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Degeneration   Listen
noun
Degeneration  n.  
1.
The act or state of growing worse, or the state of having become worse; decline; degradation; debasement; degeneracy; deterioration. "Our degeneration and apostasy."
2.
(Physiol.) That condition of a tissue or an organ in which its vitality has become either diminished or perverted; a substitution of a lower for a higher form of structure; as, fatty degeneration of the liver.
3.
(Biol.) A gradual deterioration, from natural causes, of any class of animals or plants or any particular organ or organs; hereditary degradation of type.
4.
The thing degenerated. (R.) "Cockle, aracus,... and other degenerations."
Amyloid degeneration, Caseous degeneration, etc. See under Amyloid, Caseous, etc.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Degeneration" Quotes from Famous Books



... long since subsided into a respectable exponent of high and dry Whiggery, which in these later days has undergone a further degeneration or evolution into Unionism.... Audacity, wit, unconventionality, enthusiasm—all these qualities have long since evaporated, and with them has disappeared the political influence of ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney

... as standing for an owner of a landed estate; Parson, as denoting not the rector of the parish, but clergymen in general; Artist, to denote only a painter or sculptor; are cases in point. Such cases give a clear insight into the process of the degeneration of languages in periods of history when literary culture was suspended; and we are now in danger of experiencing a similar evil through the superficial extension of the same culture. So many persons without any thing deserving the name of education have become ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... wages, sometimes one-half, and sometimes more than one-half, on intoxicants. According to some of the foremost authorities on social science, and according to some of the most prominent medical men, drink is chiefly responsible for poverty, underfeeding, ill-health, and racial degeneration. Nevertheless, the British Socialists, instead of condemning drunkenness, rather encourage, or at least excuse, this terrible vice; and again, the universally discredited Iron Law of Wages is solemnly brought forth to prove "scientifically" that sobriety and abstinence on ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... her eyes rested with quiet approval on his rather embarrassed face. She had no doubt that close contact with this man had had more to do with the change in Crestwick than the influence of the country; and then she recollected that the lad's degeneration had been marked and rapid while he had taken Clarence for a model. It was a troublesome thought and she banished it ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss

... Israel's moral degeneration is to be partly explained by this, that the place where they found themselves was apt to tempt them to lewdness. For there are springs whose waters have various effects upon those who partake of them. One kind of water strengthens, another weakens; one makes beautiful, ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG

... of the best German novels of the last decades, is entitled The Buddenbrooks, the Degeneration of a Family (1901). The book would perhaps never have been written without the example of Zola in Les Rougon-Macquart, but it is far from being a mere copy; for a much more personal conception of the subject ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... evening. He holds that the human race is deteriorating mentally and morally. He calls out at the grossness which confounds the Creator with a young Jewish Philosopher. I tried to show him that this is no proof of degeneration, since the Jewish Philosopher at least represented a moral idea, and was therefore on an infinitely higher plane than the sensual divinities of the ancients. His own views of the Creator seem to me to ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro

... endeavor to see and learn the truth for our own personal satisfaction is indeed a commencement for making it prevail, a preparing the way for this, which always serves this, and is wrongly, therefore, stamped with blame absolutely in itself and not only in its caricature and degeneration. But perhaps it has got stamped with blame, and disparaged with the dubious title of curiosity, because in comparison with this wider endeavor of such great and plain utility it ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... plays (chiefly) of the last four years. I have not verified his statements. The inference, however, seems to be clear. Collier's attack could not reform the stage. The evolution took the form of degeneration. He could, indeed, give utterance to the disapproval of the stage in general, which we call Puritanical, though it was by no means confined to Puritans or even to Protestants. Bossuet could denounce the stage as well as Collier. Collier was himself a Tory and a High Churchman, as was ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen

... Physical degeneration was not found. Indeed their bodily perfection was extraordinary. In mind, they were like children; happy and friendly, joyful to teach all they knew—joyful to show all they had. The days rang with clean, childish laughter; but there was no philosophy. ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost

... All Toby's temporary degeneration of character had vanished since his walk to Dover. He was as alert as ever in his care of Maurice, as anxiously solicitous for Cecile's benefit, and had also developed a remarkable and valuable faculty for finding small towns and out-of- the-way ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade

... these parasites, from the highest to the lowest the process that has fitted them for a parasitic life has been one of degeneration. While they may be specialized to an extreme degree in one direction they are usually found to have some of the parts or organs, which in closely related forms are well developed, atrophied or entirely wanting. As a rule this is a distinct advantage ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane

... over-eating, the want of exercise, the excessive consumption of alcohol or of tobacco, which is really underlying the whole trouble which the drugs are supposed to cure and which at the very best they only temporarily relieve, while they permit the continuance of conditions leading ultimately to degeneration of tissue and to premature death. This is the moral which it is, we contend, the duty of the profession to draw from the daily events of life. The natural secretions of the human stomach are acid, and the acidity is subservient to the digestive functions. ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk

... point in the growth of the individual, and then, if they are checked, die away, or, if they are unchecked, form habits; and impulses, which were originally strong and useful, may no longer help in preserving life, and may, like the whale's legs or our teeth and hair, be weakened by biological degeneration. Such temporary or weakened impulses are especially liable to be transferred to new objects, or to be modified by experience ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas

... condemned is a fatal deviation of this sentiment which destroys its effect and narrows its actions. What we need to prevent is the degeneration of personal interest into an egotism which parches, instead of fertilizing, and which compromises the future by the exclusive search after present advantage; for egotism is short-sighted. On the other hand, the broader and more generous feeling which inclines us to sympathize with our fellow beings ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... of sounder methods, with which we shall be concerned, this degeneration of ideals was a work of time. In June, 1666, the British met with a severe check in the Four Days Battle, in which Monk, a soldier, commanded in chief. This reverse is chiefly to be attributed to antecedent strategic ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan

... already noted how deeply Tennyson was influenced by it. With George Eliot law is like fate; it overwhelms personal freedom and inclination. Moral law was to her as inevitable, as automatic, as gravitation. Tito's degeneration, and the sad failure of Dorothea and Lydgate in Middlemarch, may be explained as simply as the fall of an apple, or as a bruised knee when a man loses his balance. A certain act produces a definite moral effect on the individual; ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... conviction attempts to show reason for his confidence in the poet's virtue, he may advance such an argument for the association of righteousness and genius as has been offered by Carlyle in his essay, The Hero as Poet. This is the theory that, far from being an example of nervous degeneration, as his enemies assert, the poet is a superman, possessing will and moral insight in as preeminent a degree as he possesses sensibility. This view, that poetry is merely a by-product of a great nature, gains ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... two was named Carrol Key, a name hinting that in his veins, however thinly diluted by generations of degeneration, ran blood of some potentiality. But one could stare endlessly at the long, chinless face, the dull, watery eyes, and high cheek-bones, without finding suggestion of either ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... those of three periods, the old, who are connected by the two chief writings, "Fama" and "Confessio," that appeared at the beginning of the 17th century; the middle, which apparently represents a degeneration of the original idealistic league, and finally, the gold crossers and rose crossers, who for a time during the 18th century developed greater power. The last Rosicrucians broke into freemasonry for a while (in the second half of the eighteenth ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer

... us all, doesn't it?" said Griffin apprehensively. "I'm not so sure about myself, now you mention it. Doris Leighton may be one ahead of me in this business. Fatty degeneration of the soul is ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther

... to the conception of disease as almost synonymous with parasitism; but it must be remembered that the presence of parasites living at the expense of the body is perfectly consistent with a state of health. Degeneration, decay and parasitism only become disease factors when the conditions produced by them interfere with the life which is the normal or usual for the ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman

... Selection, you can turn an amoeba into a man, or a man into a superman, without it. All of which is rank heresy to the Neo-Darwinian, who imagines that if you stop Circumstantial Selection, you not only stop development but inaugurate a rapid and disastrous degeneration. ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... didn't like those young countrymen, and I'm no believer in the English countryside under the Bladesover system as a breeding ground for honourable men. One hears a frightful lot of nonsense about the Rural Exodus and the degeneration wrought by town life upon our population. To my mind, the English townsman, even in the slums, is infinitely better spiritually, more courageous, more imaginative and cleaner, than his agricultural cousin. I've seen them both when they ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... shore. Nearly all of them are sick with leprosy or elephantiasis or tuberculosis, and after the long rainy period they all have colds and coughs and suffer from rheumatism; altogether they present a sad picture of degeneration and misery, and there are few healthy ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser

... against France. The sure foundations of states are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneration and ruin." ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... tissue is replaced by a fibrous cicatrix. It would appear that portions of muscle transplanted from animals to fill up gaps in human muscle are similarly replaced by fibrous tissue. When a muscle is paralysed from loss of its nerve supply and undergoes complete degeneration, it is not capable of being regenerated, even should the integrity of the nerve be restored, and so its function is ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles

... naivete is nothing but a disguise. Here we have a case in point. This boy, from all accounts, is the pure type of the callous murderer. He stutters. He makes uncalled-for gurglings of a bestial nature. He has pendulous ears, and certain other stigmata of degeneration which are familiar to all conversant with criminal anthropology. Of course he denies everything. But mark my words! After six or seven months, when the prison diet begins to take effect, he will confess. I know the species; it is all too common. Meanwhile we must congratulate ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... movements like the movements of a man. Indeed, she was a better man than her companion; of a stronger common sense; with lither limbs and a stouter heart; the best man that France has latterly produced, and, so far as the student of racial degeneration may foretell, will ever ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman

... is positively incomprehensible and unexplainable to the average mind. All mystic literature, when read with the eyes of understanding, exalts and spiritualizes sex. The latter day degeneration of sex is the "trail of the serpent," which Woman is to crush with her heel. And Woman is crushing it to-day, although to the superficial observer, who sees only surface conditions, it would appear as though ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad

... the situation. Mac New's revelation was what Pan would have expected of such a character. Bad as he was, he seemed a white man compared with this underhanded greedy Hardman. Even granting Hardman's gradual degeneration, Pan could not bring himself to believe the man would attempt any open crooked deal. Still this attempt to bribe Mac New had a dubious look. Pan did not like it. If his wild horse expedition had not reached ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey

... his assistant, Dr. M. T. Burrows, had succeeded, scientific credulity was taxed. A well-known French savant expressed the opinion before the Society of Biology in Paris, that as others experimenting along these lines, had witnessed only degeneration and survival of cells, this phenomenon was all Carrel's discovery amounted to. In view of past experience, indeed, the chances were in favor of a mistake. In 1897, Leo Loeb said that he had produced this artificial ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor

... say as much for you or your imitation dog," retorted Jim. "There's just three things in Borealis that go around smellin' thick of perfume, and you and that little two-ounce package of dog-degeneration are maybe some worse ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels

... also presents to the plant or animal other alternatives whenever any fundamental change occurs in the environment which affects the life of these individuals. These alternatives are death, degeneration, and flight. These have all had their effects upon man as well as upon plants and animals. "It is well known that men die when natural conditions become favorable enough; famines recurrently sweep many from the earth. Again, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various

... moon—namely, our own. And if you think that science is thus wronged, reflect a moment upon what science makes of things near at hand. Love, it says, is merely a play of pistil and stamen, our most fascinating poetry and art is 'degeneration,' and human life, generally speaking, is sufficiently explained by the 'carbon compounds'—God-a-mercy! If science makes such grotesque blunders about radiant matters right under its nose, how can one think of taking its opinion upon matters so remote ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne

... legions were pressing down upon Egypt. The renegade Mark Antony was fighting for his life. For a time he was successful, but youth was no longer his, the spring had gone out of his veins, and pride and prosperity had pushed him toward fatty degeneration. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

... can alone prevent degeneration. There must be new life and purpose, or there will be weakness and decay. There must be broadening of thought as well as broadening of trade. Territorial expansion is not alone and always necessary to national advancement. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... of helplessness, filled her heart. She had written many brave letters to her Eastern friends, but the vital contests, the important factors of her life, she had not mentioned. She had given no hint of her mother's physical and moral degeneration, and she had set down no word of her longing to return; but now that she was within sight of the railway the call of the East, the temptation to escape all her discomforts, was almost great enough to carry her away; but into her mind came the thought of the ranger riding his solitary way, and she ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland

... upon the portrait, and, as I lay awake, my eyes continued to dwell upon it with growing complacency; its beauty crept about my heart insidiously, silencing my scruples one after another; and while I knew that to love such a woman were to sign and seal one's own sentence of degeneration, I still knew that, if she were alive, I should love her. Day after day the double knowledge of her wickedness and of my weakness grew clearer. She came to be the heroine of many day-dreams, in which her eyes led on to, and sufficiently rewarded, crimes. She cast a dark shadow on my fancy; and when ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson

... a fit the other day, something like vertigo, after having chased a rabbit. Doctor Gordon says that he has fatty degeneration of the heart, caused by having so little exercise in the South, but that he will probably get over it if allowed to run every day. But I do not like the very idea of the dog having anything the matter with his heart. It was so pathetic to ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe

... are all right if you don't go too far with 'em. We were just in time to prevent them from becoming tools of degeneration ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller

... see people past the age of sixty suddenly taking on fat and becoming at once unwieldy and feeble, the fat collecting in masses about the belly and around the joints. Such an increase is sometimes accompanied with fatty degeneration of the heart and muscles, and with a certain watery flabbiness in the limbs, which, however, do not ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell

... of artificial fright, had not been invented then, and sanctuary form was saved one indignity. But the innovations became an abuse so general that the Council of Trent commissioned a select board of cardinals and musicians to arrest the degeneration of church song-worship. ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth

... masters had made conventional, the degeneration and progress of technique, etc., play a large part, to be sure, in all these things, with and beside the changing eye. How much, however, essentially depends upon the latter we can notice very plainly when the question is one of architectural landscapes and, in general, of the portrayal ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various

... that death is not a natural necessity, that many of the lowest species of living animals do in fact live for ever; and that in the higher animals the custom of dying has been introduced in the course of evolution for the purpose of thinning the population and preventing the degeneration of the species, which would otherwise follow through the gradual and necessary deterioration of the immortal individuals, who, though they could not die, might yet sustain much bodily damage through hard knocks in the hurly-burly of eternal existence ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... promised to call upon her at the hotel. When the "child" extended a cold, clammy hand in farewell I felt like giving him a kick—he looked so grim and ugly and patronizing. I gazed into his eyes sternly and read there deceit, hypocrisy and moral degeneration. How ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett

... Mutual Friend" the reader is led for a long time to suppose that the character of Mr. Boffin is changing for the worse; and his interest is stimulated keenly when he discovers ultimately that the apparent degeneration ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton

... end in fire, as due unto the master principle in the composition, according to the doctrine of Heraclitus; and therefore heaped up large piles, more actively to waft them toward that element, whereby they also declined a visible degeneration into worms, and left a lasting ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne

... and into a tree-shaded lane. Emily tried to believe that this at length was really the country; there were no houses in view, meadows lay on either hand, the leafage was thick. But it was not mere prejudice which saw in every object a struggle with hard conditions, a degeneration into coarseness, a blight. The quality of the earth was probably poor to begin with; the herbage seemed of gross fibre; one would not risk dipping a finger in the stream which trickled by the roadside, it suggested an impure source. And behold, ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing

... in the early Middle Ages, particularly, we find Jewish physicians doing great work and obtaining precious acknowledgment for it in spite of the most discouraging conditions. Later it is not unusual to find that there has been a degeneration into mere money-making as the result of opportunity and consequent ease and luxury. At a number of times, however, both in Christian and in Mohammedan countries, great Jewish physicians arose whose names have come to us and with whom every student of medicine who wants to know something about ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh

... easily—to be an idle man, with a little ready money in his pocket for betting and other pleasures. The money was now provided out of "our business." This state of things continued without any change, except that process of degeneration which continued in him, until the child was about four years old, when all at once one day he told her they were not doing as well as they might. She was giving far too much of her time and attention to domestic matters—to the child especially. Business was business—a thing it was hard for a woman ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson

... of the Light! In their inner world, a vanishing world, where nearly all of what once had been a vast country was now covered by the steadily encroaching sea, they had resisted the degeneration which might easily have followed the destruction of a complex civilization. Living simply, and clean of mind, they had clung to the culture of the past as it was taught them by their Wise Ones. And now the People of the Light had found ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin

... this fundamental principle in my essay On the Gastrulation of Mammals (1877), and sought to show in this way that I assumed a gradual degeneration of the food-yelk and the yelk-sac on the way from the proreptiles to the mammals. "The cenogenetic process of adaptation," I said, "which has occasioned the atrophy of the rudimentary yelk-sac of the mammal, is perfectly clear. It is due to the ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel

... well as of those engaged in industry. It is easy to imagine what kind of a treaty victorious German imperialism would impose upon us. In economic matters, Russia would become a German colony. Russia's further economic development would be greatly hindered if not altogether stopped. Degeneration and deprivation would be the result of German victory for an important ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo

... consolatory simile the domestic difficulties of the seals at the Zoological Gardens, and was pleased to find her recognise the aptness of this description. But heaviest of all on the spirits of the whole party sat the anxiety about Lady Ashbridge. There could be no doubt that some cerebral degeneration was occurring, and Lady Barbara's urgent representation to her brother had the effect of making him promise to take her up to London without delay after Christmas, and let a specialist see her. For the present the pious fraud practised on her that Michael and his father had had "a good talk" ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson

... accept the altering of the shapes of workers, the tinkering with the hereditary form of their children, the artificial grafting upon our race of revolting and unnecessary form changes. Your whole science is a degeneration of wisdom into evil, tampering with life itself. You are horrors, and ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell

... Monsieur remains his truculent, vainglorious self, Montsurry has suffered a strange degeneration. It is sufficiently remarkable, to begin with, after his declaration at the end ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman

... belonged wholly and exclusively to their own city. If Dante, the range of whose intellectual sympathies can hardly be deemed a narrow one—Dante the exile, whose chequered life made him the denizen of so many foreign homes—could speak of the degeneration of the pure Florentine blood by the admixture of that of foreigners whose native place was some five or ten miles outside the walls of Florence it may be estimated how smaller minds and narrower natures would feel on the subject. Each townsman felt that he was the heir to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various

... fair to Josephus to consider the times and circumstances in which he wrote. It was an age when the love of truth was almost dead, extinguished partly by the crushing tyranny of omnipotent Emperors, partly by the intellectual and moral degeneration of pagan society. The Flavian house soon showed the same characteristics of a vainglorious despotism as the line of Caesars which it had supplanted. Under Domitian "the only course possible for a writer without the risk of outlawry or the sacrifice of personal ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich

... one of these boys would be transformed into the same class of sodden wretches their jockers now were, who had trained them into the ways of the road, and that they in turn during their life time would spoil the futures of scores of sons of respectable parents, which proves that degeneration breeds degeneration. ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)

... Theobald's Road. They were childless and servantless, and they had reduced simple living to the finest of fine arts. Mr. Goopes, Ann Veronica gathered, was a mathematical tutor and visited schools, and his wife wrote a weekly column in New Ideas upon vegetarian cookery, vivisection, degeneration, the lacteal secretion, appendicitis, and the Higher Thought generally, and assisted in the management of a fruit shop in the Tottenham Court Road. Their very furniture had mysteriously a high-browed quality, and Mr. Goopes when at home dressed simply in a pajama-shaped ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... Cerberus," said Sir Rupert, "my hand has been struck off. You must make me a hand of iron, one with springs in it, so that I can make it grasp a dagger." The text is also, as it professes to be, instructive; being the ultimate degeneration of what I have above called the "folly" of "Ivanhoe"; for the folly begets folly down, and down; and whatever Scott and Turner did wrong has thousands of imitators—their wisdom none will so much as hear, how ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... Harnish's younger brother. I've just arrived from Alaska to attend the funeral.' 'What funeral?' you'll say. And I'll say, 'Why, the funeral of that good-for-nothing, gambling, whiskey-drinking Burning Daylight—the man that died of fatty degeneration of the heart from sitting in night and day at the business game 'Yes ma'am,' I'll say, 'he's sure a gone 'coon, but I've come to take his place and make you happy. And now, ma'am, if you'll allow me, I'll just ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... that could be given for this radical restriction of immigration is the necessity of protecting our population against degeneration and saving our national peace and quiet from ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland

... a normal body orifice or tubular passage such as the anus, intestine, or external ear canal. Degeneration and resorption of one or more ovarian follicles before a state of ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... Rome. Romulus displayed many characteristics of the planet. The mythos is no doubt a parallel to that of Aeneas. Rome was founded when the Sun in his orbit had entered the sign Aries, and Mars was the god most honored by the Romans. In time, with the degeneration of human races and their worship, to the rural mind, the subjects of the mythos became actual personalities, endowed with every human passion and godlike attribute, the former characterizing the discordant influence of the heavenly bodies ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne

... to live thinks that all it needs is endowment, when the fact is that its struggle for existence and the spirit of its teachers are its greatest endowment. And sometimes when the money endowment comes the spiritual endowment goes in fatty degeneration. Some schools seem to have been visited by calamities in the financial prosperity that ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette

... is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful story that Tchekoff has written. It is an analysis of moral degeneration, leading progressively to insanity, in a doctor who is seized by the pervasive banality of the village in which he practises. Tchekoff, like many other Russian writers, has shown himself a master in the study of certain psychological ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky

... childish diseases—such as measles, chicken-pox, and whooping-cough—are less common in adolescence than they are in childhood, while the special diseases of internal organs due to their overwork, or to their natural tendency to degeneration, is yet far in the future. The chief troubles of adolescents appear to be due to overstress which accompanies rapid development, to the difficulty of the whole organism in adapting itself to new functions and altered conditions, and no doubt in some measure to the ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly

... possibilities of apoplexy as a legacy, as I have to you in the cases of insanity, I would continue: "Now by virtue of a possible ancestral weakness of your brain arteries this may happen: the arterial walls, because of habitual food in excess, may undergo a fatty, limy degeneration that will make a rupture possible, with death or paralysis of one-half or more of the body as the direct result; or the small arteries may have their walls so thickened as not to permit enough blood to circulate in order duly to nourish parts of the brain they supply; ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey

... itself on the choicest lands in conquered Europe, was beginning to decline in strength. We have seen that it failed to implant itself in Krete, and its numbers were already stationary elsewhere. The Greek peasant slowly began to regain ground upon his Moslem lord, and he profited further by the degeneration of the janissary corps at the ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... to races on other planets that complete degeneration and final extinction has come about by the entire dependence of the individual and afterwards of the entire race, on machinery to do the work required of the individual by the Creator, such dependence finally terminating in almost complete atrophy ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon

... cartilage along its back, and corresponds very closely with the ideal I have sketched of our primitive backboned ancestor. It may be an offshoot from the same group. The sea-squirt further illustrates the origin of the backbone, since it has a similar rod of cartilage in its youth, and loses it, by degeneration, in its maturity. ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... THE ELBOW-JOINT—In what cases should it be performed?—1. For disease of the elbow-joint which has resisted ordinary remedies, and is wearing down the patient's strength, including caries, ulceration of cartilages, and gelatinous synovial degeneration. ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell

... intemperance of parents, upon the mental constitution of their progeny is surely just as great and disastrous. The children of intemperate parents frequently become drunkards themselves; they have inherited a degeneration of the vitiated constitution, and carry the stamp of this degeneration within themselves. The offspring of drunkards are not only weakly and sickly, and die early, especially of diseases of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various

... not restrained from injuring each other by the common bond of detestation of the adherents to papacy. The decline of intolerance is a direct consequence of the externalization of the religious life. Rationalists constantly mistake this process for the degeneration of religion. They fail to see the simple fact that men can afford to dispense with the paraphernalia of elaborate and artificial aids to the worship of God when they feel His presence within their own souls and unmistakably hear His call ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... pleasure-seeking—or, as it may be stated, making happiness the highest aim of life. They said that to seek happiness was to seek the highest good. This philosophy in its pure state had no evil ethical tendency, but under the bad influences of remote followers of Epicurus it led to the degeneration of ethical practice. "Beware of excesses," says Epicurus, "for they will lead to unhappiness." Beware of folly and sin, for they lead to wretchedness. Nothing could have been better than this, until ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... to Huldricksson, "I had prepared before I came here, from certain information I had. It is largely salts of radium and its base is Loeb's formula for the neutralization of radium and X-ray burns. Taking this man at once, before the degeneration had become really active, I could negative it. But after two hours ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... Nerano Newspaper reading, to be discouraged Nice Nietzsche, his blind spot Nightingales, too much of a good thing; cease from troubling Ninetta, an attractive maiden Nose, degeneration of ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... first time General Triscoe had silenced question of his opinions with the argument he had used upon Eltwin, though he was seldom able to use it so aptly. He always found that people suffered, his belief in our national degeneration much more readily when they knew that he had left a diplomatic position in Europe (he had gone abroad as secretary of a minor legation) to come home and fight for the Union. Some millions of other men had gone into the war from the varied motives ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... also been held that this organ has much to do with the supply of iodine in the system, being particularly affected by the lack of iodine in the food. Again, it is said that when the thyroid gland has degenerated there ensues a condition of auto- intoxication, followed by a degeneration of other organs which destroy and eliminate poisons in the blood. It is claimed that in many cases of thyroid deficiency, as in cretinism, good results have been obtained by the use of thyroid extract, thus supplying the body with the secretion which normally should ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden

... evolutionary processes, we have learned to talk glibly of the obligations of race progress and of the possibility of racial degeneration. In this respect certainly we have a wider outlook than that possessed by our fathers, who so valiantly grappled with chattel slavery and secured its overthrow. May the new conscience gather force until men and women, ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams

... temple; and thereupon an ecclesiastical choir chants, in succession, the stanzas of the famous hymn, Tantum ergo Sacramentum,—a poetical composition, attributed to Thomas de Aquinas, and which, although written in rhyme, according to the practice adopted on the degeneration of the pure Latinity, and although the verses have a species of jingling which never met the approbation of the literati of the Augustan age, nevertheless they contain lofty sentiments, and explain in an ingenious manner the dogma of transubstantiation. ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous

... In Hazlitt's day he complains, that genius is called mad by foolish folk. Mr. Newman writes in his Wagner, that "art in general, and music in particular, ought not to be condemned merely in terms of the physical degeneration or abnormality of the artist. Some of the finest work in art and literature, indeed, has been produced by men who could not, from any standpoint, be pronounced normal. In the case of Flaubert, of De Maupassant, of Dostoievsky, of Poe, and a score of others, though the organic system was more or ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... is the scientific distinction between man and the brute creation—it is the law of nature in the human kind, which the Poet is getting out scientifically here, in the face of that terrific failure and degeneration in the kind—which he paints so vividly, for the purpose of inquiring whether there is not, perhaps, after all, some more potent provisioning and arming of man for his place in nature, than this state of things would lead one to suppose—whether ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... tests is seen in the theory of the pathological causation of genius promulgated by recent authors. "Genius," said Dr. Moreau, "is but one of the many branches of the neuropathic tree." "Genius," says Dr. Lombroso, "is a symptom of hereditary degeneration of the epileptoid variety, and is allied to moral insanity." "Whenever a man's life," writes Mr. Nisbet, "is at once sufficiently illustrious and recorded with sufficient fullness to be a subject of profitable ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... drink," said Hewson. Already he had had many. His face was relaxed, flushed, already showing signs of a flabby degeneration. In this man of iron sudden success was insidiously at work, enervating ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... points out that our present standard of living has not changed for generations, and argues that degeneration must result. Of course, he is right in his fact but wrong ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint

... further; that therefore its extent may increase for ever, and be properly termed indefinite or unlimited. But the fallacy and absurdity of this argument will sufficiently appear from a slight examination of what Mr Condorcet calls the organic perfectibility, or degeneration, of the race of plants and animals, which he says may be regarded as one of the general laws ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus

... imperially." Mystics are asked to think celestially; and this, not when considering the things usually called spiritual, but when dealing with the concrete accidents, the evil and sadness, the cruelty, failure, and degeneration of life. ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill

... of governing capacity among public men; and it fitted the gentry of the South to contribute, when they should choose, an element of great value to the common life of America. As it was, the South suffered to the full the political degeneration which threatens every powerful class which, with a distinct class interest of its own, is secluded from real contact with competing classes with other interests and other ideas. It is not to be assumed ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood

... life of this great man, and at what hour he dined, and whether he wrote with a quill or a J pen. Whether the quality of the pens he used was or was not intimately connected with the quality of his moral fibre, and whether his ethical degeneration could or could not be dated from his ceasing to make two fair copies of his manuscripts. We should also like to be informed whether his studs were gold or gilt, and, if they were gold, whether it was 18-carat gold, or only 15. If they were gilt, whether he wore them gilt on principle, or because ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang

... how Jesus regards sin as at once the cause and consequence of a degeneration of the moral nature, and as a repudiation of God. Two questions arise: Is it possible to recover lost moral quality and faculty? Is it possible for those incapacitated by sin to regain, or to enjoy, ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover

... birth, when the Graafian follicles are the most numerous; the entire number contained within the ovaries of the child being estimated at over 70,000. In view of the unquestionably large number of follicles in very young ovaries, and the relatively small number of ova which reach maturity, the degeneration of many follicles after reaching a certain ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith

... Nevertheless his title was an old one. Men of his race had loomed great in dim historic days, and though during the last two centuries no Dauntrey had done anything notable except lose money, sell land, go bankrupt, figure in divorce cases or card scandals, and marry actresses, they had never in their degeneration lost that charm which, in Charles II's day, had won from a pretty Duchess the nickname of the ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... opportunity for recovering strength. At Cairo I had taken the advice of a learned friend (if not an "Apostle of Temperance," at any rate sorely afflicted with the temperance idea), who, by threats of confirmed gout and lumbago, fatty degeneration of the heart and liver, ending in the possible rupture of some valve, had persuaded me that man should live upon a pint of claret per diem. How dangerous is the clever brain with a monomania in it! According to ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton

... motive of every action; in place of good faith, the most shameless dishonesty; and, for the old contempt of ill-gotten gains, a corruption so fathomless and all-pervading as fairly to stagger us. The tale of the doings of Verres in a district so near Rome as Sicily shows us a depth of mire and degeneration to which no ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare

... But, since weakenings and degeneration in these respects have come into the enactments of public power, it is all the more needful for every true and patriotic citizen to be earnest and firm in witnessing for God and his everlasting laws, that the people ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss

... rheumatic fever, induced by residence in damp houses, and the heart disease subsequent upon it, would be removed. Death from privation and from purpura and scurvy would certainly cease. Delirium tremens, liver disease, alcoholic phthisis, alcoholic degeneration of kidney and all the varied forms of paralysis, insanity, and other affections due to alcohol, would be completely effaced. The parasitic diseases arising from the introduction into the body, through food, of the ...
— Hygeia, a City of Health • Benjamin Ward Richardson

... remarkable advance in the higher and larger groups does not imply any universal law of progress in organisation, because we have at the same time numerous examples (as has been already pointed out) of the persistence of lowly organised forms, and also of absolute degradation or degeneration. Serpents, for example, have been developed from some lizard-like type which has lost its limbs; and though this loss has enabled them to occupy fresh places in nature and to increase and flourish to a marvellous extent, yet it must be considered to be a retrogression rather ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... nocturnal emissions, but most painful affections of the testicles. Those who show too great familiarity with the other sex, who entertain lascivious thoughts, continually exciting the sexual desires, always suffer a weakening of power and sometimes the actual diseases of degeneration, chronic inflammation of the gland, spermatorrhoea, impotence, and the like.—Young man, beware; your punishment for trifling with the affections of others may cost you a life ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... them. Neither did any one else." "Studying Shakespeare and the theatre in the theological seminary, and taking walks instead of examinations in college," says the biography of Beecher (between the lines), "meant definite moral degeneration to me. I did habitually what I could not justify at the time, either to myself or to others, and I have had to make up since for all the moral degeneration, item by item, but the things I got with the degeneration when I got it—habits of imagination, ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee

... apartments like babes in a basket!" he said laughingly, alluding to the "lift" process—"Upon my word, when I think of the strong people of a past age and compare them with the enervated race of to-day, I feel not only pity, but shame, for the visible degeneration of mankind. Frail nerves, weak hearts, uncertain limbs,—these are common characteristics of the young, nowadays, instead of being as formerly the natural failings of the old. Wear and tear and worry of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... Besides all this the working woman has also a special interest in doing battle hand in hand with the male portion of the working class, for all the means and institutions that may protect the working woman from physical and moral degeneration, and which promise to secure to her the vitality and fitness necessary for motherhood and for the education of children. Furthermore, as already indicated, it is the part of the working-woman to make common cause with the male members of her class and of her lot in the struggle for a radical ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... influence, is admirable, does not rest on religious foundations. Take London or any metropolis of modern Europe. The bulk of the people have ceased to receive any influence from the representatives of Christianity, yet there has been moral progress instead of deterioration. Those who speak of degeneration in London or Paris do not accurately know and estimate the state of those cities in ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe

... say at my suggestion—he was subjected to the wholesome discipline equally of his schoolmates and his masters; in fact, sir, as you are probably aware, the most perfect democracy that we have yet known, in which the mere accidents of wealth, position, luxury, effeminacy, physical degeneration, and over-civilized stimulation, are not recognized. He was put into compulsory cricket, football, and rounders. As an undersized boy he was subjected to that ingenious preparation for future mastership by the pupillary ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... well known how much the health of any one part of us depends upon all the others. The theme of one of Howells's novels is the steady mental, moral, and physical degeneration of a man from eating a piece of cold mince-pie at midnight, and the sequence of steps by which he is led down is a very natural process. Indeed, how much irritability and unkindness might be traced to chronic indigestion, which originally must have ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call

... strange lands without introduction. They are part of us. Fedya is in all of us. His one cry "There has always been so much lacking between what I felt and what I could do" instantly makes him brother to all mankind. His simultaneous physical degeneration and spiritual regeneration is the glory that all people have invested in death. Tolstoi's cry against convention that disregards spiritual struggle, and system that ignores human growth, will find answering cries in many breasts in ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al

... Ann; neither sense nor desire, neither hope nor fear, neither joy nor sorrow, neither love nor hate. Beyond her own order, beyond indeed her own circle in that order, the universe hardly existed. An age-long process of degeneration had been going on in her race, and she was the result: she was well born and well bred for feeling nothing. There is something fearful in the thought that through the generations the body may go on ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald

... our plates, and reached for the dishes. Now some tables, or sections of tables, still maintain this lofty standard of good breeding, by the sheer fact that the most of the men are well bred and the rest are ashamed not to be. But where the proportion is reversed degeneration is rapid. The men furtively hang up their hats and turn over their plates before the order, and if a bunch of them take to doing this, there appears to be no remedy for it. "It's up to you," said a sergeant ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French

... the mtayer, with all his labour—carried sometimes to an extreme that degrades the man physically and mentally—and all his frugality, which so often entails constitutional enfeeblement and degeneration, because the nutrition is not sufficient to correct the exhaustion of toil, obtains really less value for his work than an English farm labourer, and is not so well housed; but, on the other hand, he enjoys a large amount of ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... dignity, and all those faults which were the direct consequence of Dan's evil influence. She was falling farther and farther away from her ideal in everything, and knew it, but seemed to have lost the power to save herself. The degeneration had begun in small matters of discipline, apparently unimportant, but each one of consequence, in reality, as part of her system of self-control. From the moment we do a thing thinking it to be wrong, we degenerate. If it be a principle that we abandon, it ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... in appearance, but many show signs of degeneration. This is common in the insane, but less frequent and pronounced in neurasthenics. An abnormal shape of the head or curvature of the skull, a high, arched palate, peculiarly-shaped ears, unusually large hands and feet, irregular teeth from narrow jaws, a small mouth, unequal ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs

... result of Life's continual effort not only to maintain itself, but to achieve higher and higher organization and completer self-consciousness, is only, at best, a doubtful campaign between its forces and those of Death and Degeneration. The battles in this campaign are mere blunders, mostly won, like actual military battles, ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw

... substitute one system for another. You think you can eliminate by legal enactment all this fatty degeneration of greed and selfishness that has incased our souls. I'm afraid it will be a slower process. We must free ourselves from within. I believe we are moving toward some sort of a socialistic state. No man with eyes in ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine

... elementary form. What would come of it? The drones who ought to be killed would remain alive, would devour the honey, would corrupt and stifle the bees, resulting in the predominance of the weak over the strong and the degeneration of the latter. The same process is taking place now with humanity; the weak are oppressing the strong. Among savages untouched by civilisation the strongest, cleverest, and most moral takes the lead; he is the chief and the ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... Christ and yet made an essential element of that teaching, so the philosophy of Greece, the mysticism of Asia, and the civic virtues of Rome were taken up by the Christian religion, which, while remaining Christian, was modified by their influence. This process cannot fairly be called degeneration, but growth, such growth and development as is the privilege of every truly ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden

... generations; but the development of the modern manufacturing system represents the operation of the same process on a far larger scale, and with far greater intensity. The result may be described by saying that we have instead of a legitimate development a degeneration of society. A vast populace has grown up outside of the old order. It is independent indeed, but at the heavy price of being rather an inorganic mass than a constituent part of the body politic. It is, briefly, to the growth of a huge 'proletariate' outside the church, and hostile ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen

... worm learning to build a solid if rude shelly covering for its tender body, on the other a relative of the elegant, many-whorled TURRITELLA forgetting its high station and degenerating to the likeness of a worm. No doubt it is really a case of degeneration from the acquirement of fixed habits, just as when a lively young crustacean larva gives up its free independent life and glues its head to a stone—what happens? Why, he becomes a mere barnacle instead of a spritely shrimp as he might have ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... muscles and ligaments that form the pelvic walls, and a relaxation and dilation of the maternal passages. In addition, degenerative changes occur in the structures that attach the foetus to the womb, the normal structures being gradually destroyed by a fatty degeneration. This results in a separation between the fetal and maternal placenta. The contents of the womb begin to affect the organ in the same manner as a foreign body, irritating the nerve endings and producing contractions of the muscles. These contractions of the muscles help greatly ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.

... is of very grave significance that women shall be in excess. It is pitiable, and indeed revolting, in this country where the excess of women is so marked, to hear from year to year the comments of men upon the supposed degeneration of women, upon their unnatural selfishness, their desire to invade spheres which do not belong to them, and so forth and so forth ad nauseam; whilst these commentators are themselves hand in hand with drink, with war ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby

... It was a degeneration of all things of heaven and of earth that might be termed disenchantment, or if you preferred, despair; as if humanity in lethargy had been pronounced dead by those who held its place. Like a soldier who was asked: "In what do you believe?" and ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset

... Melastoma, on the meaning of the two sets of very different stamens, and as yet have been shamefully beaten, and I now cry for aid. I could suggest what I believe a very good scheme (at least, Dr. Hooker thought so) for systematic degeneration of culinary plants, and so find out their origin; but this would be laborious ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... even more lasting, evil is that caused by the loss of the best blood of a nation. In general, the strongest and best men go to the field; the weaklings and cowards are left to produce the next generation. The inevitable result is racial degeneration. The decline of the Greek and Roman civilizations was doubtless in large part due to the continual killing off of the best stocks, until the earlier and nobler breed of men almost ceased to exist. The effect of modern war is the exact opposite of that of primitive war, where all the men had ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake

... into this country by immigration during the last fifty years, and have filled our slums and tenement houses, our hospitals, asylums, alms-houses, and jails to overflowing. They cannot escape the results of their physical organization, which, in its turn, is an inherited result of ancestral degeneration. For them we may 'hope the best, but hold the present, fatal daughter of the past.' Their death rates are from two to three times as great as those of the better class of population; one-fourth of their sickness is treated by charities, and one-third of those ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks

... habit of studying probabilities are great helps against such attackers; but, on the other hand, the man who drinks a glass of wine when he feels low will beat the hypnotist, who will doubtless harm him by causing degeneration. ...
— Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men • John Harris

... better the progressive evolution of scientific medicine. It is one of the oldest of known diseases. The Greeks and Graeco-Romans knew it well. It seems highly probable, as brought out by the studies of W.H.S. Jones of Cambridge, that, in part at least, the physical degeneration in Greece and Rome may have been due to the great increase of this disease. Its clinical manifestations were well known and admirably described by the older writers. In the seventeenth century, as I have already told you, the remarkable ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler

... from thirty to fifty years ago. But there is one great difference between then and now. Then, rural civilisation was passing through a stage of marked social advancement which was common throughout the country; now, there are distinct indications of social degeneration, which Mr. Ross regards as the inevitable consequence of the new landlord and tenant system. Many members of these communities must have left the Old World to escape from the selfsame conditions which they ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett

... a degeneration of body and mind are not satisfactorily ascertained. Extreme poverty, impure air, filthiness of person and dwelling, unwholesome diet, the use of water impregnated with some of the magnesian salts, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various

... immured in a place of furtive, obscene whisperings, but he had found there not only vice. There was the chance of an education. He had accepted it at first because he dared not let himself be idle in his spare time. That way lay degeneration and the loss of his manhood. He had studied under competent instructors English, mathematics, the Spanish grammar, and mechanical drawing, as well as surveying and stationary engineering. He had read some of the world's best literature. He had waded ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine

... their functions developed and of acquiring more strength (as, for example, the muscles of boxers, the breast of foot racers, the voice of singers, etc.), these same organs, on the contrary, can be atrophied or modified, and their functions be changed in nature. It is in such degradation and such degeneration of human nature that fakirs excel, and it is from such a point of view that they are ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various

... scale as does their totality. In India the conception of the four ages or Yuga, by developing itself and producing its natural consequences, engenders that of the Manvantara. According to this new theory the world, after having accomplished its four ages of constant degeneration, undergoes dissolution (pralaya), things having reached such a pitch of corruption as to be no longer capable of subsisting. Then there springs up a new universe, with a new humanity—doomed to the same cycle of necessary and fatal evolution, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various

... a softening of the muscles of the heart, and a fatty degeneration, thus clogging the workings ...
— How John Became a Man • Isabel C. Byrum

... works like that. But whether we call the leaven a good or evil thing makes little difference. The effect of its mysterious powers of movement and upheaval is in the end salutary. It works upon the lump just as the catfish, that demon of the deep, preserves the lumpish cod from the apathy and degeneration of comfort, and as Mephisto, that demon of the world, acts upon the lethargy of mankind working within him, stimulating, driving to production as ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... slow to recognize the necessity for it; and nothing but the most solemn convictions of duty would have aroused them to the stern and unanimous determination with which they have entered on the present struggle. Swift would have been our degeneration, if the spirit of our fathers had already died out among us. But our history of less than a century since the Revolutionary war has fully maintained the self-reliant character of Americans and demonstrated their military abilities; and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... exceptional man an opportunity equal to his ability and equipment. He stands for the sacrifice of the individual to the popular average; and the perpetuation of such a sacrifice would mean ultimate democratic degeneration. ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly

... nor public libraries, nor great newspapers nor booming stocks; neither mechanical invention nor political adroitness, nor churches nor universities nor civil service examinations can save us from degeneration if the inner mystery be lost. That mystery, as once the secret and the glory of our English-speaking race, consists in nothing but two common habits, two inveterate habits carried into public life,—habits so homely that they ...
— Memories and Studies • William James

... the Madonna, her Son, and the Apostles. Here, beyond possibility of denial, pure belief came first, fanciful legend was attached after. I am inclined to surmise that this has always been the case, and, in the pages on the legend of Zeus, I show the processes of degeneration, of mythical accretions on a faith in a Heaven-God, in action. That "the feeling of religious devotion" attests "high faculties" in early man (such as are often denied to men who "cannot count up to seven"), and that "the same high mental faculties... would infallibly ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... integrity, morality, must move in advance, else the personality of individuals will not survive the temptations of freedom. To what extent, therefore, can education modify the individual? The answer is to be sought in the problems of heredity and degeneration. ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various

... not done better, but that he has done as well as he has. Every thoughtful student of the subject expected that the first two or three generations of freedom would lead to excesses and mistakes on the part of the Negro, which would in many cases cause moral and physical degeneration, such as would seem to the superficial observer to indicate conditions that could not be overcome. It was to be anticipated that, in the first generation at least, the tendency would be, among a large number, to seek the ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... doctrine, in his whole concept of art, Nietzsche saw the confirmation, the promotion—aye, even the encouragement, of that decadence and degeneration which is now rampant in Europe; and it is for this reason, although to the end of his life he still loved Wagner, the man and the friend, that we find him, on the very eve of his spiritual death, exhorting us to abjure Wagner the musician ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.

... signification. It was applied by later authors to the demons or familiar spirits who attended upon enchanters like Simon Magus or Apollonius; and such satellites were believed to be supplied by the souls of innocent young persons violently slain. Whether this secondary meaning of the title indicates a degeneration of the other, and forms the first step of the process whereby classic heroes were degraded into the foul fiends of mediaeval fancy, or whether we find in it a wholly new application of the word, is questionable. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... a pleasant memory behind him when he disappeared from England, perhaps just in time before complete degeneration set in as in France and Germany, Italy and Spain. Shakespeare, whenever he introduces him, does so in a kindly spirit, and represents him as a consoler of the afflicted and a refuge to the troubled spirit. By Spenser also he is ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould

... October, 1847, Volume XIII.), in which the "Man in the Moon" was supposed to fly, genie-like, with Punch over the land which at one time he ruled with his wit; and the "Dreary Hunchback," as he was apostrophised, was caustically besought to awake and stem the tide of his supposed degeneration. It is hardly surprising that this poem, clever as it is, was not reprinted in the posthumous ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... passage along those natural highways. It is, therefore superfluous for me to add that they are now correspondingly demoralized. It is a most humiliating fact that just in proportion as the paleface advances into lands hitherto given up to the Indian so those races sink. This degeneration showed itself strikingly among the Guatos in their inordinate desire for cachaca, or "firewater." Although extremely cautious and wary in their exchanges to us, refusing to barter a bow and arrows for a shirt, yet, for a bottle of cachaca, ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray

... nincompoop, seem to be arbitrary elaborations. Zany, formerly a conjuror's assistant, is zanni (see p. 143), an Italian diminutive of Giovanni, John. With the degeneration of Innocent and Benedict we may compare Fr. cretin, idiot, an Alpine patois form of chretien, Christian, and Eng. silly, which once meant blessed, a sense preserved by its German cognate selig. Dunce is a libel on the disciples of the great medieval schoolman ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley

... certain ultimate hardihood, a certain willingness to live without assurances or guarantees. To minds thus willing to live on possibilities that are not certainties, quietistic religion, sure of salvation ANY HOW, has a slight flavor of fatty degeneration about it which has caused it to be looked askance on, even in the church. Which side is right here, who can say? Within religion, emotion is apt to be tyrannical; but philosophy must favor the emotion that allies itself best with the whole body and drift of all the truths in sight. I conceive this ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James

... first time in the early Tertiary. These limbless reptiles, evolved by degeneration from lizardlike ancestors, appeared in nonpoisonous types scarcely to be distinguished from those of ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton

... you are suffering from what is called fatty degeneration of the heart, a disease which was first divined and explored by Laennec, the man who gave us the stethoscope, not so very many years ago. A good deal of experience—a more lengthened observation—is wanting on the subject. But after what you have said, it is my duty to tell you that ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... aside the last remnants of their private hero-worship. Very soon after this stage they generally changed their clubs, becoming members of the most expensive of these establishments; and from that point on, their progress towards finished cynicism, fatty degeneration of the intellect, and smiling abandonment of all scruples, all ideals, and all ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson

... selfishness, greed, military power and domination, and the pomp and display of material wealth. Luxury, indulgence, over-indulgence, vice. The inevitable concomitant followed—a continually increasing moral and physical degeneration. An increasing luxury and indulgence called for an increasing means to satisfy them. Messengers were sent and additional tribute was levied. Pontius Pilate was the Roman administrative head or governor in Judea at the time. Tiberius Caesar was ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine

... fought, since they remained there resting, pillaging, and devouring amidst the heaped-up spoils. And the pity of it was that the old hero, the paralytic, motionless father beheld it all—beheld the degeneration of his son, the speculator and company promoter gorged ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... to see that, sooner or later, the Bolshevik degeneration over, Russia will be recomposed; Germany, in spite of all the attempts to break her up and crush her unity, within thirty or forty years will be the most formidable ethnical nucleus of Continental Europe. What will then happen to a Poland which pretends to divide two people ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti



Words linked to "Degeneration" :   decadency, hepatolenticular degeneration, degenerate, physical process, age-related macular degeneration, shift, retrogression, evolution, degeneracy, transmutation, degradation, cataplasia, abasement, attack, transformation, abjection, abiotrophy, decadence, obsolescence, devolution



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