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The muscles stiffen, the hair turns white, the joints crack, the arteries ossify, the nerve-centres harden or soften: all sorts of degeneration creep on till death appears, Mors janua vitæ. There the curves unite, and men and women are alike again. Sleep, whose inventor received the benediction of Sancho Panza, and whose power Dryden apostrophized,
"You see, it's like this: the Republicans are so damn proud of their record, they're going to ossify, with their faces turned backward. They have a past, but no future. Now the Democratic party has no past that it cares particularly to look back at, and so it's got to look into the future.
What became of all his eager listening, of his partial obedience, of his care to keep John safe from Herodias's malice? All vanished like early dew. What became of his conscience-stricken alarms on hearing of Christ? Did they lead to any deep convictions? They faded away, and left him harder than before. Convictions not followed out ossify the heart.
Those who expand less than three and one-half inches should not be satisfied until they have gone beyond this mark. Elderly people can also increase their chest expansion and breathing capacity, but it takes more time, for with the years the chest cartilages have a tendency to harden and even to ossify. The less breathing the sooner the ossification comes.
If you would not grovel in spirit; if you would not lose every tear that sparkles, and every sigh that burns; if you would not ossify the very power of passion; if you would not turn your soul into a mass of shapeless lead, avoid those despicable cynics, who never leave their discussion of the merits of beer, or the powers of stroke oars, unless it be to carp at acknowledged eminence, and jeer at genuine emotion.
From the fact that the requirements of civilization ossify certain fibres of the heart and render callous certain membranes, we must not necessarily conclude that all men are bound to undergo this partial and exceptional death of the soul. This would be to reduce the human race to a condition of atrocious moral suicide.
"It's no end of a bore, Winton, and that is the plain, unlacquered fact," he protested. "I think the governor owes me something. I worried through the Tech because he insisted that I should have a profession; and now I am going in for field work with you in a howling winter wilderness because he insists on a practical demonstration. I shall ossify out there in those mountains.
The eager and often inconsiderate appeals of reformers and revolutionists are indispensable, to counterbalance the inertness and fossilism making so large a part of human institutions. The latter will always take care of themselves the danger being that they rapidly tend to ossify us. The former is to be treated with indulgence, and even with respect.
I am not of opinion that the race of men, and the commonwealths they create, like the bodies of individuals, grow effete and languid and bloodless, and ossify, by the necessities of their own conformation, and the fatal operation of longevity and time. These analogies between bodies natural and politic, though they may sometimes illustrate arguments, furnish no argument of themselves.
They express as habits, which in turn ossify into a desirable or an undesirable body. Outward frailty has mental origin; in a vicious circle, the habit-bound body thwarts the mind. If the master allows himself to be commanded by a servant, the latter becomes autocratic; the mind is similarly enslaved by submitting to bodily dictation."
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