United States or Bahamas ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But delighted with the easy home he had obtained, he took care to school his features and smooth his manner in his father's visits, to make the most of what he had learned of less ignoble knowledge, and, with his characteristic imitativeness, to cite the finest sentiments he had found in his plays; and novels. What father is not credulous? Roland believed, and wept tears of joy.
It is difficult enough to keep the world straight without the interposition of fiction. But the conduct of the novelists and the painters makes the task of the conservators of society doubly perplexing. Neither the writers nor the artists have a due sense of the responsibilities of their creations. The trouble appears to arise from the imitativeness of the race.
It is time that some one dried their tears and took away the subject. But, in any case, examination tests are never the whole story. To those who know, a written examination is far from being a true criterion of capacity. It demands too much of mere memory, imitativeness, and the insidious willingness to absorb other people's ideas. Parrots and crows would do admirably in examinations.
Patience is not a prominent gift of our four-handed relatives, but compensating nature has endowed them with the genius of self-help and its adjuvant talents, observation, causality, imitativeness, covetousness, and self-asserting pluck. They also possess a fair share of such faculties as inquisitiveness, vigilance, and perseverance, all rudiments, indeed, but the rudiments of supremacy.
On the day following, three persons died by their own hands in Berlin, of whom two were young members of the medical profession; on the day following that, the number rose to nineteen, Hamburg, Dresden, and Aachen joining in the frenzied death-dance; within three weeks from the night on which Professor Schleschinger met his unaccountable end, eight thousand persons in Germany, France, and Great Britain, died in that startlingly sudden and secret manner which we call 'tragic', many of them obviously by their own hands, many, in what seemed the servility of a fatal imitativeness, with figured, honey-smeared slips of papyrus beneath their tongues.
This office is relegated to sightless individuals or ugly old women; many Japs indulge in their services after a warm bath, finding the treatment very pleasant and beneficial, so they say. One of the most amusing illustrations of Jap imitativeness is displayed in the number of American clocks one sees adorning the walls of the yadoyas in nearly every village.
But the finishing touch to his education was undoubtedly given by the European travelers whom he had served, and of whom he had, with the imitativeness of his age, picked up a variety of little accomplishments, particularly the oaths of different languages.
What better evidence, or instances, of this can we have than in those studies of her handiwork? as the larger species of caterpillars, when, by stretching themselves out in imitation of, and to make their foes think that they are snakes; tigers and lions choosing a background in keeping with, and in imitation of, the colours of their bodies, in order to seize their unwary prey; and for the same purpose crocodiles imitating a rotting log; the green tint of the lizard's skin for the sake of concealment; the playful imitativeness of the mocking bird; the hysterical laugh of the hyaena; the gaudy colours of tropical snakes imitated by others, besides many other examples of Mimicry, in such as butterflies of the species Danaidae and Acraediae, the Heliconidiae of tropical America; and hornets, wasps, ants, and bees.
But Father Lasse would have wept tears of blood to see his boy as he now walked along the streets, full of uncertainty and uneasy imitativeness, wearing his best coat on a workday, and yet disorderly in his dress. Yonder he goes, sauntering along with a pair of boots, his fingers thrust through the string of the parcel, whistling with an air of bravado.
Yet, in consideration of the facts there given, are we justified in counting the Japanese so conspicuously deficient in constructive, imagination as to warrant the assertion that such a lack is the fundamental characteristic of the race psychic nature? As an extreme case, look for a moment at their imitativeness.
Word Of The Day