United States or Greece ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Brooding is not a wholesome occupation for anybody at any time, but, on the other hand, through hours of active effort emotion finds an outlet and our natures are restored to peace. Introspection is to many people an actual luxury, but like other luxuries it enervates. Reveling in their own emotions is a favorite hobby with quite a lot of people, but for all that it is a very bad one.
Then for hours afterwards he sat sunk in his chair, the stupor of fatigue broken every now and then by a flash of curious introspection. It was a base thing which he had done it was also a strange thing psychologically; and at intervals he tried to understand it, to track it to its causes.
Consciousness dwindles and flares up most irresponsibly, so long as its own flow alone is regarded, and it continually arises out of nothing, which indeed is simplicity itself. But it does not arise without real conditions outside, which cannot be discovered by introspection, nor divined by that literary psychology which proceeds by imagining what introspection might yield in others.
"No, but I don't want to be knocked off like a green apple, before I'm ripe and ready." "Better be knocked off green and unripe," said Kent, his railing mood changing to one of sad introspection, "than to prematurely fall, from a worm gnawing at your heart." Jake's fright was not so great as to make him forego the opportunity for a brutal retort: "You mean the 'worm of the still, I s'pose.
"It is only a girl's fancy; she will get over it," said Mrs. Fortescue to the Colonel. "She would if she were like most girls, but I tell you, Betty, this child of ours, this devoted, obedient little thing, has more mind, more introspection, than any young creature I ever knew. There is the making of a dozen tragedies in her."
At the other extreme was the hysterical pacifism of the Abolitionists. Part of Lincoln's abiding quarrel with the Abolitionists was their lack of national feeling. Their peculiar form of introspection had injected into politics the idea of personal sin. Their personal responsibility for slavery they being part of a country that tolerated it was their basal inspiration.
My kind, devoted friends were fearful lest the innkeeper would have turned me out into the roadway to die the foreigner's spirit would haunt the place for ever and a day were I allowed to die inside. But I recovered. It was a graver, older, less exuberant walker across China that presently arose from his flea-ridden bed of sickness, and began to make a languid personal introspection.
Finally we considered the problem of free will: here we found that the reasons for supposing volitions to be determined are strong but not conclusive, and we decided that even if volitions are mechanically determined, that is no reason for denying freedom in the sense revealed by introspection, or for supposing that mechanical events are not determined by volitions.
What had seemed a nightmare, with an awakening bound to come, now became a waking dream, more terrible, because no dawn could give it end. But the chief had been wise. He had left Leighton no time for disastrous introspection. Action, work, that sovereign antidote for troubled minds, seized upon him. He told Mrs. Leighton in as few words as possible what had happened.
Meditation, comparison, introspection, were wholly foreign to this little, eager, impetuous nature, however they might be forced upon it in the course of years and events; and with her keen sense of enjoyment in all glad outward influences, one might have feared that the realities of life present to her would too readily preclude any contemplation of its hidden possibilities, but for a lively, susceptible imagination, which would surely intervene to prevent any such tendency being carried out to its too prosaic end.
Word Of The Day