"Retrogression" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... progress towards perfection forming any necessary part of the Darwinian creed, it appears to us that it is perfectly consistent with indefinite persistence in one estate, or with a gradual retrogression. Suppose, for example, a return of the glacial epoch and a spread of polar climatal conditions over the whole globe. The operation of natural selection under these circumstances would tend, on the whole, to the weeding out ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... the criterion of every aspect of the national fortunes, a corresponding barrenness and lack of interest in other aspects of national life. Yet a remedy for Henry's misrule was only found because the age of political retrogression was in all other fields of action an epoch of unexampled progress. The years during which the strong centralised government of the Angevin kings was breaking down under Henry's weak rule were years which, to the historian of civilisation, are among the most fruitful in ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... and convenience of employes in general. It cannot be said that the labor interests have always shown great wisdom in all their advocacy of new legislation, and too many acts, like those in reference to the employment of convict labor, show a lamentable retrogression. On the whole, however, there is every reason to believe that the general course of justice has been aided by the influence of the trade unions—something which can be said of very few special interests for whose benefit ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... I reflect now upon my lack of real knowledge at five and twenty, I am amazed at the futility of an expensive education which had failed to impress upon me the simple, basic fact that life was struggle; that either development or retrogression is the fate of all men, that characters are never completely made, but always in the making. I had merely a disconcerting glimpse of this truth, with no powers of formulation, as I sat beside my mother in the bedroom, where every article evoked some childhood ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... institutions. On the one side he sees the model Republic of Hayti—a coloured community, which has enjoyed nearly half a century of entire independence and self-rule. And with what issues? As respects moral and intellectual culture, stagnation: in all that concerns material development, a fatal retrogression. He beholds there, at this day, a miserable parody of European and American institutions, without the spirit that animates either: the tinsel of French sentiment on the ground of negro ignorance: even the 'sacred right of 'insurrection' burlesqued: a people which has for its only ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... pondered over this singular change in character. He had trained himself, in order to fight a paralyzing something in the desert's influence, to oppose with memory and thought an insidious primitive retrogression to what was scarcely consciousness at all, merely a savage's instinct of sight and sound. He felt the need now of redoubled effort. For there was a sheer happiness in drifting. Not only was it easy to forget, it was hard to remember. His idea was that a man ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... say that these do not exist; the period that has seen the retrogression has recorded also a reaction, and there are now perhaps more who are fired by the ardent passion for active righteousness, than for several generations, but the average is lower, for where, many times in the past, there has been a broad, general average of decency, now the disparity ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... religion —that is to say, a system by which this world is wasted in preparation for another—a system in which the duties of men are greater to God than to his fellow-men—a system that denies the liberty of thought and expression—tends only to discord and retrogression. Of course, I know that religious people cling to the Bible on account of the good that is in it, and in spite of the bad, and I know that Freethinkers throw away the Bible on account of the bad that is in it, in spite of the good. I hope the time will come when that book will be treated like ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... sort; she lifted the little mite slowly up and down, and said, "Oh, you Beauty!" and then went off into various inarticulate sounds, which I recommend to the particular study of the new philosophers: they cannot have been invented after speech; that would be retrogression; they must be the vocal remains of that hairy, sharp-eared quadruped, our Progenitor, who by accident discovered language, and so turned Biped, and went ahead of all the other hairy quadrupeds, whose ears were too long or not sharp enough to ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... as has been explained, was that his own retrogression had disconcerted the plans of this special miscreant for whom, however, he kept a ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... identity we are also left in doubt. It may be true; such things have happened ere now. This particular writer's credibility, however, is none of the best; he has been convicted over and over again of forcing the note in his diatribes against what he calls "retrogression into idolatry." There was certainly a good deal of unrest in the country during the period of the ex-monk's ascendency; no less than 13,783 persons had been banished to Siberia, and 3,756 executed ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... suggested Jane, surveying the secretive old building. "I know the racket was in that wing, and see how the round tower begins here and shoots up past all that outside plumbing? I know Lenox was one time a show building here, but freshies have got to have some place to sleep, hence the retrogression." ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... may be said without unfairness that the salient activities of the army in the interior of Alaska are the consumption of whisky and wood. There is no opportunity for military training—for more than six months in the year it is impossible to drill outdoors—and the officers complain of the retrogression of their men in all soldierly accomplishments during the two years' detail in Alaska. Whether the prosperity of the liquor dealer be in any real sense the prosperity of the country, and whether the rapid destruction of the forest be compensated ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... States did not encourage the Radicals. Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana voiced the sentiments of the opposition, defeating Galusha A. Grow, speaker of the House, and seriously threatening the Radical majority in Congress. This retrogression, accounted for by the absence of soldiers who could not vote,[857] suggested trouble in New York, and to offset the influence of the Seymour rally in Brooklyn a great audience at Cooper Institute listened to a brief letter from the Secretary of State, and to a speech ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... also maintain: The establishment of the theory of Descent in general, and the continual retrogression of Darwinism in particular. Wigand was entirely right when he said that Darwinism would ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... extension of civil rights to women. But, amid all the evidences of frivolity and extravagance which pain the judicious, we need never relinquish the hope that, once the pendulum swings backwards into the direction of sanity, its retrogression will probably be beneficial, even though ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various
... in a celestial revolution, of the two first of these epochs in the history of a settlement, depend very much on its advancement in wealth and in numbers. In some places, the pastoral age, or that of good fellowship, continues for a whole life, to the obvious retrogression of the people, in most of the higher qualities, but to their manifest advantage, however, in the pleasures of the time being; while, in others, it passes away rapidly, like the buoyant animal joys, that live their time, ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... the museum of old machines, and the cause of the apparent retrogression in all arts, sciences, and inventions. I learnt that about four hundred years previously, the state of mechanical knowledge was far beyond our own, and was advancing with prodigious rapidity, until one of the most learned professors ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... ... a general, but not a detailed progression.... It is, however, by no means difficult to show that a real progression in the scale of organisation is perfectly consistent with all the appearances, and even with apparent retrogression ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... a family of nations, living each within its own boundaries and dealing with one another as independent powers. It seemed for a few years as if the process of assimilation between Germans and Romans was going to make rapid progress without involving any considerable period of disorder and retrogression. ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... came on with a rush in the great sub-tropical river basins; and presently, where the brine of the AEgean got into his blood, he achieved such miracles of thought and art that his subsequent history, for well-nigh two thousand years, bore the appearance of retrogression. I have already asked what the Invisible King was about when he suffered the glory that was Athens to sink in the fog-bank that was Alexandria. At all events, that wonderful false-start came to nothing. Rome succeeded to the world-leadership; ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... local letters. One was embossed with the Bank of Leichardt's Land stamp and contained a cablegram originally despatched from Rome, which had been received at Vancouver and, thence, had pursued her—first along the route originally designed, afterwards, with zigzagging, retrogression and much delay, along the one she had taken. That it had reached her at all, said a good deal for Mrs Gildea's fame as ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... a haunch of venison. Ellen detested the Mexican woman because she was dirty. The inside of the cabin presented the same unkempt appearance usual to it after Ellen had been away for a few days. Whatever Ellen had lost during the retrogression of the Jorths, she had kept her habits of cleanliness, and straightway upon her return she set ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... it, the sound of her own feet on the path, the feel of the door-latch to her hand—all the little common belongings of her daily life were turned into so many stationary landmarks to prove her own retrogression and fill ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... come the retrogression of the nodes and the variation of the inclination, which at the time were being observed at Greenwich by Flamsteed, from whom Newton frequently, but vainly, begged for data that he might complete their theory while ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... infant. The only special treatment after childbirth is to sit with the back close to a fire, so as to heat it as much as can be borne. The delivery is sometimes aided by tightly binding the body above the gravid uterus in order, it would seem, to prevent any retrogression of the process. While the mother goes about her work in camp, the infant is usually suspended in a sling of bark-cloth from a bent sapling or branch, an arrangement which enables the mother to rock and so soothe the child ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... of science at the expense of man is one of the most pernicious things in the world. The stunted man is a retrogression in the human race: he throws a shadow over all succeeding generations The tendencies and natural purpose of the individual science become degenerate, and science itself is finally shipwrecked: it has ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... for it was not long in developing that the new rgime stood no show of success unless to Italian and French German opera was also added. The vicissitudes which brought with them this demonstration must be reserved for a subsequent chapter, but before I tell the story of the institution's retrogression I owe to the student of history an outline of the doings of the season 1890-91. The season began on November 26th and lasted till March 21st. There were sixty-seven subscription performances, an extra performance of "Fidelio" for the benefit of the chorus, which yielded ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... and crenellations, was a matter of four or five centuries back in a mere turn of the eye; and from these latter to the Hindu temples here and there, which, whether or not of actual age, always carry one straight into antiquity, was a further retrogression to the obscure depths of time. So, too, one's glance would often sweep in a twinkling from a European clothed in garments of the latest mode to a Hindu whose sole covering was his dhotee, or clout about the loins, taking in between these ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... its meaning. But there is another side, that dark one, which revels in anticipation. It is the cave-man in me, hiding by night, waiting with a bludgeon to slay. I am beginning to be struck by the gradual change in my comrades. I fancied that I alone had suffered a retrogression. I have a deep consciousness of baseness that is going to keep me aloof from them. I seem to be alone with my own soul. Yet I seem to be abnormally keen to impressions. I feel what is going on in the soldiers' minds, and it shocks me, set me wondering, forces me to doubt myself. I keep saying it ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... experience is more reliable than physiological theories and opinions.... The history of the advance of the cure of disease is in the history of empiricism, in the best sense of that much-abused word. The history of retrogression in the art of curing disease is that of the so-called Physiological Schools of Medicine... Physiological theory, based on experiments on dogs, wishes us to believe that mercury does not excite a flow of bile; but here the common sense of the Profession, educated ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... retrogression and decay, seem to have been crowded more closely against each other here than on any other portion of the globe. Some one of the band of adventurous prospectors who came from the exhausted placers of ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... first convention, Germany and the States hauled down their flags. It was so done again before the second; and Germany, by a still more emphatic step of retrogression, returned the exile Laupepa to his native shores. For two years the unfortunate man had trembled and suffered in the Cameroons, in Germany, in the rainy Marshalls. When he left (September 1887) Tamasese ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... carry out their own wishes fully, for fear that they might sting the populares beyond endurance. They stopped the assignments of lands, however, allowing those who had occupied large tracts to keep them, and thus the desolation and retrogression which had so deeply moved Gracchus continued and increased even more rapidly than it had in his time. The state fell into a condition of corruption in every department, and office was looked upon simply as a means of acquiring wealth, not as something to be held as a trust for the good of the governed. ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... became the very curse of his life. Every morning, duly as an attempt was made to put them in motion, they began to back, and no arts, gentle or harsh, would for a moment avail to coax or to corce them into the counter direction. Could retrogression by any metaphysics have been translated into progress, we excelled in that; it was our forte; we could have backed to the North Pole. That might be the way to glory, or at least to distinction—sic itur ad astra; unfortunately, it was not ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... anticipated for their children a distinction they could not hope for themselves. That honourable ambition would not have to be sacrificed. With the universal adoption of Colour, all distinctions would cease; Regularity would be confused with Irregularity; development would give place to retrogression; the Workman would in a few generations be degraded to the level of the Military, or even the Convict Class; political power would be in the hands of the greatest number, that is to say the Criminal Classes, who were already more numerous than the Workmen, and would soon out-number ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... in a barbarous condition. To believe that man was aboriginally civilised and then suffered utter degradation in so many regions, is to take a pitiably low view of human nature. It is apparently a truer and more cheerful view that progress has been much more general than retrogression; that man has risen, though by slow and interrupted steps, from a lowly condition to the highest standard as yet attained by him ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... expressed their convictions and hopes. They would be happy to think that Lamartine was with them for the immediate realization of the Republic. If, however, he judged that the transition of the Regency was necessary they asked him to at least aid them in obtaining serious guarantees against any retrogression. They awaited with emotion his decision ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... are not the future. The living truth is the future. Time and people do not make the future. Retrogression is not the future. Fifty million children growing up purposeless, with no purpose save the attainment of their own individual desires, these are not the future, they are only a disintegration of the past. The future is in living, growing truth, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... going on a deal of mowing and chattering over the treaty by which the United States is to be bound to arbitrate its sovereign functions—for policies are matters of sovereignty. . . . The aberrations of the social movement are neither progress nor retrogression. They represent merely a local and temporary sagging of the line of the great orbit. Tennyson knew this when he wrote that fine and noble 'Maud.' I often read it, for to do so does me good." After quoting one of Poe's stories the letter continues: "The world will come ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... or retrogression of the world depends, broadly speaking, upon the balance between acquisitiveness and rivalry. The former makes for progress, the latter for retrogression. When intelligence provides improved methods of production, these may be employed to increase the general share ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... of theology; which, in impatient haste, would anticipate its aim and goal, although with an enthusiasm for that which is raised above the change of the days,—an enthusiasm which commands all respect, and in which the hackneyed newspaper categories of Progress and Retrogression are ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... the old couple. Her husband grew more and more like his father, punctilious, rigid; a strict observant in religious matters, a pedant in little things, prejudiced against all change; too satisfied to desire improvement, too scrupulously conscientious to permit any retrogression from established rule, a model of the immutability of an ancient aristocracy, a living paradigm of what always had been and a stubborn barrier against ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... reconciliation. The dialogue is pithy, simple, and sententious. Nevertheless the play, as a whole, makes the impression of incompleteness. It is a dramatic sketch rather than a drama. It marks no advance on Bjoernson's previous work in the same line; but perhaps rather a retrogression. ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... sense of the word, a progressive being, and with many periods of inaction and retrogression, has still held, upon the whole, a steady course towards the great end of his existence, the re-union and re-harmonizing of the three elements of his being, dislocated by the Fall, in the service of his God. Each of these three elements, Sense, Intellect, and Spirit, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... as the Brahmans word it. Universes are created; reach their extreme low point of materiality; and then begin in their upward swing. Suns spring into being, and then their height of power being reached, the process of retrogression begins, and after aeons they become dead masses of matter, awaiting another impulse which starts again their inner energies into activity and a new solar life cycle is begun. And thus it is with all the worlds; they are born, grow and die; only to be reborn. And thus it is with ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... contemplation; it is a totally distinct social organization. With regard to the position of woman, the facts are even more remarkable, for if the Homeric picture be a true one, historic Hellas, instead of representing an advance upon the prehistoric age, presents a distinct retrogression. In the Homeric poems woman occupies a position, not only important, but even comparable in many respects to that held by her in modern life. She is not secluded from sight and kept in the background, as in later Hellenic society; on the contrary, she mixes freely with the other sex in ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... to assume that all that is, or has been, present to consciousness is ipso facto unified aesthetically. The result of such an assumption is an obvious disintegration both of language and artistic effort, a mere retrogression from ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... have made the world and man perfect, free from evil and from pain, as angels in heaven are thought to be; but although this was not done, man has been given the power of advancement rather than of retrogression. The Old and New Testaments remain, like other sacred writings of other lands, of value as records of the past and for such good lessons as they inculcate. Like the ancient writers of the Bible our thoughts should rest upon this ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... of better workmen, machines and means of transportation.(867) All this supposes great progress of the mining countries in civilization in general; and yet, thus far, Mexico's republican independence etc., as compared with the later years of the Spanish colonial system there, is a great retrogression. The conquest of Spanish America by the United States would give a vast impetus to economic improvement; and here, again, the increase of production would be attended by ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... the Sun's disc was released by the eastward motion of the Moon, and the light from that uppermost portion was again manifest, was about 20 minutes, and this, therefore, was the time during which the phenomenon of retrogression on the "steps" would have been exhibited to the King's eyes. Assuming then that the time when the ascending shadow had travelled upwards to the tenth step coincided, or nearly so, with the time when the Sun had reached its highest altitude for the day, at noon, we infer that ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... remembered that the word evolution may be used equivocally. It is not evident that all evolution is in the direction of a life, brute or human, that we commonly recognize as higher. There is retrogression, as well as progress, where such retrogression is favored by environment. We may call this, if we please, devolution. Were the conditions of his life very unfavorable, man could not live as he now lives; and, indeed, were they sufficiently ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... above and earth beneath. Does He not show us new materials for His building? Does He not give new forms to His design? Does He not surprise us with novelties, extraordinaries, and mysteries? In a word, the world is in progress, not in retrogression. ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... not born a telepath, John," I told him. "He has been deliberately trained to make use of the latent power in his brain. And I don't think I'm 'stuck' either. We all know we've been slowly slipping into retrogression ever since '63. None of us like it, but there isn't anything we can do to halt it—yet. We don't want our children, or their children, to keep slipping backwards. If we don't stop it in our lifetime, we may not be able to ...
— Stopover • William Gerken
... observing the ambition, the selfishness, the party spirit, the unworthy intrigues, and the irregularities of moral conduct, which modern rulers and statesmen sometimes exhibit to mankind in their personal and political career, to believe in a retrogression and degeneracy of national character as the world advances in age, will be very effectually undeceived by reading attentively a full history of this celebrated dynasty, and reflecting, as he reads, that the ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... of neumes was in some ways a retrogression from the Greek letter system, for the neumes indicated neither definite pitches nor definite tone-lengths. But it had this advantage over the Greek system, that the position of the signs on the page indicated graphically to the eye the general direction of the melody, as well as giving at least a ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... Improvement with Lycurgus means retrogression with us. He wished, perhaps ignorantly, to arrest the progress of civilization and substitute a slovenly ideal of his own. His purpose was to cancel the civilization which the race had gained during thousands of years of effort, and bring it back to a semi-savagery. But the world was too ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... the analogies of this world would be against unmeaning punishments inflicted a hundred or a thousand years after an offence had been committed. Suffering there might be as a part of education, but not hopeless or protracted; as there might be a retrogression of individuals or of bodies of men, yet not such as to interfere with a plan for the improvement of ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... with her but that she must bear her father's anger, should he be angry; put up with his continued opposition, should he resolutely oppose her; bear all that the countesses of the world might say to her;—for it was thus that she thought of Lady Cantrip now. Any retrogression ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... with it the duty, not only to preserve it or to dole it out in schools and universities, but to increase it far beyond the limits which it has reached at present. Where there is no advance, there is retrogression: rest is impossible ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... slow to improve our laws must be admitted. But, though in other countries there may have occasionally been more rapid progress, it would not be easy to name any other country in which there has been so little retrogression. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of Corson's looks like a final plunge; a fatal fall; a hopeless retrogression. But we must not judge prematurely. "Man advances; but in spiral lines," said Goethe. The river goes forward, in spite of its eddies. You can complete a geometric circle from a minute portion of its curve; but not a human cycle. We can not predict the final issue of a human ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... Ireland will return "the better class of men," who "do not believe in Home Rule" an argument? Is the as-you-were assertion an argument? What would the Irish say if Mr. Bull suggested this movement of retrogression? We should have Father Hayes, the friend of Father Humphreys, again calling for "dynamite, for the lightnings of heaven and the fires of hell, to pulverise every British cur into top-dressing for the soil." We should have Father Humphreys ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... faculty. Every man learns to be to that extent an artist; approved figures and maxims pass current like the words and idioms of a mother-tongue, themselves once brilliant inventions. The lustre of such successes is not really dimmed, however, when it becomes a part of man's daily light; a retrogression from that habitual style or habitual insight would at once prove, by the shock it caused, how precious those ingrained ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... allegorical plays. The absence of all allegory from Campaspe shows that Lyly had broken with the morality: and we seem therefore to be going back, when two years later we have an allegorical play from his pen. But in reality there is no retrogression; for with Lyly allegory is not an ethical instrument. I have mentioned examples of plays before his day which employed the machinery of the morality, for the purposes of political and religious satire. The old form of drama seems ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... why the hearty old man's face had grown so grave. Sir Charles might well experience shame for this retrogression of one of his own class, the broken obligations of nobility; the traditions shattered. But he thanked John Steele in an old-fashioned, courtly way for what he had once done for his niece whose life he had saved. ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... cannibalism: why should the relapse into the ethics of cannibalism proceed so much more rapidly? But the instinctive presentiment that growing civilisation will be connected, not with social stagnation and moral retrogression, but with both social and moral progress—this yearning for liberty, equality, and fraternity ineradicably implanted in the Western mind, despite all the follies and the horrors to which it for a time gave ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... proclaimed as the central idea of the new ordering, and that an effort, however feeble, was put forth to realize it in the shape of a covenant of social and moral fellowship, marks an advance from which there can be no retrogression. ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... fix society in a contradictory position between retrogression and progress, such as is seen in the parliamentary monarchy of England. This is a last phase of the metaphysical polity, and is only a ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... influence on the development of the milk glands. According to Lane-Claypon and Starling, if the ovaries and uteri are removed from a pregnant rabbit before the fourteenth day the development of the mammary gland ceases, retrogression takes place, and no milk appears in the gland. If, on the other hand, the operation be performed after the fourteenth day, milk appears within two days after the operation. It is to be concluded from this that the cause of secretion ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... the creek which flowed on a level with the surroundings suddenly plunged into a deep mud canyon. This canyon had been cut back from far below by the undermining action of the falling water, and it was plain to see that it would continue its retrogression till it eventually reached the mouth of the great canyon several miles above, but I did not dream that it could accomplish this work as rapidly as it actually did years after. During a great flood it washed a canyon not only to Kanab but for miles up the gorge, sweeping away at one master ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... to obtain water from an ancestral spring for use in a Hopi religious ceremonial. If these traditions are founded in fact, the promising civilization of the Mesa Verde has sadly retrograded in its transplanting. Hopi architecture and masonry shows marked retrogression from the splendid types ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... striving to increase at a high ratio and to seize on every unoccupied or less well-occupied place in the economy of nature, that it is quite possible for natural selection gradually to fit a being to a situation in which several organs would be superfluous or useless: in such cases there would be retrogression in ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... people today make peace and make war—not a sovereign, not the whim of an individual, not the ambition of a single man; but the sentiment, the friendship, the affection, the feelings of this great throbbing mass of humanity, determine peace or war, progress or retrogression. And coming to a self-governing people from a self-governing people, I would interpret my fellow-citizens—the great mass of plain people—to the great mass of the plain people of Brazil. No longer the aristocratic ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... in the arrangements of his plans, designed that women should be inferior to men in intellect and freedom of action, then, in regard to one-half of the human family, God worked by the law of retrogression, producing Eve, an inferior, from Adam, a superior being; which is clearly contrary to the law of progression, and contrary to the general plan of his creation; and, if this be true, the laws of progression and retrogression were to alternate perpetually. Is this supposition ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... outlet for a certain amount of this unused ferocity; and indeed the chief function of games in the modern state is to help us avoid occasions of sin. The sinfulness of any deed depends, therefore, on this theory, on the extent in which it involves retrogression from the point we have achieved: failure to correspond with the light we possess. The inequality of the moral standard all over the world is a simple demonstration of this fact: for many a deed which ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... to knit his brows; Shakib shakes his head, biting his nether lip; and here and there in the audience is heard a murmur about retrogression and reaction. Khalid proceeds with his allegory of the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... shouted into its ear by all sorts of commanders—parents, teachers, laws, class prejudices, or public opinion. The extraordinary limitation of human development, the hesitation, protractedness, frequent retrogression, and turning thereof, is attributable to the fact that the herd-instinct of obedience is transmitted best, and at the cost of the art of command. If one imagine this instinct increasing to its greatest extent, commanders and independent individuals will finally be lacking altogether, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... practical or effective. These conditions and methods which make you feel like a "back number" may not be the best; if they are not, try to make them the best, if you will, but do not attempt to perfect them backward by returning to yesterday. The world is very impatient of apparent retrogression; it ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... civilizations and for the decayed and destroyed civilizations; for the general facts as to the rise of civilization, and for the petrifying or enervating force which the progress of civilization has heretofore always evolved. It must account for retrogression a well as for progression; for the differences in general character between Asiatic and European civilizations; for the difference between classical and modern civilizations; for the different rates at which progress goes on; ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... The cause for this retrogression was the love of migratory life which is characteristic of the American race. The Pawnee villages, as I have stated, lay a long ways to the north-west, but among the party that had been on the long tramp, was a strong minority in favor of moving their town to the neighborhood ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... undertaking which year by year had been carried forward with so much energy and success, should after a while come to a standstill; and the commonest observation of life will suffice to remind us that when progress ceases, retrogression is almost certain to set in. The immense zeal and unflagging enthusiasm of Junipero Serra and his immediate followers could not be transmitted by any rite or formula to the men upon whose shoulders their responsibilities came presently to rest. Men they were, of course, of widely ...
— The Famous Missions of California • William Henry Hudson
... itself aloof from other countries and is ignorant of the affairs of the world; the only object sought has been to give ourselves the least trouble, and by daily retrogression we are in danger of falling ...
— The Constitutional Development of Japan 1863-1881 • Toyokichi Iyenaga
... the bill under consideration should become a law it would be regarded as a retrogression from the financial intentions indicated by our recent repeal of the provision forcing silver-bullion purchases; that it would weaken, if it did not destroy, returning faith and confidence in our sound financial tendencies, ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... advance since the time of Franz Liszt. Here again you confront me with a subject difficult to discuss within the confines of a conference. There is so much to be said upon it. A mere change in itself does not imply either progress or retrogression. It is for this reason we cannot speak of progress since the time of Liszt. To play as Liszt did—that is, exactly as he did, as a mirror reflects an object—would not be possible to anyone unless he were endowed with an individuality and personality exactly like that ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... mark was reached in the autumn of 1886. But in the early months of 1887 a reaction became visible. By July 1, the membership of the Order had diminished to 510,351. While a share of this retrogression may have been due to the natural reaction of large masses of people who had been suddenly set in motion without experience, a more immediate cause came from the employers. Profiting by past lessons, they organized strong associations. The main object of these employers' associations ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... the preceding pages, shown the retrogression of some parts of the West Indies, since the passing of the Emancipation and Sugar-Duty Acts. Let me now take a cursory view of the progression of Cuba during ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... after a strike has been won, men drop out of the Union and leave the burden of Union obligation to the loyal minority, who, weakened in numbers, face not only a loss of what the strike has gained, but a retrogression of those Union standards that have been the result of ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... are sure that He has risen and lives for ever, we have a better presence than that. He is gone from our sight that He may be seen by our faith. That 'now we see Him not' is advance on the position of His first disciples, not retrogression. Let us strive to possess the blessing of 'those who have not seen, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... canvas. Man has always wished to add something to God's work. Man retouches creation, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. The Court buffoon was nothing but an attempt to lead back man to the monkey. It was a progress the wrong way. A masterpiece in retrogression. At the same time they tried to make a man of the monkey. Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland and Countess of Southampton, had a marmoset for a page. Frances Sutton, Baroness Dudley, eighth peeress in the bench of barons, had tea served by a baboon clad in cold brocade, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... humanism had been withdrawn from the race. The retirement of the commercial aristocracy from trade, and their assumption of princely indolence in this period of political stagnation, was another factor of importance. But the truest cause of Italian retrogression towards barbarism must finally be discerned in the sharp check given to intellectual evolution by the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... But retrogression was never yet the way of progress. It is probable, for instance, that the sanitation of the Middle Ages was very inadequate, and their meals sadly indigestible; and it would be useless to provoke a revolt of the nose and the stomach ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... of a superior race, they are elevated in the scale of existence, improved mentally, morally, and physically, and are thus enabled to do their part in contributing to the well-being of the human race. But so far as our experience goes, this development is not permanent, but is liable to retrogression as soon as the influence of the superior race is removed. Like the electro-magnet, whose power is lost the moment it is insulated from the vivifying power of electricity, so the servile race loses its power when removed from the control of a superior intellect. ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... oft-asked question: "Do educated Indians go back to the blanket?" it should be said, first, that return to Indian dress in isolated communities where this is still the common dress of the people is not necessarily retrogression. It may be only a wise conformity to custom. Investigation has shown, however, that very few graduates of any school ever do reassume Indian dress or ways. Of those who have attended school but two or three years in all, a larger proportion may do so. A northwestern ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... The retrogression of the little toe in man is probably to be explained like the degeneration of the hind leg of the whale, as a result of the excess of deteriorating variations which, when not eliminated by natural selection, lead to atrophy. Since man began to limit the use of his feet to walking ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... vegetable kingdom exhibits a constant struggle between progression and retrogression. Of course, the great lines of the general pedigree are due to progression, many single steps in this direction leading together to the great superiority of the flowering plants over their cryptogamous ancestors. But progression is nearly always accompanied by retrogression ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... and then drew his chair near to Dumiger's. The latter, quite unaccustomed to the neighborhood of so great a man, immediately withdrew his seat to a more deferential distance; but the dimensions of the room speedily put a stop to the retrogression and his ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... right to a Catholic University. "For us Catholics," he wrote, "the Gospel as taught by our Holy Church, is our philosophy of life and we hold that any attempt to educate a youth in what we call secularism is a retrogression to a lower level than that of pre-Christian culture. For this reason we have withstood every attempt to force secularism on this country and we shall resist it to the last. We have equally withstood mixed education, which, false as it is in itself ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... Quien sabey? Eras of barbarism have overtaken civilizations as pretentious as our own— intellectual nights in which the patiently acquired learning of ages was lost. Petrifaction as in China, retrogression begotten of luxury as in Athens, submersion beneath an avalanche of human debris as in Rome, ignorance-breeding despoliation as in Ireland—these be the lions in the path of civilization. No race or nation of which we have any record has avoided a recrudescence ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... I have just paid one of my pair of permitted 2 minutes visits per day to the sick room. And found what I have learned to expect—retrogression, and that pathetic something in the eye which betrays the secret ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... honored with the name of "colony," was wrested from the empire and occupied by the most powerful of its adversaries. Not only Amida and Carrhae, but Antioch itself, trembled at a loss which was felt to lay open the whole eastern frontier to attack, and which seemed ominous of further retrogression. Although the fear generally felt proved to be groundless, and the Roman possessions in the East were not, for 200 years, further curtailed by the Persians, yet Roman influence in Western Asia from this time steadily declined, and Persia came to be regarded as the first power in these regions. ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... retrogression towards primevalism, must have possessed a certain charm, for it attracted vast multitudes; it was only hemmed, at ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... destiny as an infinite retrogression, Eden receding behind Eden, lost Paradise behind lost Paradise, in the dateless past, encounters us, now as a myth, now as a religious or philosophic tenet, throughout the earlier history of humanity from the Baltic to the Indian Sea, from the furthest ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... play-bills of John Kemble's last performances before me, and there is none of this fustian: the fact, the performance, and the name are simply announced. If our taste improves in some respects, it does not in this; it is a retrogression—a royal theatre sinking back into the booth of a fair. Shakspeare's and Byron's texts have been converted into the showman's explanations of panoramas: to what vile uses they may be next applied, there is no guessing. Poor Shakspeare! how ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 206, October 8, 1853 • Various
... outbreak of laxity and luxury manifested itself. Its equivalent in our day would be an excessive development of the passion for amusement and excitement, destroying the dignity and seriousness of life. The wealthy and fashionable classes led the way, as they generally do in periods of moral retrogression; and the worst symptom of all was when the womanhood of the country surrendered itself to the prevailing tendencies. This last feature of degradation had developed itself in Isaiah's day; and he attacks it with a strange combination of humour and moral indignation: "Because the daughters ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... your objection of a multitude of still living simple forms, I have not discussed it anywhere in the "Origin," though I have often thought it over. What you say about progress being only occasional and retrogression not uncommon, I agree to; only that in the animal kingdom I greatly doubt about retrogression being common. I have always put it to myself—What advantage can we see in an infusory animal, or an intestinal worm, or coral polypus, or earthworm being highly developed? ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... of women, therefore, is liberty, as untrammelled a choice of occupation and mode of life, as free a range of individuality and spiritual fruition, as is granted to men. But would this really be an advance, or a retrogression? Many maintain that it would be subversive of the genuine progress of civilization, to abandon the prejudices and throw down the bars which have hitherto restrained women from a full share in the chosen avocations and ambitions of men. All improvement is marked, ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... of these years into the future. There is no reason why in many lines of production we should not surpass all other nations, as we have already done in some. There are no near frontiers to our possible development. Retrogression ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... The elements of which the several groupings are composed, or the circumstances in the narrative to be related, should be presented in the order in which the eye would catch them in Nature, or the order in which they occurred, that there may be no unnecessary retrogression of the mind, no confounding of ideas, no fear of losing the links that connect and bind together the minor groupings of the story. In the history of Cain and Abel, for example, the child is not to be required to paint upon his imagination, a deadly struggle between two persons of whom ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... country had not been one of the few privileged places on our planet where the experiment of a sudden change of institutions and ideals has been carried on most successfully, without paralyzation or retrogression, disorganization or destruction, I would say that the apprehension and fears of those who oppose this ...
— The Woman and the Right to Vote • Rafael Palma
... it always be so? Is our commercial supremacy decaying or not? Have we begun to reach the period of inevitable decline? Or is decline indeed inevitable at all? Might a nation go on being great for ever? If so, are we that nation? If not, have we yet arrived at the moment when retrogression becomes a foregone conclusion? These are momentous questions. Dare I try, under the mimosas on the terrace, ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... and a half that succeeded the English colonization of south-eastern Britain were, no doubt, a time of great retrogression towards barbarism, as everywhere else in Romanised Europe. The villas that must have covered the gentle slopes towards the Wantsum fell into decay; the fortresses were destroyed; the roads ran wild; and ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... of necessity, this aptitude will pass suddenly from inaction to action. When, therefore, the Sparrow still from time to time indulges in spherical building, this is not progress on his part, as is sometimes contended; it is, on the contrary, a retrogression, a return to the ancient customs, so prodigal of labour. He is behaving like the Osmia who, in default of a reed, makes shift with a Snail-shell, which is more difficult to utilize but easier to find. The cylinder and the ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... with oversensibility. He took that in hand which most actively engaged the spirit of the people; and he carried it through progressive steps to a consummation beyond which there was nothing possible but retrogression.—GERVINUS. ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... period. If it did not inaugurate, it at least prepared the way for the decline. It perfected logic, as the instrument of ratiocination, and gave it exactness and precision, Yet taken all in all, it was greatly inferior to its predecessor. From the moral point of view it is a decided retrogression. The god of Aristotle is indifferent to virtue. He is pure thought rather than moral perfection. He takes no cognizance of man. Morality has no eternal basis, no divine type, and no future reward. Therefore Aristotle's philosophy ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... then are really forges for forming new structures of matter or forms of energy, rather than quarries from which they are cut, and we seem to get a glimpse of the origin of life, perhaps itself the cause of "retrogression" in the material, coming through from the Reality, the Infinite beyond ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... essential respects save one, the decade was a period of retrogression for New York City. Crime, pauperism, insanity, and suicide increased; repression by brute force personified in an armed police was fostered, while the education of the children of the masses ebbed lower and lower. The standing ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... the most powerful and wealthy kingdoms of Europe, Spain has sunk to the position of the humblest and poorest. Other nations have labored and succeeded in the race of progress, while her adherence to ancient institutions and her dignified contempt for "modern innovations" have become a species of retrogression, which has placed her far below all her sister governments. The true Hidalgo spirit, which wraps itself up in an antique garb and shrugs its shoulders at the advance of other nations, still rules over the realm of Ferdinand and Isabella, while its high-roads swarm with gypsies ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... to that. You would have a couple or more months of absolute freedom every year, control of much of your own time, ample leisure to enjoy it. You would give only your chances of actual marriage for perhaps five years, for poor Allan cannot live longer than that at his present state of retrogression, and some part of every day to seeing that Allan was not neglected. If you bestow on him half of the interest and effort I have known of your giving any one of a dozen little immigrant boys, his mother has ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... the naive intellectualism of such a view as this, which ignores or thrusts into the background the economic causes of advance and retrogression. But it is certainly not an unhistorical view. Burke dreaded fundamental discussions which "turn men's duties into doubts." The revolutionary school believed that all progress depended on the daring and thoroughness ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... the extent and hopelessness of your retrogression from all good that you should presume to ask such a question," answered Moretti, growing white under the natural darkness of his skin with an impotency of rage he could scarcely suppress, "Your sermon this morning was an open attack on the Church, and the amazing scene at its conclusion ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... truth and lead men. In a general way, however, it may be said that the course of opinion in these two generations, in reference to such questions as those of the dates and authorship of the New Testament writings, has been one of rather noteworthy retrogression from many of the Tuebingen positions. Harnack's Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur, 1893, and his Chronologie der altchristlichen Literatur, 1897, present a marked contrast ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... (or retrogression) was rapid. His muscles became hard as iron, and he grew callous to all ordinary pain. He achieved an internal as well as external economy. He could eat anything, no matter how loathsome or indigestible; and, once eaten, the juices of his stomach ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... what happened at the concert, when, for the first time, the notes of that matchless symphony fell upon the ears of the world: when the supreme desolation of the magnificent, crashing retrogression of the finale held a thousand people in breathless, trembling stillness; the tears of Ivan's boundless yearning: the passions of the true Weldschmerz glazing every eye. Accounts of the mad storm of applause which finally rose into a chorus of shouts for Ivan, are ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... monotonous in circumstance, it described individual growth, and the change of progress. Where there is no change there can be no history; and as all change is either growth or decay, all history must describe progress or retrogression. The former had now begun for Euphra as well; and it was one proof of it that she told Margaret all I have already recorded for my readers, at least as far as it bore against herself. How much more ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... we may class them, were, in fact, equally insignificant and absurd, the idle sport of illusions, one as empty and baseless as another. The history of nations, the lives of individual men, are stripped, in this view, of all interest and meaning; nowhere is there advance or retrogression, nowhere better or worse, nowhere sense or consistency at all. Systems, however imposing, structures, however vast, fly into dust and powder at a touch. The stars fall from the human firmament; the beacon-lights dance like will-o'-the-wisps; the whole universe ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... a well established fact in the very nature of things that it would be impossible to grow if there was no possibility of a decline. If there be no retrogression, there can be no progression. The beloved John from the lonely isle writes unto the church of Ephesus and tells them that God had somewhat against them because they had left their first love. He tells them to remember from whence ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... to remember that it only conforms to the tendencies of our social life, our prevailing ethics, and to the art conditions of our time. Literature is never in any age an isolated product. It is closely related to the development or retrogression of the time in all departments of life. The literary production of our day seems, and no doubt is, more various than that of any other, and it is not easy to fix upon its leading tendency. It is claimed for its fiction, however, that it is analytic and realistic, and that much of it ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... in any possible degree remedy the deficiences. On the contrary, Mr HAGERUP mentions that such decisions would be calculated to stamp Norway as a dependency, according to international and common law principles, and declared that from a national point of view, it indicates a very great retrogression on the present arrangement of the Consular Service[34:1]. In this, he forgets that Mr BOSTROeM'S conditions refer to exceptional decisions and do not touch the Norwegian Consul's normal position as being a Norwegian ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... have seen so many immortal truths die young. I verily believe that the cocksureness of our century is destined to be the amusement of the next, which may not impossibly believe that the ape is descended from man by retrogression. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... will examine the learning curve closely, you will note that after the initial spurt, there is a slowing up. The curve at this point resembles a plateau and indicates cessation of progress if not retrogression. This period of no progress is regarded as a characteristic of the learning curve and is a time of great discouragement to the conscientious student, so distressing that we may designate it "the plateau of despond." ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... has proved the correctness of this theory. In no instance has he evinced other than a retrogression, when once freed from restraint. Like a horse without harness, he runs wild, but, if harnessed, no animal is more useful. Unfortunately, this is contrary to public opinion in England, where the vox populi ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... recently published book[6] to which I have already referred. Furthermore the passage of nature enables us to know that one direction along the series corresponds to passage into the future and the other direction corresponds to retrogression ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... constitute an artistic retrogression rather than an advance. They are not "modern music" for all their apparent stylistic kinship to the music of Strawinsky and Scriabine and Ornstein. Nor are they "music of the past." They belong rather more to the sort of music that has no more relation with yesteryear than ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... self-indulgent class above the protests of its business agents and solicitors and its own habits and vanity? Is chivalry in a class possible?—was it ever, indeed, or will it ever indeed be possible? Is the progress that seems attainable in certain directions worth the retrogression that ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... gigantic trees, overrun with plants and creepers, and closely backed by the gloomy forest, he is struck by the solemnity and picturesque beauty of the scene, and is led to ponder on the strange law of progress, which looks so like retrogression, and which in so many distant parts of the world has exterminated or driven out a highly artistic and constructive race, to make room for one which, as far as we can judge, ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... which the Jesuits built in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, less and less Gothic. The former were sham-classic; the latter are rather of a new fantastic Romanesque, or rather Byzantinesque style, which is a real retrogression from Gothic towards earlier and less natural schools. Next, that the Puritan communions, the Kirk of Scotland and the English Nonconformists, as they are becoming more cultivated—and there are now many highly cultivated men among them—are introducing Gothic ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... discontent. Pestilent priests paraded the country, and did their utmost to excite religious fanaticism against the Government. These agitators spoke so loudly and rashly that the ire of the old religious leaders, the higher Moullas, men of learning and tranquil temper, who had not joined the party of retrogression, was roused. The knowledge of this emboldened the sober-minded to speak out against the arrogance and conceit of the new self-elected leaders. Open expression of opinion led to the criticism, 'These priests will next desire to rule over us.' The Nomads, ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... deal with progress rather than with retrogression. Most newspaper men admit that this is true, but declare that the public will not buy the kind of papers which all sensible people approve. Just as soon as such papers can be made to pay, they say, we shall have them. One of the objects of this course ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... will convince you," said he. "Look at the French—the most brilliant nation intellectually among all the European peoples. Where are they in the race to-day? The evolutionist sees in them familiar symptoms of a retrogression which rarely ends but in one way. Look at the Greeks. Every schoolboy knows that the Greeks were vastly the intellectual superiors of any dominant people of to-day. An anthropologist of standing assures us that the intellectual interval separating the Greek of the Periclean age ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... disgrace to any one. Misfortune is a weapon which cleaves base natures like a sword, yet like a hammer welds noble ones more closely. To you, therefore, it now seems doubly difficult to leave her, but you need love. The right to live and guard yourself from the most pitiable retrogression is your due, as much as that of the rare woman on the throne. So long as you are sure of her love, remain with her, and show your devotion in every situation until the end. But the motives which were drawing you away to books, flowers, and children, weigh heavily in the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... R. of L.C. table). That's ridiculous. Naturally we must have progress. But that's just the point. (Indicating the curtains.) I don't call this sort of thing progress. It's—ah— retrogression. ...
— Mr. Pim Passes By • Alan Alexander Milne
... not consider that we thus in any way bind ourselves to adopt Roman, or Greek, or Egyptian, or Scandinavian costumes or customs; nor in our use of the Arts of Antiquity do we perceive any demonstration of retrogression ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... population of which the majority were convicts or their descendants, was less in proportion than in England; in short, for the first time, in 1840 the exports exceeded the imports; trade was brisk, agriculture increasing, new settlers were arriving; everything betokened progress; no one dreamed of retrogression or decay. ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... the world depends, broadly speaking, upon the balance between acquisitiveness and rivalry. The former makes for progress, the latter for retrogression. When intelligence provides improved methods of production, these may be employed to increase the general share of goods, or to set apart more of the labour power of the community for the business ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... at last to break silence consists in the continual and ample advantage that all the clerical and reactionary organs have been taking of Virchow's address, during the last three-quarters of a year, in favour of mental retrogression. The shouts of triumph with which they at once hailed Virchow's "grand moral action," that is to say, his perversion from a Free-thinker to the side of mental darkness, was the first signal for that persistent utilisation ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... head, openly renounced Christianity, and, at Halle, led by Ruge, the journalist, embraced the social revolutionary ideas of "Young France," to which almost the whole of the younger journalists of literary "Young Germany" acceded; nor was this Gallic reaction, this retrogression toward the philosophical ideas of the foregoing century, without its cause, German patriotism, which, from 1815 to 1819, had predominated in every university throughout Prussia, having been forcibly suppressed. Hegel, on his appearance in Berlin, was generally regarded ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... to the convention in October in 1829, said that Virginia was in a state of "moral and political retrogression" and ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... to human beings we find at first not only no advance in the sexual relations, but a decided retrogression. Among some species of birds, courtship and marriage are infinitely more refined and noble than among the lowest savages, and it is especially in their treatment of females, both before and after mating, that not only birds but all animals show an immense superiority over primitive man; for male ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the literary result of Mark Twain's Buffalo period does not reach the high standard of The Innocents Abroad. It was a retrogression—in some measure a return to his earlier form. It had been done under pressure, under heavy stress of mind, as he said. Also there was another reason; neither the subject treated nor the environment of labor had afforded ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Tinkleby, fixing his nippers with an air of resolution and defiance, "Heningson's going to open a debate next Saturday. The subject is: 'That this house is of opinion that the moral and physical condition of mankind is in a state of retrogression.' We'll go and hear it. Ward'll let us do our 'prep.' in the afternoon. I've got a little plan in my head, and we'll take a rise ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... laborers, there is a call to the leaders of labor organizations to lead right. These chiefs of labor hold a place of the highest possibilities and obligations. In their hands largely lies the advance or retrogression of the industrial community—and that means our entire community. It is one of the most hopeful signs of the times that stress of necessity is bringing to labor's front rank men of a higher type, men often of large ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... respects, some temporary retrogression is to be looked for. Just so certainly as Japan has attempted that which is above the normal limit of her powers, so certainly must she fall back to that limit, or, rather, below it. Such retrogression will be natural as well as necessary: it will mean nothing more than a recuperative preparation ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... the well-known flat alone, he had a moment of retrogression, went back to his unmarried time, and was again, as for so many years, in the intimate life of his mother. But to-day, as he opened the door, he was abruptly thrust out of his moment. His mother was in her usual place on the high-backed sofa near the fire. She was doing nothing, was just ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... has gone by. The history of nations is the history of intrigue, quarrelling, and bloodshed, and we are determined to put a stop to warfare for good and all. We hold in our hands the only power that can thwart the designs of the League and avert an era of tyranny and retrogression. That power we intend to use whether the British ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... of two of the statues which adorned his Nevsky bridge—statues representing restive horses restrained by strong men; and the Berlin populace, with an unerring instinct, had given to one of these the name "Progress checked,'' and to the other the name "Retrogression encouraged.'' To this day one sees every- where in the palaces of Continental rulers, whether great or petty, his columns of Siberian porphyry, jasper bowls, or malachite vases—signs of his ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... minister, the shogun's father, Hitotsubashi Harunari, moved into the western citadel of Yedo Castle, and thenceforth the great reforms which Sadanobu had effected by the force of genius and unflagging assiduity, were quickly replaced by an age of retrogression, so that posterity learned to speak of the prodigality of the Bunka and Bunsei eras (1804-1829), instead of the frugality of the Kwansei (1789-1800). As for the shogun, Ienari, he received from the Throne the highest rank attainable by a subject, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... vessels which had outlived their usefulness as cruisers were one by one taken out of commission and were not replaced. Thus the navy moved steadily on a downward plane. Through the seventies and into the eighties this retrogression continued. The lowest ebb was reached in 1882, when the entire naval force numbered only thirty-one vessels in commission, all but four of which were built entirely of wood. They were old-fashioned ships, which had been efficient in a past day, but were ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... compulsory retirement of women teachers on marriage. Happily the London County Council has not succumbed to this temptation, and there are other equally enlightened authorities. But constant watchfulness is needed in order to prevent retrogression in this matter. Young teachers, anxiously awaiting promotion, sometimes foolishly resist the appointment or retention of married women. This is a suicidal policy, to be resisted at all costs, both in the interests ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... was perpetually exposed, the Roman government became a despotism which gradually took on many of the vices of the Oriental type. The political weakness which resulted from this allowed Europe to be overrun by peoples organized in clans and tribes, and for some time there was a partial retrogression toward the disorder characteristic of primitive ages. The retrogression was but partial and temporary, however; the exposed frontier has been steadily pushed eastward into the heart of Asia; the industrial type of society is no longer menaced by the predatory type; ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... elapsed between the death of Montaigne (1592) and the accession to power of Louis XIV the tendencies in French literature were fluctuating and uncertain. It was a period of change, of hesitation, of retrogression even; and yet, below these doubtful, conflicting movements, a great new development was germinating, slowly, surely, and almost unobserved. From one point of view, indeed, this age may be considered the most important ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... pendulum between sin and the hope of forgiveness,- selfishness and sensuality causing con- stant retrogression,- our moral progress will 22:6 be slow. Waking to Christ's demand, mortals experience suffering. This causes them, even as drown- ing men, to make vigorous efforts to save themselves; and 22:9 through Christ's precious love these ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... retrogression, during which we find but little apparent appreciation of the unity between parents and offspring; no reference to memory in connection with heredity, whether of instinct or structure; an exaggerated view of the consequences which may be deduced from ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... Majeste le Hasard. In the epoch of classical antiquity—which Voltaire understood ill—man had advanced from barbarism to a condition of comparative well-being and good sense; in the Christian and mediaeval period there was a recoil and retrogression; in modern times has begun a renewed advance. In fixing attention on the esprit et moeurs of nations—their manners, opinions, institutions, sentiments, prejudices—Voltaire was original, and rendered most important service to the study of history. Although his blindness to ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... and conscious only of her boundless love for this one glorious man, and to whom the memories of a less harmless past seemed like wicked dreams sent by the Tempter to molest her chastity. This self-deception, or rather retrogression of her instincts, led her into touches of mysticism. The story of little Sonia who had fallen in love with the ten-year-old Wilhelm at first sight, to die shortly afterward with his name upon her lips, made a deep impression on her, and set her dreaming. "When ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... retrogression due? Is it the delectable civilization, the religion of salvation of the friars, called of Jesus Christ by a euphemism, that has produced this miracle, that has atrophied his brain, paralyzed his heart and made of the man this sort of vicious ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal |
