"Retrogression" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... expansion of that energy caused in him the destruction of another force: the moral one, which his own father had not scrupled to repress in him. And he never perceived that his whole life was a steady retrogression of all his faculties, of his hopes, his joys—a species of gradual renunciation—and that the circle was slowly but ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... Serpents, for example, have been developed from some lizard-like type which has lost its limbs; and though this loss has enabled them to occupy fresh places in nature and to increase and flourish to a marvellous extent, yet it must be considered to be a retrogression rather than an advance in organisation. The same remark will apply to the whale tribe among mammals; to the blind amphibia and insects of the great caverns; and among plants to the numerous cases in which flowers, once specially adapted to be fertilised by insects, have lost their ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... fact that they make things easier technically. They facilitate purity of intonation. Yet I am willing to forgo these advantages when I consider the wonderful pliability of the gut strings for which Stradivarius built his violins. I can see the artistic retrogression of those who are using the wire E, for when materially things are made easier, ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... 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 modesty ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... movement, this retrogression towards primevalism, must have possessed a certain charm, for it attracted vast multitudes; it was only hemmed, at last, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... 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 ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... 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 all ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... adjoining wynds would be crammed was a law of nature, but boyhood drew imaginary lines across the Roods, the west town end, the east town end, and the brae, and if the stands did not reach these there had been retrogression. Tommy found all well in two quarters, got a nasty shock on the brae, but medicine for it in the Roods; on the whole, yelled a hundred children, by way of greeting to each other, a better ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... 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 ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... who favour the 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
... came into 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 ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... 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? If no advantage, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... for though it may appear to some readers essentially a theory of progression, it is in reality only one of gradual change. It is, however, by no means difficult to show that a real progression in the scale of organization is perfectly consistent with all the appearances, and even with apparent retrogression, should ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... 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 life and our duties here. "To perform ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... 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 in this ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... presented to the convention in October in 1829, said that Virginia was in a state of "moral and political retrogression" and proceeded ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... succession this liberty wholly disappeared. If the Wars of the Roses failed in utterly destroying English freedom, they succeeded in arresting its progress for more than a hundred years. With them we enter on an epoch of constitutional retrogression in which the slow work of the age that went before it was rapidly undone. From the accession of Edward the Fourth Parliamentary life was almost suspended, or was turned into a mere form by the overpowering ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... 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 our ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... were taken from us. The present business of the country could not be carried on, the present population could not be maintained, property would sink to half its value—(hear, hear)—and instead of prosperity and progress we should have collapse and retrogression on all sides. (Cheers.) What would Newcastle be if it ceased to be a focus of railways? How would London be supplied if it had to fall back upon turnpike roads and horse traffic? In short, England as it is could not ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... they would realize that the principle of Creative Progression, when it reaches the level of fully developed mental man, necessarily implies the Resurrection of the Body, and that anything short of this would be retrogression ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... 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. Much ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... 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 ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... which subsisted after the benefits conferred by 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 repressive forces ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... intelligent forethought; thus, the beaver builds his habitation over the water, but not a single apartment is different from the beaver homestead of a thousand years ago; there is no improvement, no retrogression. Trains of thought have been termed a third class of reflex actions. It is evident that the power of reasoning is, in a degree, possessed by some of the lower-animals: for instance, a tribe of monkeys on a foraging expedition will station guards at different parts of the field, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... thus that a fine mind and a fine heart at the bounds of a nature not great, chose to colour his retrogression and countenance his shortcoming; and it was thus that he set about ruining the work he had done. He might well say, as he once did, that there are hours when the clearest soul becomes a cunning fox. For a grief ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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 by experience, has refused ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... progressing, stage by stage, towards a higher order. Each advance purchased at such a price, becomes a free gift, by inheritance, to the next generation, and from this inheritance still further progress may be made. It is quite possible that in a dissolute age retrogression may set in and the ground be lost, in which case its recovery becomes the arduous task of a succeeding ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... during which art has no noble champion, during which the true spiritual food is wanting, are periods of retrogression in the spiritual world. Ceaselessly souls fall from the higher to the lower segments of the triangle, and the whole seems motionless, or even to move down and backwards. Men attribute to these blind and dumb periods a ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... country—are, like those 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 architecture more and more into ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... the old religious sects, and in place of the gravity and permanence of those societies of opinion, they run into freak and extravagance.... In creeds never was such levity: witness the heathenisms in Christianity,—the periodic revivals, the millennium mathematics, the peacock ritualism, the retrogression to popery, the maundering of Mormons, the squalor of mesmerism, the deliration of rappings, the rat-and-mouse revelation, thumps in table-drawers, and black art ... By the irresistible maturing of the general mind the Christian traditions ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 3: New-England Sunday - Gleanings Chiefly From Old Newspapers Of Boston And Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... 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
... 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 of history ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... according to which Germany will make war is determined by these premises. War is a return to the state of nature. Germany yields to this temporary retrogression because she has to do with people of an inferior culture who must be taught a lesson, and must be spoken to in a language which they understand. Now a characteristic of a state of nature is that force reigns undisputed. In this very trait resides the sublime beauty of that state, ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... 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 ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... His development (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; ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... 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 ...
— The Famous Missions of California • William Henry Hudson
... same society that is in 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 ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... race itself, run ever on? 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 ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... tended still further to develop a virile physique of first order. The moral and physical standards were maintained by the practice of men and women marrying early in life, and by occupations which required the people to pass most of their time in the open. Educationally, there was unavoidably some retrogression, but there is always plenty of scope in the existence of colonists in a new country for the exercise of a vigorous mind in the study of nature, in overcoming difficulties and in cultivating the faculty ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... better model for interpreting other communities more complex and highly organized. In it one may see the processes which affect the town and city communities; shifting of population, economic changes, educational improvement or retrogression and the processes of social life which express themselves in moral conditions. The community is the field in which may be observed the prosperity of the people as a whole. It is the local exhibit in which the average man shows ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... the address is dead against your views. The fact being, as they will by and by wake up [to] see that yours is the only hypothesis which is not negatived by the facts,—one of its great merits being that it allows not only of indefinite standing still, but of indefinite retrogression. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... of their brother tribes, and, resuming the life of mere hunters and fishers, speedily lose somewhat of their hardly won culture—for civilization is the product of labor. Whenever a people from necessity or choice abandon one form of labor for another demanding less skill to triumph over nature, a retrogression in culture is inevitable. ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... people not the privilege, but the 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 and pernicious, is in this country a specious ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... retrogression that appears in Carlyle's Politics is traceable in his Religion; though it is impossible to record the stages of the change with even an equal approach to precision. Religion, in the widest sense—faith in some supreme ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... be 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 unfavorable—for example, if the ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... 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 ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... 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 ...
— Woman: Man's Equal • Thomas Webster
... history of the state 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 our annals. In vivid ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... we 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 not live beyond ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... 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 they are fallen and repent. They once enjoyed the love ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... 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
... 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 narrative ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... exhibit a treasure of this 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
... 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, and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... impression! The modern method is 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 the ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry |
