Word: reaction
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Dates: during 1870-1879
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...morbid desire for excitement during those four years. She saves a classmate (male, of course) from drowning, rides a wild horse, is almost killed, like Horace, by the falling branch of a tree, and generally had her nerves strung to so high a pitch of excitement that if a reaction took place after graduation, the consequences must have been dreadful indeed. Likewise did she have her share of other wooing than that of the Muses, and did not take an entirely passive part in the amusement, as is sufficiently shown by the following invitation to a shooting expedition, in which...
...alone the contemplative, but the active life. In Mr. Dwight's article we find a theory of education of which the culminating triumph would be a character like Spinoza, The present interest in athletics may be pushed to an extreme; if so, it is but a healthy reaction and will soon right itself. We must try to check the evil without resigning the good; for, at all events, the "muscular Christian" is preferable to the languid swell. The present state of things - in Harvard, at least - comes entirely from the general indifference of society to success in study. Until...
Again, a week or ten days is perhaps left before some comparatively easy required or elective examination, and the reaction from excessive cramming ruins a man's pluck in keeping to his work, and he accomplishes little or nothing after it. Where the examinations are sandwiched in, the practical result is that life becomes "one demn'd horrid grind." This lapse of study would probably hurry the examinations, and some men would undoubtedly shirk, and work only after the week was over, but then the men benefited would be those who should be benefited, - high students and the good "middle...
...present mediocrity of his bourgeois relatives, but does not make him a gentleman. His smattering of real knowledge, say of art, enables him to despise bourgeois ignorance of it. His superior cleverness makes him writhe under the conventionality which keeps the others on a level of stupidity and complacency. Reaction against particular points of a system naturally produces contempt for the whole, and this rule applies, of course, more strongly to the "volatile" French than to other nations; so the genuine artiste despises bourgeois virtues as much as their narrow-mindedness...
...exercises next year should not be greatly diminished, the next Senior Class might expect to have the same privilege. We think that two considerations have been overlooked. In the first place, the experiment will be tried next year under peculiarly unfavorable auspices, simply because it is an experiment. The reaction so common under all similar circumstances, when any restraint is first removed, will probably take place, and the students will probably be very generally irregular in their attendance, while, as is well known to all, the members of each class are powerfully influenced by the advice and traditions they receive...