self-sustenance

English

Noun

self-sustenance (uncountable)

1. (physics, rare, fantasy, science fiction, biology) The independent sustenance of oneself, such as not requiring much oxygen to breathe or food to eat and liquids to drink like average species.
   • 1830, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 1830-02: Volume 27, Issue 162‎^[1], Blackwood Pillans and Wilson, page 262:

     We are all for utility; and it would be ‘well that it should be so, if, like the boar of the forest, which delves up the flower to get at the root, we had no instincts beyond those of self-sustenance. But, as we have the immortal power of imagination, we are bound to provide nutriment for that celestial part of us, not less than for that which we hold in common with the brutes.

   • 1832, Perkins School for the Blind, Annual Report‎^[2], Charles B. Slack, page 15:

     This and other institutions have considered these questions anxiously and ceaselessly. They have endeavored to shape their plans of education and training for the future good, and, as far as possible, to secure the self-sustenance of their pupils.

   • 1842, George Combe, Moral Philosophy‎^[3], W. H. Colyer, page 168:

     The propensities have all reference to self-sustenance, self-gratification, or self-aggrandizement, and do not give rise to a single feeling of disinterested love or regard for the happiness of other beings. Even the domestic affections, wThen acting independently of the moral sentiments, prompt us to seek only a selfish gratification, without regard to the welfare of the beings who afford it.

   • 1849, The American Journal of the Medical Sciences‎^[4], Charles B. Slack, page 440:

     The enormous expense of supporting fourteen hundred persons — about one-five-hundredth part of the whole population of this commonwealth — in a state of idiocy : and 2d, the motives of humanity, to give, if possible, to these wretched creatures some idea of responsible life, some means and power of self-sustenance, and some self-respect.

   • 1850, Henry Mills Alden, Harper's new monthly magazine‎^[5], Harper & Brothers, page 640:

     When Sir Peregrine asked her whether he should seat her on the sofa, she slowly picked herself up, and, with her head still crouching toward the ground, placed herself where she before had been sitting. He had been afraid that she would have fainted, but she was not one of those women whose nature easily admits of such relief as that. Though she was always pale in color and frail-looking, there was within her a great power of self-sustenance. She was a woman who with a good cause might have dared any thing.