He saw only sullen, scowling,
imbruted men, and feeble, discouraged women, or women that were not women,--the strong pushing away the weak,--the gross, unrestricted animal selfishness of human beings, of whom nothing good was expected and desired; and who, treated in every way like brutes, had sunk as nearly to their level as it was possible for human beings to do.
~It has a natural, an inevitable tendency to brutalize every noble faculty of man.~ An American sailor, who was cast away on the shore of Africa, where he was kept in slavery for three years, was, at the expiration of that period, found to be
imbruted and stultified--he had lost all reasoning power; and having forgotten his native language, could only ut- ter some savage gibberish between Arabic and Eng- lish, which nobody could understand, and which even he himself found difficulty in pronouncing.
By means of a few drops of powerful cordial, the doctor for a moment reanimated the
imbruted carcass that lay before him.
Retribution may come from any voice; the hardest, cruelest, most
imbruted urchin at the street-corner can inflict it; surely help and pity are rarer things, more needful for the righteous to bestow.
(22) The Messiah was to die, surely, but he was not to be
imbruted, in any sense of the word whereas Satan is, in every conceivable sense.
Milton documents the ontological effects of sin in A Masque as being similar for postlapsarian man as for the disobedient angels, only that it is the man's soul that is
imbruted by the defilement of sin; yet Milton is clear throughout his philosophy that the soul of man is his essence or form, and so once again we find that essence is determined by ethics: