What is "imbecility"

Usage examples of "imbecility".

The famous Dazzler was a tallish, thin young man, with an admirable forehead and sleepy brown eyes, and was considered by less prejudiced observers to be both personable and agreeable, though he concealed his excellent brain behind a manner often bordering upon imbecility.

After having had a hemorrhage for three months, I was taken to Padua, where, cured of my imbecility, I applied myself to study and, at the age of sixteen years I was made a doctor and given the habit of a priest so that I might go seek my fortune at Rome.

His facial expression denoted almost utter imbecility and he was quite the most repulsive creature that ever Bertha Kircher had looked upon.

The demagogues have called in all the reserves of obscurantism to extinguish the last gleams of good sense that lingered in the people, and to reduce them to imbecility.

Demme selected his children of drunkards by selecting children who came to his hospital on account of imperfect development of speech, mental defect, imbecility or idiocy.

It clearly points out those temperaments which are compatible with each other and harmoniously blend, and also those which, when united in marriage, result in barrenness, or produce in the offspring imbecility, deformity, and idiocy.

And with regard to these we must be guided by their wishes as expressed by them when sane: so that, if then they manifested a desire to receive Baptism, it should be given to them when in a state of madness or imbecility, even though then they refuse.

If we are answered that the distinction is merely a process of our thought, then, at once, the theory of a plurality in the Divine Hypostasis is abandoned: further, the question is opened whether our thought can entertain a knowing principle so narrowed to its knowing as not to know that it knows--a limitation which would be charged as imbecility even in ourselves, who if but of very ordinary moral force are always master of our emotions and mental processes.

But under smirk and wig and tiara is the body with its unsharable physiological processes, is the psyche with its insights and sudden graces, its abysmal imbecilities and its unavowable desires.

But should any officious functionary come down upon Fellside, this imbecility might be called madness, and the poor old creature whom you regard so compassionately, and whose case you think so pitiable here, would be carried off to a pauper lunatic asylum, which I can assure you would be a much worse imprisonment than Fellside Manor.

A disturbance of the corporeal organs, which especially influence this portion of the brain, naturally tends to the development of insanity or imbecility.

They had nothing to say to each other, until they had been seated some time then they patched together a semblance of talk, a few formalities, commonplaces, all but imbecilities.

Phoebe pictured Maeve, sitting in regal splendor amid her pillows and her billet-doux, opining on the imbecility of love.

Marriage transforms a distraction into a support, the power of which should be, and happily often is, in direct proportion to the degree of imbecility it supplants.

The defeat of the baby-farming lobby removes a long-time stigma from the fair brow of the Junior-but-One State - a congenital stigma, one may say, since the J-but-O State's accession to hoodness coincided almost to the day with the first eugenic legislation concerned with haemophilia, phenylketonuria and congenital imbecility .