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It was said just now that heredity is the stiffening in human nature, a stiffening bound up with a more or less considerable offset of plasticity. Now clearly it is in some sense true that the child's whole nature, its modicum of plasticity included, is handed on from its parents.
It would be easy for foxes to learn to climb trees, and many a fox might have saved his life by so doing; yet quick-witted as he is, this obvious device has never occurred to him." The vital problem with parents is how to fill this period of plasticity, how to provide an educative environment of the right kind.
At first I looked upon Betty's education as a duty; in a very short time it had become a pleasure...the deepest and most abiding interest of my life. As I had premised, Betty was good material, and responded to my training with gratifying plasticity. Day by day, week by week, month by month, her character and temperament unfolded naturally under my watchful eye.
As intermediaries between the Arab and the white man they are invaluable, their plasticity allowing them to ascend or descend in either direction, while their broad and active tolerance, fruit of bitter experience in the past, has honeycombed the land with freemasonry and scientific charity and liberalism.
He was too much a man of iron for that. His soul had lost the plasticity of imagination. But he could not forget Breault's lips as they had seemed to grin up at him. There was a reason for it. On his last trip down, Breault had said to him, with that same half-grin on his face: "M'sieu, some day you may go after my murderer, and when you do, Francois Breault will go with you."
He had to sit a long time again in the dining-room drinking tea. Ivan Petrovitch, seeing that his visitor was bored and preoccupied, drew some notes out of his waistcoat pocket, read a funny letter from a German steward, saying that all the ironmongery was ruined and the plasticity was peeling off the walls. "I expect they will give a decent dowry," thought Startsev, listening absent-mindedly.
Remember that I can reproduce only the words, not the wild power of that persuasive voice, not the aspiring courage that struck me from his eye. Almost against my will there was produced in me a plasticity of mind that seemed to demand the impress of some foreign mould.
Contagion is the only source of valid mind-reading: you must imitate to understand, and where the plasticity of two minds is not similar their mutual interpretations are necessarily false. They idealise in their friends whatever they do not invent or ignore, and the friendship which should have lived on energies conspiring spontaneously together dies into conscious appreciation.
Perhaps it is a consequence of this variety of method, which lets prose-fiction proffer itself to every passer-by, that we recognize in the Victorian novel the plasticity of form and the laxity of structure which we have discovered to be characteristic of the Elizabethan drama.
He employed with her all the plasticity of his character, all the graces of his nature, all the fascinations of his genius; but Madame Roland had a preservative against the warrior's seductions that Dumouriez had not been accustomed to find in the women he had loved austere virtue and a strong will.
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