Word: morbidness
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...front of Weld Boat House on the Charles River. His two companions swam safely to shore. MDC patrol boats dragged the river for two hours before finally recovering his body at 12:40 a.m. while a small group of summer school gathered on the banks to watch the morbid proceedings...
...first evidence of interest in psychology specifically came just after senior high school: "The girl I was fondest of said, 'Don't take psychology, it will make you morbid.' That probably had something to do with...
Cheery and salubrious though it be, healthy-mindedness for James could never qualify as an ultimately satisfactory credo. "It seems to me," he writes, "that we are bound to say that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its survey is the one that overlaps. The method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere...
...these things together do not make saints infallible. When their intellectual outlook is narrow, they fall into all sorts of holy excesses, fanaticisms or theopathic absorption, self-torment, prudery, scrupulosity, gullibility, and morbid inability to meet the world. By the very intensity of his fidelity to the paltry ideals with which an inferior intellect may inspire him, a saint can be even more objectionable and damnable than a superficial carnal man would be in the same situation. We must judge him not sentimentally only, and not in isolation, but using our own intellectual standards, placing him in his environment...
Thus James was no stranger to morbid gloom--nor could he easily dispose of the problem of evil. For him evil was real and palpable, but he refused to accept it as inevitable. Surely much of his anguished grouping in the realm of religion was due to this moral sensitivity and reluctance to compromise. To say that James was not a stranger to gloom is, by no means, to place him among the eternal groaners. Long periods of vivacity and ebullience followed his occasional fits of depression...