Literary notes about reversion (AI summary)
In literature, the term "reversion" is employed with a richly varied set of meanings. At times it denotes a return to a previous state or type, as when characters or societies relapse into more primitive or traditional behaviors—illustrated by the depiction of war as not merely an escalation but a reversion to savagery ([1]) and by the suggestion of a reversion to earlier human instincts ([2]). The word is also used in legal and inheritance contexts, referring to the return of property or status after a term expires or upon the occurrence of certain events ([3], [4], [5]). Moreover, scientific and botanical texts make use of "reversion" to describe the phenomenon where traits or characteristics reemerge, such as the return of ancestral qualities in plants ([6], [7]). In other instances, it captures the idea of a deliberate return to an earlier style or condition within art, music, and social orders ([8], [9], [10]), demonstrating the word’s flexibility and the layered meanings it carries across different literary genres.
- War is the highest exercise of that violence, and modern war is no simple reversion to savagery.
— from Psychological Warfare by Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger - Psychological studies of war have explained war either as an expression of instinct or as a reversion to a primordial animal-human type of behavior.
— from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. Burgess and Robert Ezra Park - On the expiration of each of the three lives £1 was payable as a fine or heriot, and £10 was to be paid on nominating the life in reversion.
— from Practical Politics; or, the Liberalism of To-day by Alfred Farthing Robbins - Now, if I had taken the veil, all this fortune would have descended to my father, and, in reversion, to his son.”
— from The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Maquet - ASSURE, secure possession or reversion of.
— from Epicoene; Or, The Silent Woman by Ben Jonson - The effects of variability are modified by various degrees of inheritance and of reversion.
— from On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin - This rare event is probably a case of reversion to the long-lost, aboriginal instinct of nidification.
— from The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin - Still it was simply a reversion to the absolute religion of the Roman Catholic Church as set forth by the Jesuit party.
— from An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant by Edward Caldwell Moore - Horrid thought—what if Gwendolen's drawing-room at this moment showed just such a singular reversion to ugliness?
— from The Nest, The White Pagoda, The Suicide, A Forsaken Temple, Miss Jones and the Masterpiece by Anne Douglas Sedgwick - Unfortunately a searching disintegration of dogma, a conscientious reversion to the immediate, is seldom practised for its own sake.
— from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress by George Santayana
