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Updated: May 13, 2025
Among the stories told in illustration of compulsive tendency in the great, may be instanced the touching of posts, and the placing of a certain foot first, in the case of Dr. Johnson, who, it appears, would actually retrace his steps and repeat the act which failed to satisfy his requirements, with the air of one with something off his mind.
All that he saith against the discipline, he might say the same against the doctrine, nay, against the belief of a God, viz. That the legislature might forbid it. The Church formeth and contriveth canons; and the civil power, which is compulsive, confirms them. "There were no laws enacted but by the great council of the kingdom." And that was very often, chiefly, only bishops. Ibid.
We are to believe that their hearts tremble with affright, that the very sound of our words offends the purity of their ears, that they hate us for talking so, and only yield to our importunity by a compulsive force. Beauty, all powerful as it is, has not wherewithal to make itself relished without the mediation of these little arts.
Always the world has been all ears for a clear, convincing, compulsive message from God; always, or at any rate for many thousands of years, there have been men who seemed the predestined mouthpieces of such a message; always what purported to be the word of God has proved to be either powerless to make itself heard, or powerful only to the begetting of hideous moral and social corruptions.
He will have reverted, in other words, to crude experience, to primordial illusion. The movement of his animal or vegetative mind will be far from delightful; it will be unintelligent and unintelligible; nothing in particular will be represented therein; but it will be a movement in the soul and for the soul, as exciting and compulsive as the soul's volume can make it.
This shock of hair, cut in flakes, and falling wilfully, reminded me of the lagoon grass when it darkens in autumn upon uncovered shoals, and sunset gilds its sombre edges. Fiery grey eyes beneath it gazed intensely, with compulsive effluence of electricity. It was the wild glance of a Triton.
And the spell was a compulsive, terrible thing, having a power over evil dreams and over spirits of ill; for it was a verse of forty lines in many languages, both living and dead, and had in it the word wherewith the people of the plains are wont to curse their camels, and the shout wherewith the whalers of the north lure the whales shoreward to be killed, and a word that causes elephants to trumpet; and every one of the forty lines closed with a rhyme for 'wasp'.
From the Decalogue down, the language of the law has been compulsive, "Thou shalt" and "Thou shalt not"; and men generally act upon the theory that what society does not forbid by statute or custom the individual may do.
An immense volume of force had detached itself from the unknown universe of energy, while still vaster reservoirs, supposed to be infinite, steadily revealed themselves, attracting mankind with more compulsive course than all the Pontic Seas or Gods or Gold that ever existed, and feeling still less of retiring ebb.
During the days of papacy in England, fish was an article not of optional, but compulsive consumption, and this rendered the business of a fishmonger one of the principal trades of London.
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