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3465 25th Street, Suite 17
San Francisco, CA 94110 | (noun)
[HEB-i-tood', HEB-i-tyood'] 
1. mental lethargy or dullness: "Ken avoided my simple questions, not with artful equivocation, but with blunt herbetude and blank stares, as if I was speaking another language."
adjective form: hebetudinous
Origin:
Approximately 1621; from Late Latin, 'hebetudo,' from 'hebere': to be dull; from Latin, 'hebes': dull. In action:
"Moreover, when a soul departeth,
fixed In Soothfastness, it goeth to the place--
Perfect and pure--of those that know all Truth
If it departeth in set hebetude
Of impulse, it shall go into the world
Of spirits tied to works; and, if it dies
In hardened Ignorance, that blinded soul
Is born anew in some unlighted womb.
Krishna speaking in The Bhagavad-Gita.
"Shakespeare knew human nature too well to present the narrow unmistakable type character which belongs to a different school of drama. His methods of drawing character are numerous. The most obvious of them is the soliloquy. This has been found fault with as unnatural�but only by those who do not know nature. The fact is that the soliloquy is so universal that it escapes observers who are not acute and active. Everybody, except persons of quite abnormal hebetude, 'talks to himself as he walks by himself, and thus to himself says he.' According to temperament and intellect, he is more or less frank with himself; but his very attempts to deceive himself are more indicative of character than his bare actions."
"VIII. Shakespeare: Life and Plays." The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907�21).
"The family blood had been impoverished, perhaps by long inbreeding, which I knew to be a common error among the proud and the exclusive. No decline, indeed, was to be traced in the body, which had been handed down unimpaired in shapeliness and strength; and the faces of to-day were struck as sharply from the mint, as the face of two centuries ago that smiled upon me from the portrait. But the intelligence (that more precious heirloom) was degenerate; the treasure of ancestral memory ran low; and it had required the potent, plebeian crossing of a muleteer or mountain contrabandista to raise, what approached hebetude in the mother, into the active oddity of the son."
Robert Louis Stevenson. (1850�1894). Scottish novelist, poet, and essayist. The Merry Men (1887).
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