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Why is the Oriental so prone or partial to miracle and mystery? His mind is sick. To believe is easier to him than to reason. He follows the line of the least resistance: he has invented faith that he may not have to think. The mental cells in his brain are so starved, so devitalized, that they have to be whipped into movement.
He saw himself, felt himself being gradually devitalized, with only the placid brain left, considering only the problem of hourly comfort, and trying to neutralize the penalties of blindness. She must not be sacrificed to that, for apart from all else she had greatness of a kind in her.
It can never have been explained, I suppose, what, to devitalized perception such as mine, the contact of mortal beings with each other appears to be. Once to have exercised this sense-freed perception is to realize that the gift of prophecy, although the subject of such frequent marvel, is no longer mysterious.
Senility and many mental disorders fall in this category. Many old people live on extremely deficient diets comprised largely of devitalized starches, sugars, and fats, partly because many do not have good enough teeth to chew vegetables and other high roughage foods, and they do not have the energy it takes to prepare more nourishing foods. Virtually all old people have deficiency diseases.
Irrespective of Plato's position, it is easy to perceive that the term knowledge is used to denote things as far apart as intimate and vital personal realization, a conviction gained and tested in experience, and a second-handed, largely symbolic, recognition that persons in general believe so and so a devitalized remote information.
Never having had the fine physical endowment of the others all the fires of his being were dying down to smoldering ashes. His love for Susan faded, if not from his heart, from his eyes and lips. She was as dear to him as ever, but now with a devitalized, undemanding affection in which there was something of a child's fretful dependence.
Even now, motionless in the big chair beyond the table, he seemed how shall I say it? mechanical. And that was the very defect in his memoir. He had cut the great cases into a dry recital. There was no longer in them any pressure of a human impulse. The glow of inspired detail had been dissected out. Everything startling and wonderful had been devitalized. The memoir was a report.
The days that followed were not unhappy for me; and Patricia appeared to be contented in a numb sort of way. My own reaction to the anxieties and fears of our captivity devitalized me to a certain degree, I believed; else, I would not have been contented to settle down to the drowsy existence of village life. I did no hunting. I was a companion to the girl when she wished for my company.
And I waited no more than a hundred seconds in her presence to applaud his discernment. I had pictured an old woman some aged trifle of an elder day, sad, withered, devitalized, intemperately reminiscent steeped in traditions that would leave her formidable, and impracticable as a friend to me.
And with the lanterns at night, often under fire, often so long that Boylan could not rest, but would wait at the hospital-division like a mother for a dissipated son. "They call this the great German fighting machine," Peter whispered to Boylan one night, "but we're inside. We can't call it that. It's the most pitiful and devitalized thing that ever ran up and down the earth.
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