example. I can assure you this is no exaggeration, but a portrait. It seems to me that the thing must be pathological, that he and this goodness of his have exactly the same claim upon Lombroso, let us say, as the born criminal. He is born good, a congenital good example, a sufferer from atrophy of his original sin. The only hope I can see for Bagarrow, short of murder, is forcible trepanning. He ought to have the seat of his ideals lanced, and all this wash about doing good to people ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... tallow-colored face with the bloodless, loose lips and the wandering, mystic eyes of periwinkle blue—I can see in that girl-face framed by a trashy picture-hat, and in that girl-form wrapped in the old golf-cape, one of the earth's unfortunates; a congenital failure; a female creature doomed from her mother's ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... before, and if, in the fray with the critics, he is, incidentally, as it were, somewhat roughly handled, the over-enthusiasm of his professional admirers must bear the blame. There is much prentice work in 'Lads' Love,' some strenuously enforced emotion, which is not genuine, and a congenital misunderstanding of the essential difference between tedium and humour; but if the whole of Mr. Crockett's work had reached its level, the protest against his reviewers would have stood in need ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... over the methods rather than over the conduct of affairs. A devotion to Church and Throne is not in itself a criminal sentiment; to prefer the will of one to the will of many does not argue the possession of a black heart or prove congenital idiocy. Councillor Mikulin was not only a clever but also a faithful official. Privately he was a bachelor with a love of comfort, living alone in an apartment of five rooms luxuriously furnished; and was known by his ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... the beastly chest holds twenty-seven thousand point nine double eight recurring cubic inches of air. Some other fool can reduce that to rods, and there you are. I'm fed up with it. Thanks to the machinations of that congenital idiot with the imitation mustachios, I've paid more than four times its value, and I'm not going to burst my brains trying to work out which drawer would have had a false bottom if it had been built by a dipsomaniac who ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... earliest dawn of history. There is a possibility that some advance, though a very small one, may be made by animals brought under the control of man. It is said, for instance, that a young pointer dog will sometimes point at game without any training. But in this case the acquired knowledge is congenital, and is therefore to be regarded as a development brought about by superintended selection. But with man none of the acquired knowledge is innate. It is a treasure entirely external to himself until he has appropriated it by study of some ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... his enemies his friends." And sometimes she baptized me, the bath-tub being her Jordan, in the name of duty, love, and patience. In truth, Aunt Judy took as much prophylactic pains with my soul as if it had been tainted with a congenital sulphuric diathesis; and if I had sunk under a complication of profane disorders, no postmortem statement of my spiritual pathology would have been complete and exact which failed to take note of her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... Wrap him in an oilskin, and there you were! I mention all my inspirations to show that I really did cover the ground pretty thoroughly in that blessed island. It is true that the conduct of my oil-skinned acquaintance was scarcely that of a congenital idiot; still, I was resolved to leave ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... I thought the most typical, and overcame the reluctance of the manager to let me see it. He said I had no idea what tricks were played by other makers to find out any new processes and steal them; but this was after I had pleaded my innocent trade of novelist, and assured him of my congenital incapability of understanding, much less conveying from the premises, the image of the simplest and oldest process. Then he gave me for guide an intelligent man who was a penknife-maker by trade, but was presently out of work, and ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... said cautiously. "Well, I should have said that crime is almost nonexistent. I suppose there will always be a few congenital criminal types, easily recognizable as such. But I'm told they don't amount to more than ten or twelve individuals a year out of a population of nearly two billion." He smiled broadly. "My chances of meeting one are ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... number of variations seem to be due to the so-called congenital causes, which are sharply contrasted with the influences of the first and second classes. It is quite true that the influences of the third class cannot be surely and directly demonstrated like the others, but however remote and vague they themselves may appear to be, their effects are obvious ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... mutilated limb, unequaled in mechanism and utility. Hands and Arms of superior excellence for mutilations and congenital defects. Feet and appurtenances, for limbs shortened by hip disease. Dr. HUDSON, by appointment of the Surgeon General of the U. S. Army, furnishes limbs to mutilated Soldiers and Marines. References.—Valentine Mett, M. D., Willard Parker, M. D., J. M. Carnochan, M. D. Gurden Buck, M. D., Wm. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... attained a mental and moral orientation which could be of inestimable service to his fellow men, and to civilization in general. What you call crankiness in old people, so trying to the younger generations, does not arise from natural hatefulness of disposition and a released congenital selfishness, but from atrophying glands, and, no doubt, a subtle rebellion against nature for consigning men to ineptitude when they should be entering upon their best period of usefulness, and philosophical as well as active enjoyment ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... eventuality that Taine had been chosen as weapons officer of the Niccola. His choice had been deliberate, because he was a xenophobe. He had been a problem personality all his life. He had a seemingly congenital fear and hatred of strangers—which in mild cases is common enough, but Taine could not be cured without a complete breakdown of personality. He could not serve on a ship with a multiracial crew, because he was invincibly suspicious ...
— The Aliens • Murray Leinster
... actually in your coffers; but with your prospects, surely you can sign something, or make over something, or back something, say a post obit or post vincula, or employ some other instrument? Excuse my inexperience; or, I should say, excuse my congenital inability to profit by experience, now considerable, of DIFFICULTIES—and of friendship. Let not the sun of May-day go down on Harold ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... must saw it out, and tighten up the sacking from end to end, or she must get a Christian bed. Poor Prosy! Whereon Mrs. Iggulden explained that her nephew had by an act of self-sacrifice surrendered this bed as a luxury for lodgers in the season, having himself a strong congenital love of bisection. He hadn't slept nigh so sound two months past, and the crossbar ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... manipulation that he is a stenographer or pianist at least five sixths ready-made as soon as he can control his hands intelligently, we are forced to suspect either that keyboards and shorthand are older inventions than we suppose, or else that acquirements can be assimilated and stored as congenital qualifications in a shorter time than we think; so that, as between Lyell and Archbishop Ussher, the laugh may not be with Lyell quite so uproariously as ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... a congenital dislocation of the hipbone suggests the name of Doctor Lorenz, so the slightest dislocation of the cloak and suit business immediately calls for Henry D. Feldman. No cloak and suit bankruptcy would be complete without his name as attorney, either for the petitioning creditors or the bankrupt, ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass
... that, but claimed the identification not complete as he doubted whether, strictly speaking, I could be classified as a congenital idiot. Windy pointed out that evidently I had traded Tiger for the gyasticutus. Wooden admitted that this proved me an idiot, but not necessarily ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... many cases of stricture or complete occlusion of the vagina, congenital or acquired from cicatricial contraction, obstructing delivery, and in some the impregnation seems more marvelous than cases in which the obstruction is only a thin membranous hymen. Often the obstruction ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... left of such high civilization" is due to several reasons. One of these may be traced chiefly to the inability, and partially to the unwillingness (or shall we say congenital spiritual blindness of this our age!) of the modern archeologist to distinguish between excavations and ruins 50,000 and 4,000 years old, and to assign to many a grand archaic ruin its proper age and place in prehistoric times. For the latter the archeologist is not responsible—for what criterion, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... already contains the characters of the adult, and when we remember that the characters of the adult which are to be developed from the egg are already determined, even to many minute details—such, for instance, as the inheritance of a congenital mark—it becomes evident that the egg is a body of extraordinary complexity. And yet the egg is nothing more than a single cell agreeing with other cells in all its general characters. It is clear, then, that we must look upon organization as something superior to cells and something existing ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... growing popularity of the Gentleman's Magazine, which is accused of living by plunder. But in truth the reader will infer that, if the selection includes the best pieces, the journal may well have died from congenital weakness. ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... stood numb and silent, scarcely daring to draw breath. Never in all his life had he seen his father in a rage so royal. Yet it seemed to inspire no fear in Fenzileh, that congenital shrew whose tongue not even the threat of rods or hooks ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... beloved predilection. And no spectacles will correct the mental astigmatism of the multitude, a fact that is often a cause of considerable annoyance to the possessors of normal sight. That defect of vision, whether congenital or induced by the confinements of early training, persists and increases throughout life, like other forms of myopia. The man who sees a ball as slightly flattened, like a tangerine orange too tightly packed (an "oblate ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... their origin in the peculiar nature of the social order which so long prevailed in Japan. This is a study of Japanese psychogenesis. The question to which we shall continually return is whether or not the characteristic under consideration is inherent and congenital and therefore inevitable. Not only our interpretation of Japanese evolution, past, present, and future, but also our understanding of the essential nature of social evolution in general, depends upon the answer ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... discovered, in the first place, furtively underlying my philosophy, a latent ambition to be regarded as a final authority on things in general. Hitherto this aspiration had fallen short, partly owing to the clinging sediment of my congenital ignorance, but more especially because I lacked, and knew I lacked, what is known as a 'presence.' Now, however, the high, drab belltopper and long alpaca coat, happily seconded by large, round glasses and a vast ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... Inversion.*—The first attention bestowed upon inversion gave rise to the conception that it was a congenital sign of nervous degeneration. This harmonized with the fact that doctors first met it among the nervous, or among persons giving such an impression. There are two elements which should be considered independently in this conception: the ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... Self, that all being is only one, that salvation consists in the identification of these two, and is attained by knowledge, the intuition of their identity, and that the phenomenal universe or manifold of experience is simply an illusion (maya) conjured up in Brahma by his congenital nature, but really alien to him—in fact, a kind of disease in Brahma. This was not new: it had been taught by some ancient schools of Aupanishadas, and was very like the doctrine of some of the Buddhist idealists; but the vigour and skill with which Samkara propagated his ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... die hard Better for mankind,—and all the worse for the fishes Bewitching cup of self-quackery C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre Coincidences Colossal system of self-deception Community is still overdosed Confound belief with evidence Congenital incapacity for life Count the pulse; also note the time of day Counting only their favorable cases Cut all their throats, sweetly Diseases get well without being "cured," Dislike whatever shakes the dust out of their traditions ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of Oliver W. Holmes, Sr. • David Widger
... because it is really ours," he utters a moral absurdity, and strikes at the root of all moral distinctions. He says, "The sinfulness with which we are born is really ours;" but in what sense ours? Only as any congenital disease may be called ours. If a man is born with a tendency to consumption, blindness, lameness, he may say, "my lameness, my near-sightedness." But no one would suppose that he meant thereby to hold himself ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... predisposition is well marked in this complaint. It may exist at birth, but so-called congenital rupture may very probably be the result of the pulling which the navel-string underwent at the time of foaling. However, umbilical hernia usually occurs during the first two or three months after birth; that is to say, while the opening ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... The congenital black magicians—those who, to an innate propensity towards evil, unite highly-developed mediumistic natures—are but too numerous in our age. It is nigh time then that the psychologists and believers, at least, ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... generation to generation. This is doubtless based upon the inheritance of physical and mental defects. Indirectly, therefore, there is such a thing as hereditary pauperism. Now we know from the labors of Weismann that acquired characteristics are not inherited, but only congenital, or inborn characteristics. It is not the characteristics, in other words, which are acquired from the influence of environment that are transmitted to offspring, but the characteristics that arise through variations in the germ, caused by forces which are not yet ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... then," he said. "You have now got two candidates elected, A. and B. You take from them 653 votes, which do not legitimately belong to them, and you mix them up with the surplus votes of the remaining eight candidates. Unless C. is a congenital idiot, or a felon, or otherwise incapacitated, he will then be found to have 4,129 votes, and he too will be elected. For the last place you must proceed on a basis of geometrical progression. There are still seven candidates, but ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 25, 1917 • Various
... them." As Miss Alida S. Williams, principal of Public School 33 in New York City, has in many articles and addresses freely illustrated from school experience, the art of seeing is acquired, not congenital, and every human being who possesses it has ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... be with us then? Will Daniel Lambert, the mammoth of men, appear weighing half a ton? Will the Siamese twins then be again joined by the living ligament of their congenital band? Shall "infants be not raised in the smallness of body in which they died, but increase by the wondrous and most swift ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... frequent cause of female celibacy and divorce. This view was upheld by such authorities as Dr. Constance Long of England, and other prominent women physicians. Although a certain percentage of female homosexuality is congenital, it is probable that by far the largest part is due to a conditioning of the sexual impulse by the substitution of members of the same sex as the erotic stimulus in place of the normal response to ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... and to grit his teeth at his own impotence. But there was no strength, no virile grip to take his fate in his own hands and mould it like a man. He only mourned his disadvantages, and sometimes blamed destiny, sometimes a congenital infirmity of purpose, for the dreary course of his life. Nature alone could charm his sullen moods, and that not always. Now and again she spread over the face of his existence a transitory contentment and a larger hope; but the first contact with facts swept it away again. ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... generations, inherited. Nevertheless, a few cases of apparent inheritance of mutilations have been recorded,[215] and these, if trustworthy, are difficulties in the way of the theory. The undoubted inheritance of disease is hardly a difficulty, because the predisposition to disease is a congenital, not an acquired character, and as such would be the subject of inheritance. The often-quoted case of a disease induced by mutilation being inherited (Brown-Sequard's epileptic guinea-pigs) has been discussed by Professor Weismann, ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... queer little congenital urge that kept Lilly on her feet for two weeks after the malady had hold of her. With a stoicism that taxed her cruelly, she would march smilingly off to school, a bombardment of pains shooting through her head, her hands and tongue dry, a ball and chain of inertia ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... conscription in England, we should find, as in other countries, that a large fraction of the men who earn their living by sedentary occupations are unfit for military service. Our human civilised stock is far more weakly through congenital imperfection than that of any other species of animals, whether ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... or allied form, and some ancient Viola, had all petals spur-shaped, and that all cases of "irregular peloria" in these genera are reversions to such imaginary ancient form? (660/3. "'Regular or Congenital Peloria' would include those flowers which, contrary to their usual habit, retain throughout the whole of their growth their primordial regularity of form and equality of proportion. 'Irregular or Acquired Peloria,' ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... outskirts of the town in a line as nearly straight as the congenital deviousness of Sialpore's ancient architects allowed. There was not a street but turned a dozen times to the mile. At one point she bade Dick stop, and begged Tess to let Tom Tripe take her home, promising ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... ignorant minds in the twilight, dabbling or hobbling in first one element and then the other, without parts or organs suited to either, in fact one of Nature's impostors who could not be said to have any artful pretences, since a congenital incompetence to all precision of aim and movement made their every action a pretence—just as a being born in doeskin gloves would necessarily pass a judgment on surfaces, but we all know what his ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... and similar figures showed that women living in comfort and luxury did not want to be bothered with confinements. It had been said that the degree of sterility could be regarded as an index to the morals of a race. Congenital sterility was rare, but the number of children born in England was decreasing. It had been estimated that one-third of the pregnancies in several great cities abroad aborted. Dr. Gibbons then quoted figures given by Douglas Wight and Amand Routh to ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... right-handedness goes back, indeed, to the most primitive savagery. Why did one hand ever come to be different in use and function from another? The answer is, because man, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, is really one-sided. Externally, indeed, his congenital one-sidedness doesn't show: but it shows internally. We all of us know, in spite of Sganarelle's assertion to the contrary, that the apex of the heart inclines to the left side, and that the liver and other internal organs show a generous disregard for strict and formal symmetry. In this irregular ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... sealed up in darkness. The nigger brain can never expand and absorb the universe, sir. It can never rise on the wings of genius and weigh the stars, nor compute the swing of the Pleiades. Thus far and no farther! It's congenital. ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... essayed with such industry, learning, and eloquence to convince a nation that its sympathies for half a century at least have have been misplaced .... The thesis which he only partly set out for the night—that the misfortunes of Ireland are rather due to the congenital qualities of the race than to wrongs inflicted by their conquerors—will excite earnest and perhaps bitter controversy." This prediction was abundantly fulfilled, and the controversy spoiled the tour. A friendly and sympathetic journalist questioned Froude's "wisdom in coming before ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... possibility of doing Maud a service and ridding himself of the faintest tinge of remorse. He was not fatuous or conceited. He did not for a moment imagine that the girl was in love with him. He attributed her demonstration in the rose-house to her "congenital bad breeding," and thought it only one degree worse than other match-making manoeuvres of which he had been the object in the different worlds he had frequented. He gave himself no serious thought about it, and yet ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... minister, and before he changed and took up the law. But making light of a cause so high and noble seemed to show a want of earnestness at the core of his being. Not but that she felt herself able to cope with a congenital defect of that sort, and make his love for her save him from himself. Now perhaps the miracle was already wrought in him, In the presence of the tremendous fact that he announced, all triviality seemed to have gone out of him; she began to feel that. He sank down on the ...
— Different Girls • Various
... appears to be for believing that peculiarities of race are themselves originally formed by the influence of external circumstances on the primitive tribe; that, however marked and ingrained they may be, they are not congenital and perhaps not indelible. Englishmen and Frenchmen are closely assimilated by education; and the weaknesses of character supposed to be inherent in the Irish gradually disappear under the more benign influences of the New World. Thus, by ascribing ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... the spleen, is analogous to Kurloff's secondary reaction of the bone-marrow. Such cases are frequently found in the literature. For instance Mueller and Rieder bring forward three cases of splenic tumour caused by congenital syphilis, cirrhosis of the liver, neoplasm in the cranial cavity, and in which the numbers of the eosinophils amounted to 12.3%, 7.0%, 6.5% respectively. In three cases of acute splenic tumour in typhoid fever ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... that high intelligence which lies latent in the brain of the infant. Thus it happens that the European inherits from twenty to thirty cubic inches more of brain than the Papuan. Thus it happens that faculties, as of music, which scarcely exist in some inferior races, become congenital in superior ones. Thus it happens that out of savages unable to count up to the number of their fingers, and speaking a language containing only nouns and verbs, arise at length ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... congenital, arising from conception during the menstrual period. For the corrupt blood within the maternal body, which forms the nourishment of the fetus, leads likewise to the corruption of the latter. Sometimes ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... peculiarities going beyond a certain point, is necessary to the general welfare. If, for instance, a man is born hasty and awkward, is always having accidents and hurting himself or his neighbors, no doubt his congenital defects will be allowed for in the courts of Heaven, but his slips are no less troublesome to his neighbors than if they sprang from guilty neglect. His neighbors accordingly require him, at his proper peril, to come up to their standard, ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... could be obtained, more than we now seek to obtain it. The leopard cannot change his spots, and the human being cannot wholly rid himself of his congenital qualities. Nevertheless culture and habit are second nature. There is scarcely a disposition of mind or manner of sentiment into which we cannot bring ourselves by steadily encouraging it. The faculties of the mind are like the muscles of the body. They shrink to nothing ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker |
