"Inversion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... name, let me assure the suspicious reader, is his own and not an Erewhonian inversion), in a most informing preface to a new edition, makes two assertions which may serve as my excuse for again endeavoring to explain the fascination for our generation of the work of Samuel Butler. College ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Holyoake solaces himself, and attempts to sustain the spirits of his friends with the assurance, "Whatever is likely to secure your best interests here will procure for you the same hereafter,"—a strange inversion of the scriptural maxim, for it practically amounts to this, "Seek first the things of this world, and the kingdom of heaven shall be added unto you." And he states the ground or reason of his confidence in this respect: "If there be other worlds to be inhabited after ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... one, for it is only through the individual that the higher specialization of the power can take place, but at the same time this must not lead us to suppose that the individual, himself, brings the creative force into being. To suppose this is inversion; and we cannot impress upon ourselves too deeply that the relation of the individual to the Divine Spirit is that of a distributor, and not that of the original creator. If this is steadily borne ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... simply and well. When he quoted the officer's remark to the cab driver, with the German inversion, the ...
— Facing the German Foe • Colonel James Fiske
... thirty degrees from the south pole, is seen in its whole revolution, and, accordingly, when off the Cape, I have observed it in every stage, from its triumphant erect position, between sixty and seventy degrees above the horizon, to that of complete inversion, with the top beneath, and almost touching the water. This position, by the way, always reminded me of the death of St. Peter, who is said to have deemed it too great an honour to be crucified with his head upwards. In short, ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... think would be to many, particularly acceptable. (562/2. In a paper "On the Geological Structure of the Alps, etc." ("Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc." Volume V., page 157, 1849) Murchison expressed his belief that the apparent inversion of certain Tertiary strata along the flanks of the Alps afforded "a clear demonstration of a sudden operation or catastrophe." It is this view of paroxysmal energy that Lyell criticises in the address.) Capital, that metaphor of the clock. (562/3. "In a word, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... system are very good; but Dr. Herz has endeavored to simplify it still further, and with this object in view has experimented on several arrangements. For example, to obtain inversion a contact was simply placed on each side of the vibrating plate. Although the movements of this latter are not, as we know, of the nature of ordinary sonorous vibrations, it was thought that they might prove to be in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... be; that is, the evidence 'a priori', securing the rational probability; and then the historical proofs of its reality. Pity that Baxter's chapters in 'The Saints' Rest' should have been one and the earliest occasion of the inversion of this process, the fruit of which is the Grotio-Paleyan religion, or 'minimum' of faith; the maxim being, 'quanto ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Parliament became supreme in administration as well as in legislation. The king became its servant on good behaviour, liable to dismissal for himself or his ministers. All this was not restitution, but inversion. Passive obedience had been the law of England. Conditional obedience and the right of resistance became the law. Authority was limited and regulated and controlled. The Whig theory of government was substituted for the Tory theory on the fundamental points of political science. The great achievement ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... adequate for the gigantic crimes of kings. Napoleon himself had been the champion of democracy and freedom, until he became an emperor and his head swelled so much with success that he thought of God and himself together, just as the Kaiser was now thinking. It was a curious inversion that the French who were fighting then to dominate Europe were fighting now to prevent such a domination. But it was now a great French republican nation remade and reinvigorated, as ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... ironically, I went on to argue on the benefits of war and of the necessity of the race continuing in the exercise of this elemental passion. I had always abhorred preaching, and here to preach I used a method of inversion, peppering my argument with platitudes on war as a needed discipline for the spiritual in man by its lessons in fortitude and self-sacrifice, and on the softening influences of peace. But what ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... propositions mean identically the same as when read in the usual order, and she seems to regard this as conclusive proof of their logical truth. She says, "The metaphysics of Christian Science, like the rules of mathematics, prove the rule by inversion. For example: there is no pain in Truth, and no truth in pain; no nerve in Mind, and no mind in nerve; no matter in Mind, and no ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... and confusion broke out again. The figure began to sway; and the light draperies were ignited by some bit of fire which had been brought into contact with them, by the inversion of Columbia's proper position. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... n elements in the dexter diagonal. And we thence derive the rule for the signs, viz. considering the primitive arrangement of the columns as positive, then an arrangement obtained therefrom by a single interchange (inversion, or derangement) of two columns is regarded as negative; and so in general an arrangement is positive or negative according as it is derived from the primitive arrangement by an even or an odd number of interchanges. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... on the lip of Atta-Kulla-Kulla the council did not immediately acquiesce in his view, and thus for a time flattered the hope of the ada-wehi that they were resting in suspension on the details of this choice argument. There was an illogical inversion of values in the experience of the tribe, and while they could not now accept the worthless figments of long ago, it was not vouchsafed to them to enjoy the substantial merits of the new order of things. Reason, powder, diplomacy, had brought the Cherokee nation to a ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... considered very talented. But Emily was theatrical, except in funny parts, Christy was lifeless, and Kitty Lacy had not taken the trouble to learn the lines properly and broke down at least once in every long speech, thereby justifying the popular inversion of her name to Lazy Kitty, a pseudonym which some college wag had fastened upon her early ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... [Footnote: In one or two sentences he has left a degree of stiffness in the style, not so much from inadvertence as from the sacrifice of ease to point. Thus, in the following example, he has been tempted by an antithesis into an inversion of phrase by no means idiomatic. "The plain state of the matter is this—I am an extravagant young fellow who want money to borrow; you, I take to be a prudent old fellow who ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... supplemented by a vague young lady from the village and an alert agent from the neighbouring Tentington estate who had intentions about a cottage. Lady Marayne insisted upon regarding Socialism as a proposal to reinaugurate the first French Revolution, as an inversion of society so that it would be bottom upward, as an attack upon rule, order, direction. "And what good are all these proposals? If you had the poor dear king beheaded, you'd only get a Napoleon. If you divided all the property up between everybody, you'd have ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... rudimentary. Every stage of evolution is here represented, distributed regularly from bottom to top, from the verge of maturity to the vague outlines of the embryo. The sheath clasps its string of ovules so closely that any inversion of the order is impossible. Besides, an inversion would result in a gross absurdity: the replacing of a riper egg by another in ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... were born and ever since, the women of the Earth have done their utmost to impress indelibly upon my mind—the lesson that woman is but a less lovable, more petulant, more deeply and incurably spoilt child. Your mother's reproach is an exact inversion of the truth. No one could have acted with more utter unselfishness, more devoted kindness, more exquisite delicacy than you have shown in this miserable matter. I could not have believed that even ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... be urged that the objects enumerated in the preceding number ought to be provided for by the State governments, under the direction of the Union. But this would be, in reality, an inversion of the primary principle of our political association, as it would in practice transfer the care of the common defense from the federal head to the individual members: a project oppressive to some States, dangerous to all, and ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... the story which is told us be true, namely that the Presbyter Laurentius has been groping for fatal riches among human corpses. An odious inversion of his functions, that he who should preach peace to the living has been robbing the dead, and that hands which have been touched with the oil of consecration should have been grasping at unholy gains, instead of distributing his own ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... and hospitality, was held in high reputation, assuming, in these respects, the attitude of a royal court in the northern parts of the kingdom; and the family were regarded with such veneration and esteem that the following harmless inversion was familiar "as household words:"—"God save the Earl of Derby and the King;" the general feeling and opinion thereby apparent being love to their lord and loyalty to ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... have been refreshing myself with Irish Memories since dinner. Do you remember what is said of Martin Ross? 'The large conventional jest had but small power over her; it was the trivial absurdity, the inversion of the expected the sublimity getting a little above itself and failing to realise that it had taken that fatal step over the border—those were the things that felled her, and laid her, wherever ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... are confirmatory of his inferences from the experiments on rabbits. The instances given are—an os uteri torn off; extensive laceration of the uterus and rectum in labour; four uteri extirpated on account of chronic inversion, (p. 13.) One of these last under his own care. It was removed by a wire, and came off in 11 days, without one bad symptom, (p. 14.) Rupture and laceration of the abdominal coverings, four fingers' breadth, the bowels hanging out, (p. 14.) Two spleens removed; one in a soldier ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... consider that strange inversion of idolatry which is the motive of Guy Fawkes Day and which annually animates the by-streets with the sound of processionals and of recessionals—a certain popular version of "Lest we forget" their unvaried theme; the more I hear the cries of ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... all this, but it seemed part of the general inversion of the new age. He bowed condescendingly to his first introduction. It was evident that subtle distinctions of class prevailed even in this assembly, that only to a small proportion of the guests, to an inner ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... value themselves upon a presumed refinement of judging. Poverty of language is the primary cause of the use which we make of the word, Imagination; but the word, Taste, has been stretched to the sense which it bears in modern Europe by habits of self-conceit, inducing that inversion in the order of things whereby a passive faculty is made paramount among the faculties conversant with the fine arts. Proportion and congruity, the requisite knowledge being supposed, are subjects upon which taste may be trusted; it is competent to this office—for in its intercourse with these ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... only the author of the one passage could have thought it necessary to disguise his plagiarism in the other by an inversion of sexes between the two speakers. In the same scene were three other ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... dreadful thing it is that people should have to go to America again, after coming to Europe! It seems to me an inversion of the order of nature. I think America is a sort of "United" States of Probation, out of which all wise people, being once delivered, and having obtained entrance into this better world, should never be expected to return (sentence irremediably ungrammatical), ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... origin; perhaps an inversion of bel cece, "beautiful chick (pea)," or from Fr. chiche beau, with same meaning), the term in Italy from the 17th century onwards for a dangler about women. The cicisbeo was the professed gallant of a married woman, who attended her at all public entertainments, it being considered unfashionable ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... prolific sources of Corrupt Readings, is Transposition, or the arbitrary inversion of the order of the sacred words,—generally in the subordinate clauses of a sentence. The extent to which this prevails in Codexes of the type of B[Symbol: Aleph]CD passes belief. It is not merely the occasional writing of [Greek: tauta panta] for [Greek: panta tauta],—or ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... to decry Sevcik as a teacher, to dwell on his absolutely mechanical character of instruction—and not without justice. First of all Sevcik laid all the stress on the left hand and not on the bow—an absolute inversion of a fundamental principle. Eldering had taken great pains with my bow technic, for he himself was a pupil of Hubay, who had studied with Vieuxtemps and had his tradition. But Sevcik's teaching as regards the use of the bow was very poor; his ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... were, with one leg raised before the gladiatorial arena of musical London, where all were waiting to turn their thumbs down on the figure of the native Potts, he had received a letter from his mother's birthplace. It was inscribed: "Egregio Signor Pozzi." He was saved. By the simple inversion of the first two words, the substitution of z's for t's, without so fortunately making any difference in the sound, and the retention of that i, all London knew him now to be ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... from natural and selfish life into spiritual and heavenly life. It was our selfishness and passion that drove us asunder. Thus it is, dear Rose, that my thoughts have been wandering about in the maze of life that entangles me. In my isolation I have time enough for mental inversion—for self-exploration—for idle fancies, if you will. And so I have lifted the veil for you; uncovered my inner life; taken you into the sanctuary over whose threshold no foot but my own ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... we take to be the following—utility in all cases, ornament when practicable. The first should ever precede, and serve as the basis to the second; and it is the inversion of their due positions that causes so many applications of the utile and the dulce to end in sheer absurdity. The usefulness of any article or system of dress depends entirely upon climate, modified of course by the occupation or pursuits of the wearer; the beauty of it or the suitableness ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... desperately, cursing under his breath. He pulled down the outer screen that was fighting directly against the radio frequency, energy for energy, and allowed the beam to strike squarely on the second screen, the inversion field that shunted the major portion of the energy impacting against it through ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... his sword in repelling the Indians and fighting against the British!' etc. This historical fiction, in the antagonistic excitement of the moment, was carried by an almost unanimous vote! . . . INVERSION of mere words, or involution of phrase and syntax, let us whisper in the ear of our Troy correspondent, is not a very great beauty in poetry. His own good thoughts are spoiled by this affectation. It requires an artist to employ frequent ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... colors of the Chinese, while green is one of the "intermediate" colors that are less esteemed. Here we have the yellow used merely as a lining to the green, or employed in the lower, or less honorable, part of the dress;—an inversion of propriety, and intimating how a favorite had usurped the place of the rightful wife and thrust ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... tribe, but, like the God of the Rabbi who protested against the Bath-Kol, the God of Reason and Love. As clearly as for the nineteenth-century Martineau, "the seat of authority in Religion" has passed to the human conscience. God Himself appeals to it in that inversion of the Sodom story, the story of Jonah, whose teaching is far greater and more wonderful than its fish. And this Abrahamic tradition of free thought is continued by Moses, who boldly comes between Jehovah and the people He designs to destroy. "Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... is the replies alone that vary, and the nature of these replies is determined by the knowledge at our disposal. The difference is not in nature but in man. The answers given by primitive man to these eternal questions are a complete inversion of those of his better informed descendants. The conception of natural force, of mechanical necessity, is as yet unborn, and the primitive thinker everywhere assumes the operation of personal beings as responsible for all that occurs. ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... him, that he should not depart from them."—Luke, iv, 42. Here, to prove that to be a pronoun, the disciples of Tooke and Webster must resort to more than one imaginary ellipsis, and to such inversion as will scarcely leave the sense ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... is generally designated. Nevertheless, as it is united with the body from which it emanates by an invisible vascular plexus, it can, at will, draw to itself, by a sort of aspiration, the greater part of the living forces which animate the latter. One sees, then, by a singular inversion, life withdrawn from the body, which then exhibits a cadaverous rigidity, and transfers itself entirely to the phantom, which acquires consistency—sometimes even to the point of struggling with persons before whom it materializes. It is but exceptionally ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... reinvestment. The purpose of these calculations does not lie in the application of amortization to administrative finance. It is nevertheless one of the touchstones in the valuation of certain mines or mining investments. That is, by a sort of inversion such calculations can be made to serve as a means to expose the amount of risk,—to furnish a yardstick for measuring the amount of risk in the very speculations of extension in depth and price of metals which attach to a mine. Given the annual income being received, ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... stations gives any record of the up and down movement of the air. In frosts of the usual type this vertical displacement is all-important. True, there may be brought into the district, by horizontal displacement, large masses of cold air and the temperature thus materially lowered; but the marked INVERSION of temperature occurs only when these horizontal currents or winds are lulled. On windy nights, as is well known, there is less likelihood of frost than on quiet nights, because of the thorough mixing of ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... determined by what I have defined as the natural map of mankind. I cannot understand those pacifists who talk about the German right to "expansion," and babble about a return of her justly lost colonies. That seems to me not pacificism but patriotic inversion. This large disposition to hand over our fellow-creatures to a Teutonic educational system, with "frightfulness" in reserve, to "efficiency" on Wittenberg lines, leaves me—hot. The ghosts of the thirst-tormented Hereros rise up in their thousands ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... cannot be left for a moment to its own inclination. This entails strict attention and much muscular effort, and, of course, the latter comes into play also in turning at each end of the field. The result is very effective; the flat mould-board offers the least possible resistance to the inversion of the soil, whereas the iron plough, with a curling mould-board, presses the crest of the furrow-slice into regularity of form, and gives a more finished appearance at the expense of much extra friction and ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... conceive to have come in this way even within a Horace's apprehension is undoubtedly what has attached many nobler souls to fame. With an inversion of moral derivations which all mythical expression involves we speak of fame as the reward of genius, whereas in truth genius, the imaginative dominion of experience, is its own reward and fame is but a foolish image by which its worth is symbolised. ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... expansion of pairs he was able to show similarities in mechanisms that had no apparent relation. He was first to recognize that the fixed link of a mechanism was kinematically the same as the movable links. This led him to the important notion of inversion of linkages, fixing successively the various links and thus changing the function of the mechanism. He devoted 40 pages to showing, with obvious delight, the kinematic identity of one design after another of rotary steam engines, demolishing for all time the fond hopes ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... all were assembled, Mr Benson followed, unmarshalled and unattended. When he had closed the pulpit-door, and knelt in prayer for an instant or two, he gave out a psalm from the dear old Scottish paraphrase, with its primitive inversion of the simple perfect Bible words; and a kind of precentor stood up, and, having sounded the note on a pitch-pipe, sang a couple of lines by way of indicating the tune; then all the congregation stood up, and sang aloud, Mr Bradshaw's great bass voice being half a note ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... for inserting the comma in such cases as there is for inserting it after a long subject. Moreover, there is often need of some device to remove the ambiguities that are caused by inversion. In English, the meaning of words is so greatly determined by their position that, in altering the usual arrangement of a sentence, there is risk of being misunderstood. The danger of inserting the point in this case is that the object may be read with the words going before, and not with its ...
— "Stops" - Or How to Punctuate. A Practical Handbook for Writers and Students • Paul Allardyce
... like a noun as the subject of has been proved. The conjunction that [Footnote: "That was originally the neuter demonstrative pronoun, used to point to the fact stated in an independent sentence; as, It was good; he saw that. By an inversion of the order this became, He saw that (namely) it was good, and so passed into the form He saw that it was good, where that has been transferred to the accessory clause, and has become a mere sign of grammatical subordination."—C. P. ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... indeed the superficial desire to indulge his passions. There is also the latent longing to be conformed to the good. There is the sense that he fulfils himself then only when he is obedient to the good. One of the great facts of spiritual experience is this gradual, or even sudden, inversion of standard within us. We do really cease to desire the things which are against right reason and conscience. We come to desire the good, even if it shall cost us pain and sacrifice to do it. Paul could write: 'When I would do good, evil is present ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... of this volume was published in 1899, following "Sexual Inversion," which now forms Volume II. The second edition, issued by the present publishers and substantially identical with the first edition, appeared in the following year. Ten years have elapsed since then and this new ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... ovulum as I have here described it, In Compositae its coats seem to be imperforated, and hardly separable, either from each other or from the nucleus, in this family, therefore, the direction of the embryo can only be judged of from the vessels of the testa.* And in Lemna I have found an apparent inversion of the embryo with relation to the apex of the nucleus. In this genus, however, such other peculiarities of structure and economy exist, that, paradoxical as the assertion may seem, I consider the exception rather as confirming than lessening the ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... shortcomings now to be noticed bear not upon Mr. Longfellow's own style of work so much as upon the method itself with which they are necessarily implicated. These defects are, first, the too frequent use of syntactic inversion, and secondly, the too manifest preference extended to words of Romanic over words ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... more part, greatly disposed to run for shelter behind the bolder petticoats; particularly the stablemen. The footmen, being more accustomed to ladies' society, are less embarrassed by their own hands, and by the exigencies of chivalry. This inversion of the usual attitude of the sexes, will, no doubt, be set more than right when we have retired. The moment has arrived. I quit father's arm—for the first time in my life I am honestly sorry to drop it—and go up ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... am sure that the French poets deserve a great deal of credit for producing such masterpieces of versification from a language, which, however elegant, is the least poetical in Europe; which allows little or no inversion, scarce any poetic license, no enjambement, compels a fixed caesura; has in horror the hiatus; and in fine is subject to the most rigorous rules, which can on no account be infringed; which rejects hyperbole; which is measured by syllables, the pronunciation of which is not felt in prose; ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... Danubian Principalities, North America, etc. Artificial fertilizers, guano in particular, indeed substitute the offal of men and beasts; but many farmers can not obtain the same in sufficient quantity; it is too dear; at any rate, it is an inversion of nature to import manure from great distances, while it is allowed to go to ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... were it not for the excess of his qualities. Would he continue to appear a genius, then he must continue to display that excess which—so he wished them to believe—alone prevented his brilliant achievements. It was all a curious, vicious inversion. "You could do great things if you didn't drink," crooned the fools. "See how I drink," Gourlay seemed to answer; "that is why I don't do great things. But, mind you, I could do them were it not for this." Thus ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... of laughter that greeted his inversion, Bettles released the bear-hug and turned fiercely on them. "Laugh, you mangy short-horns, laugh! But I tell you plain and simple, the best of you ain't knee-high fit to ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... raphe being next to the axis and representing the midrib the funicle corresponding to the petiole. The outer tegument of the ovule, according to Griffith, is a leaf united along its margins, but always more or less open at its apex. No inversion can, therefore, really take place in anatropous ovules, but the blade of the leaf is bent back on the funicle, with which ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... comical antithesis of our own. What we regard intuitively in one way from our standpoint, they as intuitively observe in a diametrically opposite manner from theirs. To speak backwards, write backwards, read backwards, is but the a b c of their contrariety. The inversion extends deeper than mere modes of expression, down into the very matter of thought. Ideas of ours which we deemed innate find in them no home, while methods which strike us as preposterously unnatural appear to be their birthright. From the standing of a wet umbrella ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... gasp of dismay, Bobby set to work in the dogged analytical mood which difficulties already aroused in him. The remedy for the inversion was plain enough. Bobby changed the type end for end and turned the R and the E right side up, but he worked slower and slower and his brow ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... sphere of investigation, and these are found uniformly to reveal the same Law or Principle, it is assumed that all similar Phenomena are invariably governed by this Principle or Law, which, in reality deduced or derived, is, by this inversion of terms, said to be induced from the observed Facts. The Law so established has thenceforth two distinct functions: I, all the Facts of subsequent Observation, by the primitive Method of observation, are ranged under the Law which, to ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... direction; p 206 and fields covered with different kinds of plants found to be displaced in the great earthquake of Riobamba, in the province of Quito, on the 4th of February, 1797, and in that of Calabria, between the 5th of February and the 28th of March, 1782. The phenomenon of the inversion or displacement of fields and pieces of land, by which one is made to occupy the place of another, is connected with a translatory motion or penetration of separate terrestrial strata. When I made the ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... thing like the same proportion, but is not necessarily much diminished at all. Nothing more results than a disturbance in the order of precedency of the two processes, sometimes amounting to its actual inversion: insomuch that instead of deducing our conclusions by reasoning, and verifying them by observation, we in some cases begin by obtaining them provisionally from specific experience, and afterward connect them with the principles ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... foreign bodies from the larynx. In such cases, while the same relative position of the head to the plane of the table is maintained, the whole table top is so inclined as to elevate the feet and lower the head, known as Jackson's position. This semi-inversion of the patient allows the foreign body to drop into the pharynx if it should be dislodged, or slip ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... west coast of Shetland, the rate charged as hire and the amount of the annual instalment of the price of the boat and lines appear to be the same; and the lines, if lost, are understood, it is said, to be at the risk of the men in both cases, which is an inversion of the ordinary rule of law in location. It is generally said that little or no profit is derived by merchants from boat hires or the sale of boats. In some places, however, those who are anxious to get into business make deductions from the boat hire; in order ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... Australia, seldom hunt without making perpetual grass or spinifex fires, and the traveller in these wilds may be always sure that the natives are in the neighbourhood when he can see the smokes, but it by no means follows that because there are smokes there must be water. An inversion of the terms would be far more correct, and you might safely declare that because there is water there are sure to be smokes, and because there are smokes there are sure to be fires and because there are fires there are sure to be natives, the present case ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... densest tropical forest, where a geologist pursues his fatiguing investigations under disadvantages that can hardly be realized in England, will I fear long remain unconfirmed. I may mention, however, that the appearance of inversion of the strata at the foot of great mountain-masses has been observed in the Alleghany chain, and I believe in the Alps.* [Dr. M'Lelland informs me that in the Curruckpore hills, south of the Ganges, the clay-slates are overlain by beds of mica-slate, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... for colour as Angelico received it from his monastic forefathers, the illuminators of Missals, or as he applied it in its strictest and most usual acceptation. Yes, if we admit the law of antagonism, the rules of inversion, and if we know that symbolism authorizes the system of contraries, allowing the use of the hues which are appropriated to certain virtues to indicate ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... acquaintance with the language. But attention ought to be drawn to one more particularly clever device—the form of asking questions. An Esperanto statement is converted into a question without any inversion of subject and verb or any change at all, except the addition of the interrogative particle cxu. In this Esperanto agrees with Japanese. But whereas Japanese adds its particle ka at the end of the sentence, the Esperanto cxu stands first in its clause. Thus when, speaking ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... affording an acquaintance with the mythology of other nations, were made to furnish him with the materials for hastily applying one solution to all the early Jewish histories, which he failed to invalidate by the application of the historic method just described. By an inversion of the argument of the early Christian apologists, he pretended that the early history preserved among the Hebrews was borrowed from the heathens, instead of claiming that the heathen mythology was a trace of Hebrew tradition; and, with a view to ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... perhaps, that Marius, who, Epicurean as he was, had his visionary [117] aptitudes, by an inversion of one of Plato's peculiarities with which he was of course familiar, must have descended, by foresight, upon a later age than his own, and anticipated Christian poetry and art as they came to be under the influence of Saint Francis ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... at five shillings a bottle, champagne (nee gooseberry) at five pounds, Cape smoke at two shillings per two fingers,—and, at a given signal, there was an inarticulate roar from dusty throats, an inversion of tumblers over thirsty mouths, and a second inversion over the ground to show that all the ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... been in chronological consecutive order. The final three quotations below show that while the original true definition and meaning, (1), are still not quite lost, yet authoritative writers find it necessary to combat the modern popular inversion, (2). ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... is like an awakened dreamer—he lives in his dream. (Of this we might cite seemingly authentic examples: Shelly, Alfieri, etc.) Psychologically, this means that there is in him a double inversion ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... N. contrariety, contrast, foil, antithesis, oppositeness; contradiction; antagonism &c (opposition) 708; clashing, repugnance. inversion &c 218; the opposite, the reverse, the inverse, the converse, the antipodes, the antithesis, the other extreme. V. be contrary &c adj.; contrast with, oppose; diller toto coelo [Lat.]. invert, reverse, turn the tables; turn topsy-turvy, turn end for end, turn upside down, turn inside ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... loitered away my boyhood in books, and dissipated my youth in reverie; but it is singular that as years rolled away, and the noon of manhood found me still in the mansion of my fathers—it is wonderful what stagnation there fell upon the springs of my life—wonderful how total an inversion took place in the character of my commonest thought. The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn, not the material of my every-day existence, but in very ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of the century that the revolutionary movement began with the break-up of classic form and the gradual dissolution of the classic spirit. Indeed this is such a commonplace of criticism, that we can only treat M. Taine's inversion of it as a not very happy paradox. It was in literature that this genius of innovation, which afterwards extended over the whole social structure, showed itself first of all. Rousseau, not merely in the judgment of a foreigner like myself, but in that of the very ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley
... you understand, for example, the disdain of the Methodist convert for the mere sky-blue healthy-minded moralist; and you likewise enter into the aversion of the latter to what seems to him the diseased subjectivism of the Methodist, dying to live, as he calls it, and making of paradox and the inversion of natural appearances the essence ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... general drift of the argument, it seems probable that Dryden was speaking of the drama in general. At a later stage of the dispute, however, he distinguishes between tragedy and comedy, and allows that the arguments in favour of rhyme apply only to the former—a curious inversion of the truth, as it would appear to the modern mind.—Ib., pp. 561, 566.] Howard—who, it may reasonably be guessed, had had some brushes with Dryden over their joint tragedy, The Indian Queen—at once took up the cudgels. He had written ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... This inversion sometimes creates ambiguity in poetry, e.g. "The son the father slew," and must be sparingly used ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... predicate subject. This order occurs also in independent clauses, and is employed (a) when some modifier of the predicate precedes the predicate, the subject being thrown behind. The words most frequently causing Inversion in Old English prose are then, onne then, and :r there: fr h, Then went he; onne rna hy: ealle tweard :m fo, Then gallop they all toward the property; ac :r bi medo genh, but ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... there is wisdom among our rulers. But to suppose that this great revolution can be accomplished by a temporary army; that this army will be subsisted by state supplies; and that taxation alone is adequate to our wants, is in my opinion absurd, and as unreasonable as to expect an inversion of the order of nature to accommodate itself to our views. If it were necessary, it could be easily proved to any person of a moderate understanding, that an annual army, or any army raised on the spur of the occasion, besides ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... In the Declaration of Rights, there is an inversion of ideas in the first article, liberty being placed before equality, from which it in reality springs. This defect is not to be wondered at; the science of the rights of man is a new science: it was invented yesterday by the Americans, to-day the French are perfecting ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... of your levity hits the nail on the head sometimes," said Carne, "though the blow cannot be a very heavy one. Nature has not fashioned me for enjoyment, and therefore affords me very little. But some little I do expect in the great inversion coming, in the upset of the scoundrels who have fattened on my flesh, and stolen my land, to make country gentlemen—if it were possible—of themselves. It will take a large chimney to burn their title-deeds, for the robbery has lasted for a century. But I hold the great Emperor's ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... It is a continent of rock, gullied by furious rivers; plateau on plateau of sandstone, with sluiceways through which lakes have escaped; the whole surface gigantically grotesque with the carvings of innumerable waters. What is remarkable in the scenery is, that its sublimity is an inversion of the sublimity of almost all other grand scenery. It is not so much the heights that are prodigious as the abysses. At certain points in the course of the Colorado of the West you can drop a ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... course, have taken place in an easy and gradual manner, and it is by no means clear that, had I even been awake at the time of the occurrence, I should have been made aware of it by any internal evidence of an inversion—that is to say, by any inconvenience or disarrangement, either about my person ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... standard. Judged by this, surely the fairest, the only fair, rule, Japan has every reason to be considered a moral country. Those shocking crimes which appear to be the outcome of either the aberration or the inversion of the sexual instincts are almost unknown there. Nor do I consider that the public estimate of prostitution on the whole makes for immorality. If an evil exist, and prostitution is undoubtedly an evil, it is surely better to regulate it than to affect to be oblivious of it. The Japanese attitude ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... shapes this eruption covers the countenance of the earth: the animal and the vegetable: one in some degree the inversion of the other: the second rooted to the spot; the first coming detached out of its natal mud, and scurrying abroad with the myriad feet of insects or towering into the heavens on the wings of birds: a thing so inconceivable that, if it be well considered, the ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... poet partook of the natural, or, in other words, was a true poet after his kind, his best was always written in his most natural and straightforward manner. Hear Shadwell's antagonist Dryden. Not a particle of inversion, beyond what is used for the sake of emphasis in common discourse, and this only in one line (the last but three), is to be found in his immortal character of ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... impetuous. Franz rose from his seat while watching these men standing with their violins pressed against their breasts, as if they were pouring their life's blood into them: he felt oppressed with anguish, when, by an ingenious inversion, the gloomy theme was transformed into a graceful, poetic melody. The sounds passed away rapidily like sparks, then were extinguished for a moment. A ferocious violence animated the last measures, and the gypsies laid down ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... which we have from our not very distant ancestors. The spirit of anarchy in religion would persuade us that there is no divine sanction for goodness and no eternal stamp on vice, that morality is a matter of convention which every society and every nation has a right to invert if it judges such inversion in the line of its interests. The spirit of anarchy in art proclaims that all the works of nature are equally beautiful or equally ugly, that nothing which exists is unfit to be represented in our galleries and public places, that so long as a picture or a statue ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... a man can engage. Ambition to serve is always noble. Desire for the honors and emoluments of public office, however, may crowd out the desire to render public service. Such a substitution of selfish for patriotic considerations, such an inversion of the proper order of interests in a man's mind, is the vice of political ambition. The ambitious politician seeks office, not because he seeks to promote measures which he believes to be for the public good; not because he believes he can promote those interests more effectively ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... was then chosen: Arthur Tappan of New York, president, and Elizur Wright, Jr., William Lloyd Garrison, and A. L. Cox, secretaries. Among the vice-presidents was Dr. Lord of Dartmouth College, then professedly in favor of emancipation, but who afterwards turned a moral somersault, a self-inversion which left him ever after on his head ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... dignity of Alderman has dulled him into prudence, and the love of feasting; but hitherto he has done nothing but go to City banquets and sermons, and sit at Guildhall as a sober magistrate. With an inversion of the proverb, "Si ex quovis Mercurio fit lignum!" What do you Italians think of Harlequin Potesta?[1] In truth, his party is crumbled away strangely. Lord Chatham has talked on the Middlesex election ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... then, in order to see what I see, the obedient reader must do what I tell him to do. Let him therefore view the wretch upside down. If he neglects that simple direction, of course I don't answer for anything that follows: without any fault of mine, my description will be unintelligible. This inversion being made, the following is the dreadful creature ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... hystericus. Hysteric suffocation is the perception of a globe rolling round in the abdomen, and ascending to the stomach and throat, and there inducing strangulation. It consists of an ineffectual inversion of the motions of the oesophagus, and other parts of the alimentary canal; nothing being rejected ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... communication represented. Even before 1972, he observed, there had been argument about what would happen if a man could travel in time and happened to go back to an earlier age and kill his grandfather. This communication was an inversion of that paradox. The world of 2180 wished to communicate back in time and save the lives of its great-great-great-grandparents so that it—the world of ...
— The Machine That Saved The World • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... ornament; floridness c^. adj.. turgidity, turgescence^; altiloquence &c adj.^; declamation, teratology^; well-rounded periods; elegance &c 578; orotundity. inversion, antithesis, alliteration, paronomasia; figurativeness &c (metaphor) 521. flourish; flowers of speech, flowers of rhetoric; frills of style, euphuism^, euphemism. big-sounding words, high-sounding words; macrology^, sesquipedalia verba [Lat.], Alexandrine; inflation, pretension; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... display their taste in ornamentation. They first design the exterior, and then fit into it the interior of their building. The purpose of the building is thus regarded as a secondary consideration. In short, they utilise ornament instead of ornamenting utility—total inversion, as it appears to me, of the fundamental principle which ought to govern all classes of architectural structures. This is, unfortunately, too evident in most of our public buildings. See, for instance, our ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... in their holiday garb, and on his gondola sat Angela, happy, and blushing at her happiness. Then he and she entered the house in which I dwelt, and came into my room (and it was strange indeed, after so many years of inversion, to see her with her head above her feet!), and then she wished me happiness and a speedy restoration to good health (which could never be); and I in broken words and with tears in my eyes, gave her the little silver ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... between the warring powers, and strong likelihood of peace in the world for all time to come. It also meant other things. It meant the complete inversion of the American policy and the welcoming of science as the servant of mankind's larger needs and not merely a flunky to the degenerate, ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings
... N. contrariety, contrast, foil, antithesis, oppositeness; contradiction; antagonism &c. (opposition) 708; clashing, repugnance. inversion &c. 218; the opposite, the reverse, the inverse, the converse, the antipodes, the antithesis, the other extreme. V. be contrary &c. adj.; contrast with, oppose; diller toto coelo[Lat]. invert, reverse, turn the tables; turn topsy-turvy, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... enzymes, or ferments, that appear in living bodies—"never found in inorganic Nature and not to be gained by chemical synthesis." Orders and suborders of enzymes, they play a part in respiration, in digestion, in assimilation. Some act on the fats, some on the carbohydrates, some produce inversion, others dissolution and precipitation. These enzymes are at once the products and the agents of life. They must exert force, chemical force, or, shall we say, they transform chemical force into life force, or, to use Professor ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... Brazil. Yet who would now pretend, on the basis of linguistic similarity, to say that there is no United States literature as distinguished from English literature? After all, is it not national life, as much as national language, that makes literature? And by an inversion of Verissimo's standard may we not come face to face with a state of affairs in which different literatures exist within the same tongue? Indeed, is not such a conception as the "great American novel" rendered quite futile in the United States by the fact that from the ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... constantly colder with elevation above the earth's surface. It is strong evidence of considerable efficiency in the instruments, and of careful attention on the part of the observer, that Lussac was able to record the temporary inversion of the law of change of temperature above-mentioned. Had he possessed modern instrumental equipment he would have brought down a yet more remarkable account of the upper regions which he visited, and learned that the variations of heat and cold ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... as to his style; he is very vicious there." Such was the colloquy; we bowed, parted, and never more (I apprehend) exchanged one word. Now, trivial and trite as this comment on Paley may appear to the reader, it struck me forcibly that more falsehood, or more absolute falsehood, or more direct inversion of the truth, could not, by any artifice of ingenuity, have been crowded into one short sentence. Paley, as a philosopher, is a jest, the disgrace of the age; and, as regards the two universities, and the enormous responsibility they undertake for the books which they ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... all this is a total inversion of all the moral and social ideas. Law, instead of being respected, is odious. Force and not affection is the foundation of government. There is no association, but a violent antagonism between the idea of freedom ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... minuteness of the sub-fields that demand observation, is shown by an entry in the Psychological Index: "1202. Benedict, F.G. "Studies in Body—Temperature." 1. Influence of the Inversion of the Daily Routine; ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... inversion of the usual process of proposing and acting a comedy of sham coyness occurs only in the case of the poor girls, the wealthy ones being betrothed by their parents in infancy; but it would be interesting ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the professor, 'we see that this Radium, which seemed at first a fantastic exception, a mad inversion of all that was most established and fundamental in the constitution of matter, is really at one with the rest of the elements. It does noticeably and forcibly what probably all the other elements are doing with an imperceptible slowness. It is like the single voice crying ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... such a selection and arrangement of words as produced this effect, they added the habit of frequently omitting the usual particles, and of conveying their meaning in short and contracted phrases. The only artifices they used were those of inversion and transition."[7] It is difficult to give examples to those unacquainted with the language, but the following extract may serve to indicate our meaning: it ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... be purified by washing with saline solution or eusol, and the surrounding skin painted with iodine, after which the edges are approximated by sutures. The raw surfaces must be brought into accurate apposition, care being taken that no inversion of the cutaneous surface takes place. In extensive and deep wounds, to ensure more complete closure and to prevent subsequent stretching of the scar, it is advisable to unite the different structures—muscles, fasciae, ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... seminal liquid where millions of germs are floating, which, until her last day, will issue one by one, as the eggs pass by, and in the obscurity of her body accomplish the mysterious union of the male and female element, whence the worker-bees are born. Through a curious inversion, it is she who furnishes the male principle, and the drone who provides the female. Two days after the union she lays her first eggs, and her people immediately surround her with the most particular care. From that moment, ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Lord John Russell to the foreignoffice, while Lord Palmerston was placed in the home-office, was regarded as an absurd inversion of their appropriate positions, and the arrangement was considered as an unwarrantable concession by Lord Aberdeen to the vanity of the ex-premier. Events justified the suspicions and dislikes of the public, except in the instance ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... of the fewest and simplest words that can be found in the compass of the language, to express the thing meant: these few words being also arranged in the most straightforward and intelligible way; allowing inversion only when the subject can be made primary without obscurity: (thus, "his present, and your pains, we thank you for" is better than "we thank you for his present and your pains," because the Dauphin's ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the eighteenth century, ever sets out with anything but such an intention for good, as is capable of respectable expression. And we ask ourselves what good end Helvetius proposed to himself. Of what was he thinking when he perpetrated so singular a misconstruction of his own meaning as that inversion of beneficence into self-love of which we have spoken? We can only explain it in one way. In saying that it is impossible to love good for good's sake, Helvetius was thinking of the theologians. Their doctrine that man is predisposed to love evil for evil's sake, removes ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... them; | |this is very considerable, some having about one-third of the sail, others | |only the hull. | 60|Light wind from SE. Sky cloudy, somewhat hazy; but the horizon sharp and | |unbroken. | 61|The inversion of the vessels as conspicuous as before. Parts of the | |horizon observed ESE and WNW. | 62|A light breeze from the SE. Cloudy and close.—N.B. Instrument readjusted. | 63|Part of the horizon observed N and S. | 64|Part of the horizon ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... twelve, and she had not heard Dr. Ellridge go. The whole situation filled her with a sort of wonder of disgust. She could not imagine her mother and Dr. Ellridge sitting up until midnight as she might sit up with George Ramsey. She felt as if she were witnessing a ghastly inversion of things, as if Love, instead of being in his proper panoply of wings and roses, was invested with a medicine-case, an obsolete frock-coat, and elderly obesity. Dr. Ellridge was quite stout. She wondered how her mother could, and then she wondered how Dr. Ellridge could. Lily ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman |
