When my old schoolfellow came in, and I informed him with a smile that I was not a patient, he seemed rather at a loss to perceive any reason for smiling in connexion with that fact, and inquired to what was he to attribute the honour? I asked him with another smile, could he remember me at all? I was beginning to have but a poor opinion of Mr.
But it is the nature of general causes to reproduce, in the same circumstances, always the same event. Common sense and science alike dictate that, all other things being the same, we should rather attribute the effect to a cause which if real would be very likely to produce it, than to a cause which would be very unlikely to produce it.
The dry, elastic atmosphere of the northern States produces a restlessness which must either expend itself in bodily or mental exertion or force of expression; from this probably arise the frequent use of superlatives, and the exaggeration of language, which the more phlegmatic English attribute to the Americans.
"In that case, the condition will last until one of two things occurs; either she must be similarly shocked back into sensibility and I can't see how this can happen, Fenton, unless you can secure the co-operation of the man to whom you attribute the matter or she must lie that way indefinitely." "Indefinitely!" I exclaimed, sensing something ominous. "You mean "
Works on psychology abound in facts demonstrating that this primitive tendency to attribute life and even personality to everything is a necessary phase that the mind must undergo long or short in duration, rich or poor in inventions, according to the level of the child's imagination.
Here was the great defect in Mr. Jefferson's views of slavery. In the highest Christian sense, he was not qualified to understand this subject; he reasoned like one who did not take into view the providence and the purposes of God, even while he was saying what he did of there being "no attribute in the Almighty that would take part with us" in favor of slavery.
Now in such a case as this, a young teacher, philosophizing upon his success and the causes of it, will almost invariably make this mistake, namely, he will attribute to something essentially excellent in his plans the success which, in fact, results from the novelty of them. When he proposes something new to a class, they all take an interest in it because it is new.
You will find men who are very turgid and magniloquent at five-and-thirty, at forty, at fifty. But I attribute the phenomenon in no small measure to the fact that such men had not the opportunity of blowing off their steam in youth. Give a man at four-and-twenty two sermons to write a week, and he will very soon work through his Veal.
She had, however, that curious but common desire to excel in that for which she had no aptitude; still, if she possessed no other attribute of a horsewoman, she was undoubtedly gifted with nerve amounting almost to recklessness. "Oh, no, Captain Bloxam," she exclaimed; "I am sure we can go anywhere that the rest of them do. Don't you think so, Mr. Sartoris?"
But bearing in mind the liberties which rumor is wont to take with the names of eminent persons, the readiness the multitude always display to attribute light morals to grave men, and the infrequency of the cases where a dissolute youth is the prelude to a manhood of strenuous industry and an old age of honor the cautious reader will require conclusive testimony before he accepts Popham's connection with 'the road' as one of the unassailable facts of history.