With what difficulty do we entirely throw off atavistic notions!

This is the atavistic type of criminals which represents an involutionary, or retrogressive, form of abnormality, due to an arrested development or an atavistic reversion to a savage and primitive type.

This is the atavistic type of criminals which represents an involutionary, or retrogressive, form of abnormality, due to an arrested development or an atavistic reversion to a savage and primitive type.

These altruistic criminals feel the sufferings and horrors due to the injustice surrounding them and may go so far as to commit murder, which must always be condemned, but which must not be confounded with atavistic or egoistic murder.

The evolutionary abnormal is often an instrument of human progress, not in the form of criminality, but in that of intellectual and moral rebellion against conditions which are sanctioned by laws that frequently punish such an evolutionary rebellion harder than atavistic crime, as they do in Russia, where capital punishment has been abolished for common crimes, but retained for political violations of the law!

For the graver crimes committed by atavistic or congenital criminals, of by persons inclining toward crime from acquired habit or mental alienation, the positive school of criminology reserves segregation for an indefinite time, for it is absurd to fix the time beforehand in the case of a dangerous degenerate who has committed a grave crime.

For the rest, indefinite segregation, such as we propose for the most dangerous atavistic criminals, is a measure which is already in use for ordinary lunatics as well us for criminal lunatics.

In the case of atavistic criminality, prevention does not mean handcuffing of the man who is about to commit a crime, but devising such economic and educational measures in the family and administration as will eliminate the causes of crime or attenuate them, precisely because punishment is less effective than prevention.

While even Brahms did not escape the influence of Wagner, nor that of the romanticists Schubert and Chopin, still, in his essence, he represents reaction against modern romanticism and an atavistic return to the spirit of Beethoven.

"The term is of your own choice," continued the doctor equably, "not mine, and it is a good example of a word that indicates a result while it conceals the process; but the explanation of this beast that haunts your island and attacks your daughter is of far deeper significance than mere atavistic tendencies, or throwing back to animal origin, which I suppose is the thought in your mind.

Perhaps Kit was moved by an atavistic fear of the dark forest, and he owned that he was influenced by the civilized man's longing for the shelter of a house.

What atavistic strain, hidden deep within me, had been touched into vile response, giving this flash of intuitive comprehension, I cannot say.

And besides, I was overcome by an atavistic longing to do chores.

One race is lively and progressive, the other is sluggish and atavistic.

There is to my mind something inhuman in senility, something crouching and atavistic; the human qualities seem to drop from old people insensibly day by day.

By a singular, atavistic reversion, the last descendant resembled the old grandsire, from whom he had inherited the pointed, remarkably fair beard and an ambiguous expression, at once weary and cunning.