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More "Faculty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... will is not without influence on the variations of the face. If violent emotions have the power to yellow the white tones of persons of bilious and melancholy temperament, and to green lymphatic faces, shall we not grant to desire, hope, and joy, the faculty of clearing the skin, giving brilliancy to the eye, and brightening the glow of beauty with a light as jocund as that of a lovely morning? The celebrated faintness of the princess had taken on a ripeness which now made her seem more august. At this moment of her ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... originated, man, as man, no matter how low in the scale of humanity, has never yet been found destitute of the power of improvement. Everywhere and at all times he has made some use of this power. The varying degrees in which the faculty is used cannot be ascribed to differences in original capacity. These are evidently connected with social development. A survey of history shows diversities in improvement, halts, and retrogression; and the law ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... learned Chinese: Tippoo Sultaun declared that there were not in all Europe ten thousand men: the Sklavonic hordes, it is said, so entitled themselves from a word in their jargon, which signifies "to speak;" the ruffians imagining that they had a monopoly of this agreeable faculty, and that all other ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Brett again interviewed the hall-porter and returned to the sitting-room, where he disposed himself for a nap on the sofa. Like all men who possess the faculty of concentrated thought, he also cultivated the power of dismissing a perplexing problem from his mind until it became necessary to consider it afresh in ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... to me now; and so it might to any one; but, at the time, it worked me up to a fever of indignity. To make a mad dog of Lorna, to compare all my imaginings (which were strange, I do assure you—the faculty not being apt to work), to count the raising of my soul no more than hydrophobia! All this acted on me so, that I gave John Fry the soundest threshing that ever a sheaf of good corn deserved, or a bundle of tares was blessed with. Afterwards he ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... the series of charming volumes on plant-life, Darwin had found compensation in making patient and persevering experiment take the place of enterprising and exact observation; and there was one direction in which he could indulge the "old love" by employment of the new faculty. ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... and universal truths owe their origin, not to experience (except as occasion of their development,) and not, consequently, to the ordinary process of induction, but flow from higher sources—flow immediately from some supreme faculty to which the name of reason has by some been exclusively appropriated, in order to distinguish it from the understanding, the faculty judging according to sense. We will pause a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... happy faculty of expressing yourself, Mrs. Gallilee. But, if I had been in your place, I should have said to the best of my poor ability exactly what you have said now." She bent her head with a graceful gesture of respect, ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... between its chiefs above and its clansmen below, left no place for a free yeomanry. I note this same thing in the Valley, with the Johnsons and the Butlers. So far as Sir William is concerned, the quality I speak of has been of service to the Colony, for he has used his fondness and faculty for attracting retainers and domineering over subordinates to public advantage. But then he is an exceptional and note-worthy man—one among ten thousand. But his son Sir John, and his son-in-law Guy Johnson, and the Butlers, father and son, and now ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... true. Nancy had a most unfortunate faculty for breaking glass, china, and any other fragile thing she came near. She ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... there's anything I can do to help you. We're acquainted with two or three of your engineering faculty at the Office. They write in about various things. Do you ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... of preventing disease, is injurious. It is sufficient, that the bowels be kept in a natural and healthy state; for all cathartics, even the mildest, have a tendency to nauseate the stomach, create debility, and weaken the digestive faculty. A reduction of tone in the system, which is always advantageous, will be more safely effected by using somewhat less than usual of animal food, and of spirituous, strong vinous, or fermented liquors. The robust will derive benefit from ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... captain's as he continued. "I have been making a fool of myself, Captain. Got into some mischief with a crowd of fellows at school. Of course, I got caught and had to bear the whole blame for the silly joke we had played. The faculty has suspended me for a term. I would have got off with only a reprimand if I would have told the names of the other fellows, but I couldn't ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... Langley tried to argue him out of his fears. The more Whitson saw of Ghamba, the more he disliked and distrusted him and his teeth. The instinct which detects danger in the absence of any apparent evidence of its existence is a faculty developed in some men by an adventurous life. This faculty Whitson ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... and plough up your skin so as to make you quickly loose your hold. With his head, a powerful ploughshare, the Beetle might very easily push the ring off its short support. He is not able to do so, because he does not think of it; he does not think of it, because he is devoid of the faculty attributed to him, in order to support their theories, by the dangerous ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... restless, he had suddenly hardened and stiffened to a repressed, tense calm; speechless, almost rigid in his chair. Excitable under even ordinary circumstances, his every faculty was now keyed to its highest pitch. The nervous strain upon him was like the stretching and tightening of harp-strings, too taut to quiver. The color left his face, and the moisture fled his lips. His projected article, his promise to Blix, all the ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... the materialistic theory of the existence of the mind is utterly false. In an act of perception I distinguish the pen in my hand, and the hand itself, from my mind which perceives them. This distinction is a fact of the faculty of perception—a particular fact of a particular faculty. But the general fact of a general distinction of which this is only a special case, is the distinction of the I and not I, which belongs to the consciousness as the general faculty. He who denies the contrast ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... man is generally able to travel in his astral vehicle wherever he will, and has much more consciousness in the astral world, though he has not often the faculty of bringing into his waking life any memory of what he has seen and done while his physical body was asleep. Sometimes he does remember some incident which he has seen, some experience which he has ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... establish on a firm basis the distinction, so that it shall not be lost sight of or brought into question again. Thus long before Wordsworth wrote, it was obscurely felt by many that in 'imagination' there was more of the earnest, in 'fancy' of the play, of the spirit, that the first was a loftier faculty and power than the second. The tendency of the language was all in this direction. None would for some time back have employed 'fancy' as Milton employs it, [Footnote: Paradise Lost, v. 102-105 5 so too Longinus, ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... the Inquisition; but the power of that formidable tribunal had already notably declined. Charles III. had taken two means calculated to militate against its preponderance, to humble its pride, and deprive it of the faculty of exercising its sanguinary vengeance. In the first place, the penalty of death was prohibited, and it could only impose the punishment of confiscation, imprisonment, and banishment. In the second place, he ordered that one of the judges of each tribunal of the ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... natural; she does not see things from my point of view: I could not expect she should. If I could see from hers, it might be easier for us all; but that is still less to be expected; and it is hard upon her, Frank—very hard," said Gerald, turning round in his old ingenuous way, with that faculty for seeing other people's difficulties which was so strong a point in his character. "She is called upon to make, after all, perhaps, the greater sacrifice of the two; and she does not see any duty in it—the reverse, indeed. ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... up the moral authority of the aggregate over the individual members and fractions. The other officers could doubtless speak well enough to address short encouragements, or give simple explanations, to the soldiers: without this faculty, no man was fit for military command over Greeks. But the oratory of Xenophon was something of a higher order. Whoever will study the discourse pronounced by him at Kotyora will perceive a dexterity in dealing with assembled multitudes—a discriminating ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... not, perhaps could not, make a confidante even of her mother in this matter, but Mrs. Fellowes had a remarkable faculty for striking human averages, and she got near the truth ...
— Bulldog And Butterfly - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... tavern with Fred Beaucock—nay, would have been quite uninfluenced by such a character on any other matter in the world—such fascination lay in the idea of delivering his poor girl from bondage, that it deprived him of the critical faculty. He could not resist the ex-lawyer's ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... delivered.' Ye have here the same warning, look to it, watch well ye that despise it, lest the wrath of God, which the men of Israel by their speedy obedience escaped, descend upon your heads. Ye may say that ye are banished men. 'Tis true: but thereby are ye not stripped of all faculty of rendering service; moreover, your assistance is asked for one who will restore ye to your homes. Ye may say that ye have been robbed of all your goods; yet many of you have still something remaining, and of that little ye should contribute, each ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... that those historic actors who had not attained unto a position of futurity in respect to their task, but whose task sustained to them that relative place instead, were obliged to do the best they could with whatever quantum of the latter faculty they might have possessed and toward the manful achievement of their duty. And this is what Congress did at this juncture. In view of the long, bitter and disastrous strife between the two sets of industrial ideas and interests in the republic, of the complex and earthquake circumstances and ...
— Modern Industrialism and the Negroes of the United States - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 12 • Archibald H. Grimke
... there has been no religious epoch, of any importance, in man's history. English orthodoxy was at last vitally attacked; and it began to show a new life, and express itself in a new language. These were times when men on all sides felt that stretching and straining of faculty which ushers in the days of spiritual or poetic creation; times when the most confident Modernist of them all knew well that he, no more than any one else, could make any guess worth having ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and tumbling about, such as is suitable to and inevitable with the seal's want of shape. He can enjoy the sound of bagpipes, which is a privilege accorded to few. Further, he can shut his ears when he has had enough, which is a faculty man may envy him. His wife, too, always has a first-rate sealskin jacket, made in one piece, and he hasn't to pay for it. He can always run down to the seaside when so disposed, although the run is a waddle and a flounder; and if he has no tail to speak of—well, he can't ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... through his pain and weakness. But, as before, his every faculty was on guard. A born and trained expert in reading human nature, he felt this giant somehow suspected him and was trying to trap him in an inaccuracy. Wherefore, he fenced, verbally, calmly confident he could outpoint his ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... somewhat as a surprise, is a Yorkshire landowner, and a son of the peer so well known both in literary and social circles as Richard Monckton Milnes, whose poems and prose writings alike will long keep his memory alive. This literary faculty has descended to the present peer, his recent volume of poems having been received by the best critics as bearing evidence of a true poetic gift. Lord Houghton, who served as a Lord-in-Waiting in Mr. Gladstone's Government of 1886, is a rich man ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the appropriate position forward, few would be the statutes left in Tables XI-XII. It is merely coincidental that some of the statutes among the Supplementary Laws should concern topics already treated, for from the Romans we must not remove the faculty ...
— The Twelve Tables • Anonymous
... three stories. But this could not go on indefinitely, and for more than a week now conversation between the two had been a trying matter. For Mr. Musselwhite to sustain a dialogue on such topics as Barbara had made her own was impossible, and he had no faculty even for the commonest kind of impersonal talk. He devoted himself to his dinner in amiable silence, enjoying the consciousness that nearly an hour of occupation was before him, and that bed-time ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... lingering girlhood and hems table linen with more resignation. The unattached girl has a strange interest in creams and hair tonics, and usually betakes herself to the cloister of the university for special courses, since azure hosiery does not detract from woman's charm in the eyes of the faculty. ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... additional elements over and above sensations plus an unknowable cause—additional elements added by the mind itself, and therefore still only relative, but constituting the original furniture of the mind itself—inherent laws, partly of our sensitive, partly of our intellectual faculty. It is on this latter point that Hartley and those going along with him diverge. Admitting the same additional elements, these philosophers do not ascribe to the mind any innate forms to account for them, but hold ...
— Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' • George Grote
... one of Dr. John Pitzer's of St. Louis, dean of the faculty of the Missouri Medical College. The above amount would cost about ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... ways, and not a few, a model private secretary for a busy statesman. He was a gentleman by birth, bringing-up, appearance, and manners; he was very quick, adroit and clever; he had a wonderful memory, a remarkable faculty for keeping documents and ideas in order; he could speak French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and conduct a correspondence in these languages. He knew the political and other gossip of most or all of the European capitals, and of Washington and Cairo just as well. ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... in the city: McKinley High, on the east side, and Dwight Eisenhower High, on the west. A few blocks from McKinley was the Tulip Tavern, where the Eisenhower teachers came in the late afternoons; the McKinley faculty crossed town to do their after-school drinking on the west side. When Benson entered the Tulip Tavern, on a warm September afternoon, he found Bill Myers, the school psychologist, at one of the tables, ...
— Hunter Patrol • Henry Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... entertain strong hopes, that this Illustrious Virtuoso and Restless Inquirer into Nature's Secrets will not stop here, but go on and prosper in the Disquisition or the other principal Colours, Green, Red, and Yellow. The Reasoning faculty set once afloat, will be carried on, and that with ease, especially, when the productions thereof meet, as they do here, with so greedy an Entertainment at home and abroad. I am confident, that the ROYAL ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... study, with his hands laced in his thick, dark hair. He was thinking - Jack claimed the happy faculty of being able to think of one thing at a time, and to ...
— The Motor Girls on a Tour • Margaret Penrose
... esteem our Teuton ancestors had for their scalds, or polishers of language, when poetry and music were linked together by the voice and harp of minstrelsy, and when the divine right to fill the office of bard meant the divine faculty to invent a few heroic stanzas to ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... the world and certainly not the least intelligent. We have behind us a continuity of national existence lacking in other nations in this quarter of the globe. In our modern epoch we have assimilated French culture with indisputable success, and have given in every field proof of a great faculty of adaptability and progress. We can become the most important second-class power in Europe the day after the war stops; in fifty years, when our population will have passed twenty-five millions, a great power. We shall be a nation content ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... veiled mockery in his composed tones, irreproachably courteous though they were, and Diana coloured hotly. Somehow, this man possessed the faculty of making her feel awkward and self-conscious and horribly young; he himself was so essentially of the polished type of cosmopolitan that beside him she felt herself to be as raw and crude as any bread-and-butter miss fresh from the schoolroom. Moreover, she had an inward ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... must we do by our affections. If the heart will not lay aside those vicious motions, and the fantasy those fond imaginations, we have another form of government to enforce and refrain our outward members, that they be not led by our passions." If appetite will not obey, let the moving faculty overrule her, let her resist and compel her to do otherwise. In an ague the appetite would drink; sore eyes that itch would be rubbed; but reason saith no, and therefore the moving faculty will not do it. Our fantasy would intrude a thousand fears, suspicions, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... can mend your things and look after Mis Morgeson. Your mother is not the woman she was, and you and Veronica haven't a mite of faculty. What you are all coming to is ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... founder of this association, bequeathed to it a sum of money, to purchase annually, some foreign medical works. This collection is composed of original memoirs, extracts, and announcements of other works, and a review of the course of the faculty of medicine. It is specially consecrated to the practical department of the art—(three numbers per ann. of 70, to 100 pages each.) The 2nd collection, is the Nye Hygaea, the editor of which, (M. OTTO,) embraces in his plan, all the medical sciences. This journal, ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... cup of material enjoyment—for wants not governed by the intellect and the heart are infinite in number, and the gratification of one gives birth to another—they submit to the law of sacrifice, and give play to the noblest faculty with which the Creator has endowed us, moral empire ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... capable of feeling and knowing the immense beauty and value of the gift which God hath bestowed upon me. Sure, love vincit omnia; is immeasurably above all ambition, more precious than wealth, more noble than name. He knows not life who knows not that: he hath not felt the highest faculty of the soul who hath not enjoyed it. In the name of my wife I write the completion of hope, and the summit of happiness. To have such a love is the one blessing, in comparison of which all earthly joy is of no value; and to think of her, is to ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... in two Roman legends collected by Miss Busk. In the first, the innkeeper asks first for the faculty of always winning at cards; and second, that any one who climbs his fig-tree must stay there. When Death comes the host asks her (Death is feminine in Italian) to climb the tree and pick him a few figs. When once up the tree, the host refuses to let her down until she promises him ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... thing is the oil and lamp-black, I should spread them thick upon a rag, and clap it on directly.—That would make a very devil of it, replied Yorick.—And besides, added Eugenius, it would not answer the intention, which is the extreme neatness and elegance of the prescription, which the Faculty hold to be half in half;—for consider, if the type is a very small one (which it should be) the sanative particles, which come into contact in this form, have the advantage of being spread so infinitely thin, and with such a mathematical equality ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... inexhaustible, even though one visit it annually for a lifetime. The business man invests in stocks and bonds. A panic may wipe out their values and ruin follow in a night-time. But a visit to the Grand Canyon is an investment that yields interest manifold and compounded, as long as the faculty of memory remains. Better still, there is no middleman in the deal. The ticker does not reel off the changing values. You yourself are the banker, and the joys of beholding ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... the sphere of better business, the housekeeping faculty of woman is an important asset, since a good system of farm accounts is one of the most valuable aids to successful farming. But it is, of course, in the third part of the programme,—better living,—that woman's greatest opportunity lies. The woman ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... abused Charles Francis for his judgment. Naturally they never attempted to assign values to either; that was the children's affair; but the traits were real. Charles Francis Adams was singular for mental poise — absence of self-assertion or self-consciousness — the faculty of standing apart without seeming aware that he was alone — a balance of mind and temper that neither challenged nor avoided notice, nor admitted question of superiority or inferiority, of jealousy, of personal motives, from any source, even under ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... We often read that, as if it were a kind of apology for a sentimental and useless gift, because it was the best that she could bestow. I do not hear that tone in the words at all. I hear, rather, this, that duty is settled by faculty, and that nobody else has any business to interfere with that which a Christian soul, all aflame with the love of God, finds to be the spontaneous and natural expression of its devotion to the Master. The words are the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... which, like alcohol, may be reduced to the same principle in all, though it assumes such varied qualities from the mode in which it is exerted or combined. Of this power of intellect, Dryden seems to have possessed almost an exuberant share, combined, as usual, with the faculty of correcting his own conceptions, by observing human nature, the practical and experimental philosophy as well of poetry as of ethics or physics. The early habits of Dryden's education and poetical studies gave his researches somewhat too much of a metaphysical character; ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... death has to be taken out of Christianity before they will believe it. It comes, too, from the morally cowardly and the worldly-minded, who desire a religion without the cross. If Christianity were only a creed to believe, or a worship in whose celebration the aesthetic faculty might take delight, or a private path by which a man might pilgrim to heaven unnoticed, they would be delighted to believe it; but, because it means confessing Christ and bearing His reproach, mingling with His despised people and supporting His cause, they will have ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... backing. The number of young firms whom they had started and made, and whose profit also afterward profited them, was more than had ever been counted. They were never deceived, for they had an unerring faculty for knowing their own kind. No firm was keener. Straight on the nail themselves, they exacted the same quality in others. What they traded in needed no other guaranty than ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... reminded himself thankfully that if necessary he could hire a piano and send it in. Then, looking up, he met Pat's eyes fixed upon him with a quizzical smile. Pat showed at times an uncomfortable faculty for, reading his friends' thoughts, and Stephen realised that it was in force at this minute, and was thankful that at least it did not find vent in words. Pixie's happy complacence about her own powers was so far removed from ordinary conceit that ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... the chancel aisles unused for seats and partially blocked up; the high square pews, rising in tiers westwards, roomy enough for undisturbed slumber; above all, the heavy galleries, with pews, made by faculty private property; all these arrangements so curtailed the accommodation, that the congregation, at its best, could be little more than half what it has been in recent years; while the tout ensemble, not omitting the flat whitewashed ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... was Sam's closest friend, McCloud. It's good to see him getting the recognition he deserves, isn't it? Do you know, I send him an annual every year? Yes, sir! And one year I had the whole blooming faculty out here on a fossil expedition; but, by Heaven, McCloud, some of them looked more like megatheriums than what they dug ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... were in high spirits. The duke, who had handled his fowling piece with more than usual skill, was in the best of humors; the duchess chatted gaily with the ladies, and the head forester fairly beamed with pleasure, for the prince had congratulated him warmly upon his faculty for doing perfectly all he undertook. Frau von Wallmoden, who kept near the duchess, was the object of much attention; she was unquestionably the most beautiful woman there; the others needed for the most ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... she takes it from the tea leaves or from an Egyptian dream book or from her own trance fancies, but I do know that the prophecies of this fraud have deeply influenced some of their lives and shaped the faculty of the high school. What does this mean? Mature educators to whose training society has devoted its fullest effort and who are chosen to bring to the youth the message of earnest thought and solid knowledge, ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... paragraph of "An Outcast" and the first of The Lagoon there has been no change of pen, figuratively speaking. It happens also to be literally true. It was the same pen: a common steel pen. Having been charged with a certain lack of emotional faculty I am glad to be able to say that on one occasion at least I did give way to a sentimental impulse. I thought the pen had been a good pen and that it had done enough for me, and so, with the idea of keeping it for a sort of memento ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... diminish as the years passed. After 1764, relieved of the pressure of life's anxieties and daily nourishing his mind on premises and conclusions reasonably abstracted from the relative and the conditioned circumstance, he acquired in a high degree the faculty of identifying reality with propositions about it; so that, for example, Liberty seemed threatened if improperly defined, and a false inference from an axiom of politics appeared the same as evil intent to take away a people's rights. Thus it was that ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... the Doctor, "that collectively you have a wonderful faculty for emerging with eclat from every adventure; but I can't say as much for ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... of God all round us, able to sing, to draw, to paint, to hammer and build, to sail, to ride horses, to run, to leap; having for our splendid inheritance love in youth and memory in old age, and we are to take one miserable little faculty, our one-legged, knock-kneed, gimcrack, purblind, rough-skinned, underfed, and perpetually irritated and grumpy intellect, or analytical curiosity rather (a diseased appetite), and let it swell till it eats up every other ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... the moment that I had left my house and run down the gallery, there it was, all full-formed and mature. As to how it was to be done I had no idea at all; yet that it would be done I had no doubt. On the other side, however, every faculty of observation that I had, was alert and tight-stretched. I remember the very pattern of the carpet I walked on; the pictures on the walls; and the carving on the presses. Above all I remember the little door in the corner of the chamber—the third; ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... my Lord Castlemallard, a curious old tract of the learned Van Helmont, in which he says, as near as I can remember his words, that magnetism is a magical faculty, which lieth dormant in us by the opiate of primitive sin, and, therefore, stands in need of an excitator, which excitator may be either good or evil; but is more frequently Satan himself, by reason of some previous oppignoration or compact with witches. The power, indeed, is in the witch, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... funeral rites which King Philip arranged in Brussels during the latter part of December in honour of his dead father was the procession which afforded the authorities of the Brabant capital an opportunity to display the inventive faculty, the love of splendour, the learning, and the wit which, as members of flourishing literary societies, they constantly exercised. In the pageant was a ship with black sails, at whose keel, mast, and helm stood Hope with her anchor, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... appreciation of the beauty and sublimity of the universe, an avenue of light; while Quakerism, according to the doctrines of Fox and his early followers, is merely a form of mysticism nearly allied to the 'ecstasy' of Plotinus. The Quaker silences his reason, his every faculty, and in utter passivity waits for the infusion of divine light into his mind; the mystic of Alexandria, as far as possible, divests his intellect of all personality, and becomes absorbed in the Infinite intelligence from ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... medical community of Paris is all agog by the arrival of the celebrated American doctor, Miss Blackwell. She has quite bewildered the learned faculty by her diploma, all in due form, authorizing her to dose and bleed and amputate with the best of them. Some of them think Miss Blackwell must be a socialist of the most rabid class, and that her undertaking is the entering wedge to ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... idea, though I think it is a mistake. It would be an irreparable loss to science if they should get away. The old one is tamer than it was, and can laugh and talk like the parrot, having learned this, no doubt, from being with the parrot so much, and having the imitative faculty in a highly developed degree. I shall be astonished if it turns out to be a new kind of parrot, and yet I ought not to be astonished, for it has already been everything else it could think of, since those first days when it was a fish. The new one is ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in its own works, will pass through life perfectly happy in the feeling that in reaching mediocrity it has achieved success. Not only wanting talent to produce better works, he lacked also the faculty of perceiving where his own were faulty, and having a great aptitude for copying the works of others, he felt himself as great as the original artists. Michelangelo was always amused with his naive self-conceit, and kept up a friendship with him for ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... crime to love one's country better than anything else on earth, to exert every faculty of mind and body, to sacrifice one's time and property, to risk liberty and life to serve her, then I am guilty— to love liberty and freedom of conscience, to hate tyranny and oppression, then I am indeed a criminal," he answered in an unshaken ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... rate, within the week all danger was past and Coquenil observed uneasily that, along with her strength and gay humor, his mother was rapidly recovering her faculty of asking embarrassing questions and of understanding things that had not been told her. In the matter of keen intuitions it was like ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... of feelings that Maltravers listened: at one moment he proudly congratulated himself on having quitted a career where such opinions seemed so well to prosper: at another, his better and juster sentiments awoke the long-dormant combative faculty, and he almost longed for the turbulent but sublime arena, in which truths are ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book IV • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... hitherto lain rather in the direction of philosophy and letters;" and on Odo's prompt admission of ignorance, he courteously continued: "The physical sciences seem, indeed, less likely to appeal to the imaginative and poetical faculty in man, and, on the other hand, religion has appeared to prohibit their too close investigation; yet I question if any thoughtful mind can enter on the study of these curious phenomena without feeling, as it were, an affinity between such investigations and the most ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... West, the awkward freedman or woman from the South, or the well-born student whose poverty made this college a possibility when other doors were barred. There still was prejudice, ridicule, neglect in high places, and prophecies of failure to contend against; but the Faculty was composed of cheerful, hopeful men and women who had seen greater reforms spring from smaller roots, and after stormy seasons blossom beautifully, to add prosperity and honour to the nation. So they worked on steadily and bided their time, full of increasing faith in their attempt as ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... British sister, nor a more profound thinker; but her mind is indisputably more agile and elastic. In fact, a slow-going Britisher has to go through a regular course of training before he can follow the rapid transitions of her train of associations. She has the happiest faculty in getting at another's point of view and in putting herself in his place. Her imagination is more likely to be over-active than too sluggish. One of the most popular classes of the "Society for ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... She saw once more the face of which she had caught a glimpse in the amphitheatre, the crucified face, the tortured face to which the blood and agony of a heart had mounted together. She saw it once more with the faculty which the second sight of memory separates from its surroundings. And that face, as it became clearer to her, caused her less terror. It appeared to her, divesting itself, as it were, of its fear-inspiring, horrifying qualities. Suffering alone remained, but it was the suffering of expiation, ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... the idea of 'King of Shadows', with a reality fantastically sober: the poems are steeped in moonlight. In Drayton all is clear day, or the most unromantic of nights; though everything is charming, there is no attempt at idealization, little of the higher faculty of imagination; but great realism, and much play of fancy. Herrick's verses were written by Cobweb and Moth together, Drayton's by Puck. Granting, however, the initial deficiency in subtlety of charm, the whole poem is inimitably graceful and piquant. The gay humour, ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... and lucid reasoner. With wonderful flashes of sure intuition or happy anticipation, his mind was deficient in the powers which deal with the deeper problems of thought, just as it was deficient in the mathematical faculty. The subtlety, the intuition, the penetration, the severe precision, even the force of imagination, which make a man a great thinker on any abstract subject were not his; the interest of questions which had interested metaphysicians had no ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... our government lags behind our Allies in mobilizing woman's power of initiative and her organizing faculty. The Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense, appointed soon after the outbreak of war, still has no administrative power. As one member of the Committee says, "We are not allowed to do anything without the consent of the Council ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... fond of children, and she held out her hand to the little girl, who seemed to have a most wonderful faculty for discriminating between friends and enemies, and who went to her readily, and leaning against her arm, looked curiously at the group of children—at Tom, and Jack, and Maude, the latter of whom wished to go to her, but was restrained ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... furnished by Miss Husted. If she furnished the professor with food for the body, she also furnished him with food for the mind, for the dear good lady talked, and talked, and talked. Fortunately Von Barwig was a good listener; that is, he had the faculty of thinking of something else than what was being said. He had always been the repository for all her troubles, but until to-day she had never gone so far as to confess to him the reasons why she had never married, and would never ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... destroyed; and as light scarcely ever visited him, and when it did, only in doubtful and invisible glimmerings, the prevailing darkness, both physical and mental, that surrounded him, prevented him from being sensible of the existence of that precious faculty, of which he imagined himself bereft. Perhaps thou wilt ask my reason for inflicting upon him so strange a deception?—Simply it was, that being by it conceived incapable of reigning, his memory might pass out of the minds of the public, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... river threw the "lamp-posts." The long and horrible shells arrived with a noise that was indescribable. A thousand shrieking rockets, perhaps, with at the end an explosion and a rain of fragments like rocks from Vesuvius. They had a peculiar faculty for getting on the nerves. The men watched their coming with something like shrinking, with raised arms and narrowed eyes. "Look out for the lamp-post—look out ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... applied to military movements, but it has a broader meaning than this; it embodies the idea of a peculiar skill or faculty—a nice perception or discernment which is characterized by adroit planning or management, artfully directed in politics or ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... noted by any who make their religion lugubrious, and their Sunday the eclipse of the week. And observe further, that if Milton does not ryme, it is because his faculty of Song was concerning Loss, chiefly; and he has little more than faculty of Croak, concerning Gain; while Dante, though modern readers never go further with him than into the Pit, is stayed only by Casella in the ascent to the Rose of Heaven. So, Gibbon can write in ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... fellow-creature's head with battle-axes. The seven incorporated trades, with their million guild-brethren, with their hammers, their shuttles, and tools, what an army,—fit to conquer that land of England, as we say, and hold it conquered! Nay, strangest of all, the English people had acquired the faculty and habit of thinking,—even of believing; individual conscience had unfolded itself among them;—Conscience, and Intelligence its handmaid. [1] Ideas of innumerable kinds were circulating among these men; witness one Shakspeare, a wool-comber, poacher or whatever else, at ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... I was considerably astonished at him, and not a little indignant. The 'faculty' of the Peppersville Academy were invited to a small party at the house of one of its wealthiest patrons, who lived some miles out ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Public Attorney finds that he has still said too much. When I have shown him some men who, in great philosophical works, have delighted in descriptions of these things, and when in the light of this fact I have shown that this man, who possesses the descriptive faculty to so high a degree and who, far from using it, desists and abstains from it, I shall indeed have the right to ask why ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... aid to her husband, in spite of an easy-going nature, cannot be doubted. She possessed the faculty of telling interesting stories and novelettes, and with this apparently inexhaustible fund of invention she would amuse him between his periods of work. The description that we have of the composition of the great ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... of the men, and the bodies of the women, is not repugnant to the supposition that they were large apes, baboons, or orang-outangs, common to this part of Africa. At all events, the voyagers do not say that they flayed a people having the faculty of speech. ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.04.06 • Various
... of dementia, idiocy, and dotage, are all, apart from their morbid and organic conditions, derived from the same source which produces myths, dreams, and normal hallucinations; the objective entification of images is due to the innate faculty of the perception, which leads to the immediate personification of any given phenomenon. We have shown that, given a sensation, there naturally arises the implicit notion of a subject and a cause, and this natural impulse is further developed by the influence of heredity; ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... pursuits, with the empty headed, ill informed youth, fresh from Harrow or Westminster. This case offered no exception to the rule; for though there were few men possessed of more assimilating powers than O'Flaherty, yet certainly his companion did put the faculty to the test, for any thing more unlike him, there never existed. Tom all good humour and high spirits—making the best of every thing—never non-plussed—never taken aback—perfectly at home, whether flirting ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... and hatefully reserved. Fate had already placed me the eldest by three years of a large family. Add to the eminence thus attained intentions which varied from hour to hour, a will so little in accordance with desire that I had rather give up a cherished plan than fight for it, and a secretive faculty equalled only by the magpie, and you will not wonder when I affirm that I lived alone in a household of a dozen friendly persons. As a set-off and consolation to myself I had very strongly the power ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... they will ascend hundreds of yards, attracted by the odor of the fish that are swimming on the surface. This prodigious faculty renders useless, in part, the colors in which the timid species clothe themselves in order to confound themselves with lights or shadows. The greatest flesh-eaters see badly, but they scrape the bottom with a divining touch and scent ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... with awe. The face and voice of the beautiful girl who leaned so eagerly toward me as she tried to explain the meaning of some word or correct my pronunciation of another quite entirely occupied my every faculty of perception. The firelight shone upon her animated features and sparkling eyes; it accentuated the graceful motions of her gesturing arms and hands; it sparkled from her white teeth and from her golden ornaments, and glistened on the smooth firmness of her ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and with his dramatic faculty, his genuine sympathy with all sorts and conditions of men, his happy gift of humour, and his trained observation, Dr. Hedin gives us a welcome and impressive picture of the present condition of things in a country teeming with ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... the (spiritual) soul is the third part (i.e., the fifth of the septenary group), the baodhas. Or in other words, the (spiritual) soul has with it, or in it, the true consciousness by which it can view the experiences of its physical career. So this consciousness, this power or faculty which brings the recollection, is always with, in other words, is a part and parcel of, the soul itself; hence, its not mixing with any other part, and hence its existence after ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... window and teaches nice little boys and girls to float through the air. I was surprised that anyone should be so singularly ignorant of child-nature as to hold that children really believe these things. Children have a wonderful and special faculty of "make-believe," which is not the same as "belief." All the time when a child is indulging in "make-believe" (a sort of willing self-illusion or waking dream) its real, though tender, reasoning-power is merely "suspended," and is not offended or outraged. ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... years ago (1808) Johan Gottlieb Fichte, in his ever-memorable Speeches to the German Nation, proclaimed the German people to be the only people in Europe which had preserved its primitive genuineness (urspruengliche Echtheit), and therefore its spiritual creative faculty, and found the transition from his previous cosmopolitan way of thinking to flaming national enthusiasm, in the idea that this people was called to be the upholder of world-Kultur, and that it was therefore its duty to humanity to look to its own preservation.—PROF O. v. GIERKE, ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... chief minister de facto of a country; she was finance minister of a queen, she was herself queen; she was Master of the Ceremonies to a court; she was purveyor of amusements to a great prince; yet she had lost the faculty to understand that this prince agonised because she was too occupied to give him tenderness. Passion she gave him, and brilliant gaiety; she tyrannised, flattered, charmed, cajoled him, what more could he desire? Only, he dreamed of the impossible; he dreamed of ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... of South Carolina, Queen st.—The Faculty inform their professional brethren, and the public that they have established a Surgery, at the Old College, Queen street, FOR THE TREATMENT OF NEGROES, which will continue in operation, during the session of the College, say from first November, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... that the Correggiosity of Correggio, that which sharply distinguished him from all previous artists, was the faculty of painting a purely voluptuous dream of beautiful beings in perpetual movement, beneath the laughter of morning light, in a world of never-failing April hues. When he attempts to depart from the fairyland of which he was the Prospero, and to match himself with the masters of sublime thought or ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Montmorency—of whom, in the words of Medora Trevilian it may be said, that he was "only an excellent person"—through respectable savants like Sismondi and Dumont, down to a very low level of toady and tuft-hunter. It is rather surprising that with such models and with no supreme creative faculty she should have been able to draw such creditable walking gentlemen as the Frenchman Erfeuil, the Englishman Edgermond, and the Italian Castel-Forte; and should not have produced a worse hero than Nelvil. For Nelvil, whatever faults he may have, and contemptible as his vacillating refusal ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... Nut Growers' Association assembled does hereby express its sincere thanks to the President and Faculty of Cornell University for placing at its disposal the facilities for holding its convention ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association
... talent which is Bryan's chief defect—the scientific habit of holding facts in solution. His mind is lucid and flexible, and he has the faculty of taking advice quickly, of stating something he has borrowed with more ease and subtlety than the specialist from whom he got it. Woodrow Wilson's is an elegant and highly refined intellect, nicely balanced and capable of fine ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... to perfection, the faculty of condensing water on its leaves, much more so than Salsolaceae; it presents an obvious affinity to Rutaceae, capsula radiata 5-valvis, loculicida: valvis linea centrali notatis, septis solutis imo apice exceptis. Seminibus basi locul. affixis, apice ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... that their common denominator, insofar as personal success and ease of participation are concerned, is the ability to think quickly and accurately on one's feet; the one best school for the sharpening of this faculty is the lecture platform. Keenness ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... have no sensation, God has created a useless thing; now according to your own confession God does nothing in vain; He therefore did not create so many organs of sensation, merely for them to be uninformed with this faculty; consequently beasts are not mere machines. Beasts, according to your assertion, cannot be animated with a spiritual soul; you will, therefore, in spite of yourself, be reduced to this only assertion, viz., that God has endued the organs of beasts, who are mere matter, ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... the other boys of his age got theirs at the spring and fall sales of the Golden Eagle Clothing Store. It was always nip and tuck between his semester standings and his track team and football possibilities. The faculty refused to allow flunkers to take ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... here especially that we are presented with the triumphs of civilisation. How immeasurable is the distance between the voice of the clown, who never thought of the power that dwells in this faculty, who delivers himself in a rude, discordant and unmodulated accent, and is accustomed to confer with his fellow at the distance of two fields, and the man who understands his instrument as Handel understood the organ, and who, whether he thinks of it or no, sways those that hear him as implicitly ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... undervalue the good I may do to my poor sheep—they're not an intellectual flock—in trying to lead them in the ways of spiritual modesty and unconsciousness. How do we know but they profit more by my preaching than the faculty would? Perhaps our university friends are spiritually unconscious enough ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... fall came, he was going home "next spring," and when the spring came, President Andrew Johnson was at loggerheads with the Senate, and found it best to keep things unchanged. After the usual manner of public servants who had acquired the habit of office and lost the faculty of will, the members of the Legation in London continued the daily routine of English society, which, after becoming a habit, threatened to become a vice. Had Henry Adams shared a single taste with the young Englishmen of his time, he ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... the echo of these lines still in his ear, when he described imagination as 'that noble faculty whereby man is able to live in the past and in the future, in the distant and in the unreal.' Essays, ed. ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... use of language; as I trust that none that has ever learned to talk, and is unprejudiced, will deny: then it will follow that in propriety of speech neither liberty, nor its contrary, can properly be ascribed to any being or thing but that which has such a faculty, power or property as is called will. For that which is possest of no such thing as will, can not have any power or opportunity of doing according to its will, nor be necessitated to act contrary ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... and hydra-headed mind-healing is naturally glared at by the pulpit, ostracized by the medical faculty, and scorned by people of common sense. To aver that disease is normal, a God-bestowed and stubborn reality, but that you can heal it, leaves you to work against that which is natural and a law of being. It is scientific to ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... material enjoyment—for wants not governed by the intellect and the heart are infinite in number, and the gratification of one gives birth to another—they submit to the law of sacrifice, and give play to the noblest faculty with which the Creator has endowed us, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... stated, when speaking of the nightingale, that birds in which the singing faculty is highly developed, sometimes make the mistake of bursting into song when anxious or distressed or in pain, but that this is not the case with the mocking-birds. Some species of these brilliant songsters of the ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... for decoration, was absolutely desperate; coarse leather being exchanged for fine, all was done that could be done; and the wit of man was able to devise no further improvement. Hence it happened, that the whole power of the inventive faculty was accumulated upon the fastenings, as the only subject that remained. These were infinitely varied. Belts of bright yellow, of purple, and of crimson, were adopted by ladies of distinction—especially those of Palestine, and it was a trial of art to throw ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... the broad, level glare full on him, looking at Prather, who was in the shadow; and his reflections were mixed with that pity which one feels toward another who is lame or blind or suffers for the want of any sense or faculty that is born to the average human being. For a man of true courage rarely sees a coward as anything but a man ailing; he is grateful for nature's kindness to himself. And the spark of John Wingfield, Knight, skipping generations before it settled on a descendant, had not chosen ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... speculative from the actual reality seemed to diminish as the years passed. After 1764, relieved of the pressure of life's anxieties and daily nourishing his mind on premises and conclusions reasonably abstracted from the relative and the conditioned circumstance, he acquired in a high degree the faculty of identifying reality with propositions about it; so that, for example, Liberty seemed threatened if improperly defined, and a false inference from an axiom of politics appeared the same as evil intent to ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... visions of deliverance and joy. Deliberately as she went by, we might possibly have found means of boarding her, had not our sudden disappointment and the appalling nature of the discovery which accompanied it laid entirely prostrate every active faculty of mind and body. We had seen and felt, but we could neither think nor act, until, alas! too late. How much our intellects had been weakened by this incident may be estimated by the fact, that when the vessel had proceeded so far that we could perceive no ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... "sense." The frequent recurrence of the words is the more awkward because they are curiously ambiguous. "Wit" was beginning to receive its modern meaning; but Pope uses it vaguely as sometimes equivalent to intelligence in general, sometimes to the poetic faculty, and sometimes to the erratic fancy, which the true poet restrains by sense. Pope would have been still more puzzled if asked to define precisely what he meant by the antithesis between nature and art. They are somehow opposed, yet art turns out to be only "nature ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... Genius certainly follows its own devices, and inventive power that has in it any touch of genius may be supposed to do the same. It is, however, a fact of experience that some circumstances favor and increase the actual exercise of this faculty, while other influences deter it. Moreover, what is important is not merely the making of inventions, but the introduction of such of them as are valuable into the productive operations of the world. Some influences ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... recollect that there is another beside you who sees the object obliquely, and then you will not be surprised by his irreverence. What if, in the end, you were conducted to a like point of view? Self-worship, it has been said, is preferable to no trimming of the faculty, but worship does not necessarily cease with the extinction of this of the voraciously carnal. An ideal of country, of Great Britain, is conceivable that will be to the taste of Celt and Saxon in common, to wave ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sheepman's eyes, no least stir fail to apprise his ears. Yet for many minutes he waited in vain, and the delay told him that he had to do with a trained hunter rather than a mere reckless cow-puncher. For somewhere in the rough country before him his enemy lay motionless, every faculty alive to the ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... during these years he mastered the first six Books of Euclid. It would probably be no mere fancy if we were to trace certain definite effects of this discipline upon his mind and character. The faculty which he had before shown of reducing his thought on any subject to the simplest and plainest terms possible, now grew so strong that few men can be compared with him in this. He was gaining, too, from some source, what the ancient geometers would themselves ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... he drew nearer home his steps would quicken, and the more weary and grey the walk, the more he rejoiced as he thought of his hermitage and of the curious difficulties that awaited him there. But when, suddenly and without warning, the faculty disappeared, when his mind seemed a hopeless waste from which nothing could arise, then he became subject to a misery so piteous that the barbarians themselves would have been sorry for him. He had known some foretaste of these bitter and inexpressible ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... mechanical adroitness from the cradle, and every household process was reduced to the very minimum of labor. Every step required in a process was counted, every movement calculated; and she who took ten steps, when one would do, lost her reputation for 'faculty.' Certainly such an early drill was of use in developing the health and the bodily powers, as well as in giving precision to the practical mental faculties. All household economies were arranged with equal niceness in those thoughtful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... armed with a stick and Western was not; and that he fell upon him in the most unexpected manner, in a place where he was wholly out of his element. It is inconceivable that the sturdy squire, with his faculty for distributing "Flicks" and "Dowses,"—who came so valiantly to the aid of Jones in his battle-royal with Blifil and Thwackum,—was likely, under any but very exceptional circumstances, to be dismayed by a cane. It was the ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... honour me by the assumption that such a kingly component is mine. I cannot gainsay thy assertion, but who but my King could touch to life the almost undefined limning of moral faculty that has been my ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... or even against ready submission to it, but against allowing onlookers to be witness of such submission. Even the very young man knows either by experience or hearsay, that women have concentrated upon their faculty for turning this particular weapon to account, all the skill they would have divided among other resources had there been others. Yet the charm is something too delicious even to desire to escape from—the impulse centres in a determination ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... rid of them, she settled down with a blissful sigh. What greater honor could she have than to be chosen as the confidante of the most brilliant pupil ever enrolled at Warwick Hall? At least it was reported that that was the faculty's opinion of her. Dora's roommate, Cornie Dean, had chosen Lloyd Sherman as the shrine of her young affections, and it was from Cornie that Dora had learned the personal history of her literary idol. She knew that ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... the feelings are dwarfed, as the thought may be in certain sterile imaginations. Thus, just as some minds have the faculty of comprehending the connections existing between different things without formal deduction; and as they have the faculty of seizing upon each formula separately, without combining them, or without the power of ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... admired and liked him, "an eight-day clock that must be wound up long before it can strike. He is ready only on reflection: dangerous only at the rebound. He gathers himself up, and strains every nerve and faculty with deliberate aim to some heroic and dazzling achievement of intellect; but he must make a career before he flings himself armed upon the enemy, or he is ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... retained a formidable "BAR." Mr. Attorney-General was a man much superior, in point of intellect and legal knowledge, to Mr. Subtle. His mind was distinguished by its tranquil power. He had a rare and invaluable faculty of arraying before his mind's eye all the facts and bearings of the most intricate case, and contemplating them, as it were, not successively, but simultaneously. His perception was quick as light; and, at ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... of this fact, it is very obvious that there are many imitations, especially those of the cries of particular animals, and of sounds of a high pitch, which cannot be performed pleno ore, by the ordinary modes of utterance, but which require for their production that very faculty, of which Mr. Stewart doubts the existence. Such sounds are necessarily produced by the throat, without requiring the use of the mouth and lips; and the deception actually depends on the difference between such sounds, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 484 - Vol. 17, No. 484, Saturday, April 9, 1831 • Various
... and yet continue his play. By the use of the paraphrastic exercise, however, the pupil will soon be enabled not only to concoct in his own mind what he intends to write, during the time he is writing; but the faculty may, by the same means, be cultivated to such an extent, that he may at last be able to dictate to two clerks at a time, and sometimes perhaps, (as it has been affirmed some have ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... breakfast, being designed to recruit the waste of the body from the night's insensible perspiration; an inquiry is important, whether INDIA TEA, which the Faculty unanimously concur in pronouncing a Species of Slow Poison, that unnerves and wears the substance of the solids, is adequate to such a purpose—If it be not—the inquiry is further necessary to find ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... side of him, as if to seize him, while the first continued to bar the way. He was alarmed, deeply alarmed, but he lost neither his courage nor his presence of mind. Luckily he had already summoned every faculty for instant action, and now he acted. He uttered a sudden shout, and raked the side of his horse ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... ranks and degrees of painters assembled at Rome, Mr. Clive found companions and friends. The cleverest man was not the best artist very often: the ablest artist not the best critic nor the best companion. Many a man could give no account of the faculty within him, but achieved success because he could not help it; and did, in an hour and without effort, that which another could not effect with half a life's labour. There were young sculptors who had never read a line of Homer, who took on themselves nevertheless ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... faculty had much changed her countenance. "I see," she said, thoughtfully, "I had a few intellectual tastes, and liked to think and read, which was supposed to be cleverness; and my wilfulness made me fancy myself superior in ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... be noted, was a person of the simplest composition, a character as cipherable as a sum of two figures. He had a native financial faculty of the finest order, a gift as direct as a beautiful tenor voice, which had enabled him, without the aid of particular strength of will or keenness of ambition, to build up a large fortune while he was still of middle age. He had a genius for happy speculation, ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... is what the multifarious Babel sound did mean to say in clear words; this, more nearly than anything else. Let the most gifted intellect, capable of writing epics, try to write such a Leader for the Morning Newspapers! No intellect but Edward Sterling's can do it. An improvising faculty without parallel in my experience."—In this "improvising faculty," much more nobly developed, as well as in other faculties and qualities with unexpectedly new and improved figure, John Sterling, to the accurate observer, showed himself very ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... the happy faculty which some people have of putting their thoughts on paper, lucidly and clearly, and the letter had not been an easy one to write. She had honestly tried to be frank, but when it came to writing ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... first, but Emerson won him over, then proceeded to pump him dry of information, as he had done with his hostess. He covered the plant like a ferret; he showed such powers of adaptability and assimilation as to excite the girl's wonder; his grasp of detail was instant; his retentive faculty tenacious; he never seemed ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... high degree the royal faculty of recognition. "It is years since I have seen him, but I remember his face well," said he, turning to his minister. "It is the Comte ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... romantic things to tell, for poor Mrs. Kennedy was a shiftless, broken-down woman, who could only 'sozzle round,' as Mrs. Grover said, and rub along with help from any one who would lend a hand. She had lived out, married young, and had no faculty about anything; so when her husband died, and she was left with three little children, it was hard to get on, with no trade, feeble health, and a discouraged mind. She does her best, loves the girls, and works hard at the only thing she can find to ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... Dick rode out of the camp on his good horse, he considered himself equal to any task. He felt an enormous pride because he was chosen for such an important and perilous mission, and he summoned every faculty to meet its hardships ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... feet in length, and of proportional girth. They attack alike wild and domestic beasts, and often human kind. They kill their prey by encircling it in their folds, and squeezing it to death, and afterwards swallow it entire; this they are enabled to do by a faculty of very extraordinary expansion in their muscles, without at the same time impairing the muscular action or power. The bulk of the animals which these serpents are capable of gorging would stagger belief, were the fact not so fully attested as to place it beyond doubt. The state of torpor in which ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... tell you fairly, the task is difficult, for hitherto it has foiled me. I knew but one man who, without flattery, could succeed, and therefore I spared no pains to find out Nicholas Grabman. You have the true ferret's faculty; you, too, are a lawyer, and snuff evidence in every breath. Find us a son,—a legal son,—a son to be shown in a court of law, and the moment he steps into the lands and the Hall of Laughton, you ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... vastly diminished force, in the selection and estimate of public men. The change may be for good or ill, and is partly, perhaps, for both. In that old day, the English settler on these rude shores—having left king, nobles, and all degrees of awful rank behind, while still the faculty and necessity of reverence were strong in him—bestowed it on the white hair and venerable brow of age; on long-tried integrity; on solid wisdom and sad-colored experience; on endowments of that grave and weighty order which gives the idea of permanence, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... brilliant and penetrating rationalism. Diderot alone of this famous trio had in his mind the idea of scientific method; alone showed any feeling for a doctrine, and for large organic and constructive conceptions. He had the rare faculty of true philosophic meditation. Though immeasurably inferior both to Voltaire and Rousseau in gifts of literary expression, he was as far their superior in breadth and reality of artistic principle. He was the originator of a natural, realistic, and ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... superior mental powers of the apes. Hartmann says of them that "their intelligence sets them high above other mammals," and Romanes that they "certainly surpass all other animals in the scope of their rational faculty." It is scarcely necessary here to give extended examples of ape intelligence. Hundreds of instances are on record, many of them showing remarkable powers of reasoning for one of the lower animals. The ape, it ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... know that I think it—of all the errors, all the contradictions, and all the disputes which have arisen among those who impose themselves on their fellow-creatures for great masters, and almost sole proprietors of a gift of God which is common to the whole species. This gift is reason; a faculty, or rather an aggregate of faculties, that is bestowed in different degrees; and not in the highest, certainly, on those who make the highest pretensions to it. Let your satire chastise, and, if it be possible, humble that pride, which is the fruitful parent of their vain curiosity ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... attention. A person must have some tag by which he is identified, or, so far as we are concerned, he becomes one of the innumerable lost articles. There are persons who are like umbrellas, very useful, but always liable to be forgotten. The memory is an infirm faculty, and must be humored. It often clings to mere trifles. The man with the flamboyant necktie whom you saw on the 8.40 train may also be the author of a volume of exquisite lyrics; but you never saw the lyrics, and you did see the necktie. In the scale of being, the necktie may be the least ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... opportunities of observing him in both characters, and knew not which to admire most—that perfect enjoyment which he seemed to possess in the bosom of his family; that peculiar faculty of giving and receiving happiness in the truly happy circle of which he was the centre—or that energy of character which led him with enthusiasm into active service, and which made the good of his country paramount to every other consideration. Perhaps the most weary of all situations, to a ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross
... That wonderful faculty of association, so interwoven with the inmost fibers of even the hardest nature, filled the young man's breast with a prophetic pain as he remembered that, however long or late, the day must come on which the oaken shutters would be closed for awhile, and the ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... different from this. It consists in the deliberate and triumphant separation of the faculties from one another and from the thing they have produced—the dull, bare, pitiless process of passing a living and beautiful thing before one vacant, staring faculty at a time. This faculty, being left in the stupor of being all by itself, sits in complacent judgment upon a work of art, the very essence of the life and beauty of which is its appealing to all of the faculties and senses at once, ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... sense. He played beautifully on the flute too, and had a cheerful conversible turn; which naturally recommended him still farther to Fritz; and awoke or encouraged, among other faculties, the musical faculty in the little Boy. Rentzel continued about him, or in sight of him, through life; advancing gradually, not too fast, according to real merit and service (Colonel in 1759); and never did discredit to the choice Friedrich Wilhelm had made of him. Of Senning, too, Engineer-Major ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... propositions, where the terms are understood, and the whole subject is comprehended at once, there is such an uniformity of sentiment among all human beings, that, for many ages, a very numerous set of notions were supposed to be innate, or necessarily co-existent with the faculty of reason: it being imagined, that universal agreement could proceed only from the invariable dictates of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... Evelin had no scruples in leaving her alone for a couple of days. They knew that she, who had such an exceptional faculty for getting on with all sorts and conditions of men and women, and who always shed sunshine around her, had within her a great love of, sometimes almost a thirst ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... it, and his dynamic criticism did much toward shaping it. My wife, Heluiz Chandler Washburne, gave invaluable help throughout the work, especially in the present revision of the course. One of my co-workers on the Normal School faculty, Miss Louise Mohr, rendered much assistance in the classification and selection of inferences. Miss Beatrice Harper assisted in the preparation of the tables of supplies and apparatus, published ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... is the story that when Mr. Young was Lord Advocate for Scotland a vacancy occurred on the Bench and two names were mentioned in connection with it. One was that of Mr. Horne, Dean of Faculty, a very tall man, and the other Lord Shand. "So, Mr. Young," said a friend, "you'll be going to appoint Horne?"—"I doubt if I will get his length," was the reply. "Oh, then," queried the friend, "you'll be going to appoint ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... fallacy to blame the desert for this state of affairs; to insinuate, for example, that even as it disintegrates the mountains into sand, so it decomposes the intellectual fabric of mankind, his synthesizing faculty, into its primordial elements of ecstasy and emotionalism. This is merely reaction: the desert's revenge. For we now know a little something of the condition of old Arabia and Africa in the days ere these ardent shepherds appeared on the scene, with their crude and ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... Desire of Power.* This is manifested in every period of life, and in the exercise of every faculty, bodily, mental, and moral. It is this which gives us pleasure in solitary exercises of physical strength, in climbing mountains, swimming, lifting heavy weights, performing difficult gymnastic feats. It is this, more than deliberate cruelty, that induces boys to torture animals, or to oppress ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... doubts had been disturbing her ever since that first moment of enthusiasm when she had yielded to Isobel's coaxing. Isobel had said that the other girls were making their own costumes—she knew that the faculty disliked any extravagance or great expenditures of money in any of the school affairs—might it not have been better to have helped Isobel fashion something simple and pretty at home? Then when she watched Isobel's flushed, ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... to deep but to shallow as well, and in the end all notes harmonize. Where the swathe of the scythe is wide men's souls expand in heart qualities. Amidst the wreckage of a battlefield he picks up all kinds of things, every faculty picks up something and they become contributions to soul force. The greater the gloom the more the soldier searches for the gleam. Religion and resolution meet in the soldier and give him deeper vision. He hears ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... like a shiver, suddenly passed across her nerves, and left them in a state of rigid tension. With every sense morbidly acute, with every faculty strained to its utmost, the subtle instincts of Low's woodcraft transformed and possessed her. She knew it now! A new element was in the wood—a strange being—another life—another man approaching! She did not even raise ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... This faculty of draining all the rivulets of knowledge by the way was strikingly developed by a man of surpassing eloquence and tireless activity. He was never a methodical student in the sense of following rigidly a single line of study, but he habitually ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... mysterious manner, and having carefully ascertained that all the doors to the room were shut and no one listening, Antonio swore the knight to secrecy. Then he proceeded to tell Don Quixote that the head he saw there before him had been made by a Polish magician, and possessed the magic faculty of being able to answer any question whispered into its ear. Only on certain days, however, did its magic assert itself, and the following day, which was the day after Friday—it had been astrologically worked out—would again witness the miracle. Don Antonio ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... he gave in Songs of Experience, where The Garden of Love describes the blighting curse which church law had laid upon free love. To overthrow intellectualism and discipline, Man must liberate his most precious faculty, the imagination, which alone can reveal the spiritual character of the universe and the beauty that life will wear when the feelings cease to be unnaturally confined. Temporarily Blake rejoiced when the French Revolution seemed to usher in the millennium ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... Witmore, thou hast the faculty opposite to that of a witch, and canst lay a tempest. I should as soon have imagined one man could have stopt a cannon-ball in its full force ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... or dreams. For the first time in his neglected and mismanaged life he knew the pleasure of congenial work; and this, although Lorrimer worked him like a slave. He dragged him over the city and set his picture-painting faculty to labor in dark corners. Dickie, every sense keen and clean, was not allowed to flinch. No, his freshness was his value. And the power that was in him, driven with whip and spur, throve and grew and fairly took the bit in its teeth and ran ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... he may order it for his own honor and glory. These eyes shall see, this tongue shall speak, this mind shall think, these ears shall hear, these hands shall labor, these feet shall run, this strength and these energies, this heart shall beat, every faculty, organ, and appetite shall be used only for him, who has so freely given himself for us; and thus this body becomes the temple, and the earthly dwelling-place of the Holy Ghost, his own exclusive dedicated property. While it is not possible that we could itemize ...
— Sanctification • J. W. Byers
... and his manifold qualities, his gaiety and his gracefulness, his faculty of observation and that apprehensiveness of mind which enables him to sympathise with the most diverse specimens of humanity, has drawn an immortal picture of mediaeval England. In certain respects, however, the description ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... of mimicry. I was told, almost in the same words, of the same ludicrous habit among the Caffres; the Australians, likewise, have long been notorious for being able to imitate and describe the gait of any man, so that he may be recognised. How can this faculty be explained? is it a consequence of the more practised habits of perception and keener senses, common to all men in a savage state, as compared with ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... of it. Now, it so happened that these children had seen what Typhon's accomplices had done with the body, and they accordingly told her by what mouth of the Nile it had been conveyed to the sea. For this reason the Egyptians look upon children as endued with a kind of faculty of divining, and in consequence of this notion are very curious in observing the accidental prattle which they have with one another whilst they are at play, especially if it be in a sacred place, forming omens and presages from it. Isis meanwhile having been informed that Osiris, ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... separated, was now called together by a battle. Troops from every direction were pouring upon the common center. The little army which had fought so gallantly the day before now amounted to only one-fourth of the whole. McDowell, Sigel and many other generals joined Pope, who, with the strange faculty of always seeing his enemy too small, while McClellan always saw him too large, began to feed upon his own sanguine anticipations, and to regard as won the great victory that he intended to win. He sent telegrams to Washington announcing that his triumph at Cedar Run was only the first ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... thoughts of man, of the greatest deeds of the past. The poet of the future may return to his greater calling of the prophet or teacher; indeed, we hardly know what may not be effected for the human race by a better use of the poetical and imaginative faculty. The reconciliation of poetry, as of religion, with truth, may still be possible. Neither is the element of pleasure to be excluded. For when we substitute a higher pleasure for a lower we raise men in the scale of existence. ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... clumsy with words draw fat pay checks because they have a faculty for smelling out interesting facts. In the larger cities there are reporters with keen noses for news who never write a line from one year's end to another, but do all of their work by word of ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... agreement between Christian faith and reason. They consider themselves placed between two fixed points, faith in the Christian truths inculcated from the very first or formally revealed by God to man, and reason, which is the faculty given to man to enable him to recognize the truth. "Faith," wrote Hildebert, Archbishop of Tours, in the eleventh century, "is not contrary to reason, but it is above reason. If, like the philosophers, one willeth not to believe ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... he brought the books back, and that other awful call he made one evening, when we were all so suffocatingly polite. You know about those times. But three or four times more, he's come down to the university—he's great friends with several men in the law faculty, so he's there quite a lot, anyway—but several times he's picked me up, and we've gone for walks, miles and miles and miles, and we've talked and talked and talked. So really, we know ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... MS. was acquired by the Faculty of Advocates, in 1792, with the mass of Wodrow's MSS.—It is very neatly written by Charles Lumisden, whose name (but partially erased) with the date 1643, occurs on the fly-leaf. Wodrow was correct in imagining that the greater portion of the volume was transcribed from Vautrollier's edition, ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... he informed me that our friendship was not based upon more than ordinary mutual suitability of temperaments. The faculty of mind-reading, he explained, brought minds so close together, and so heightened sympathy, that the lowest order of friendship between mind-readers implied a mutual delight such as only rare friends enjoyed among other races. He assured me that later on, when ...
— To Whom This May Come - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... not have taken notes at such times in any case; but I had trained myself in similar work to preserve, with a fair degree of accuracy, the form of phrase, and to some extent its wording, if I could get hold of pencil and paper soon enough afterward. In time I acquired a sort of phonographic faculty; though it always seemed to me that the bouquet, the subtleness of speech, was lacking in the result. Sometimes, indeed, he would dictate next morning the substance of these experimental reflections; or I would find among ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... seas, French Revolutions, Chartisms, Manchester Insurrections, that make the heart sick in these bad days, the Supreme Powers are driving us. On the whole, blessed be the Supreme Powers, stern as they are! Towards that haven will we, O friends; let all true men, with what of faculty is in them, bend valiantly, incessantly, with thousandfold endeavour, thither, thither! There, or else in the Ocean-abysses, it is very clear ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... It aims at being comical, and satirical upon the times. The author studies hard to portray the motley characters which move before the observer in a large city; but he has not enough of the vision and the faculty divine, to make them more than melancholy ghosts of what they profess to be. The attempts at humor are inexpressibly dismal; the burlesque overpowers the most determined reader, by its leaden dulness. The style is ingeniously tasteless and feeble. He ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... rose tree, when a blossom is chopped or broken off, suffers precisely as we human mortals do if we lose a finger; but the rose tree, being a much more perfect and delicate handiwork of nature than any human being, has a faculty we have not: it lives and has a sentient soul in every one of its roses, and whatever one of these endures the tree entire endures also by sympathy. You think this very wonderful? Not at all. It is no whit more wonderful than that a lizard's ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... consider essential to feminine beauty. She had no brilliancy of complexion, no pearly whiteness, no vivid carnation; nor, indeed, did she possess the dark brilliance of a brunette. But there was a speaking earnestness in her face; an expression of mental faculty which the squire now for the first ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... reward of all this labour? Hardly enough could be retained, from the proceeds, to procure the meanest food, the most ragged of clothes. Denied all power of legislation, and of considering and providing for his own necessities, as a citizen, the Irish peasant had lost the citizen's faculty, had become paralysed. He succumbed, almost without a struggle, to the fate brought him by famine, bred of evil days. He died on the mountain glens, along the sea coast, in the fields, in his cabin, after shutting the door. ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... Wordsworth's terminology to the process already described. The "vision" of the poet would mean his sense-impressions of every kind, his experience, as Goethe said, of "the outer world, the inner world and the other world." The "faculty divine," into which vision blends insensibly, would mean the mysterious change of these sense-impressions— as they become subjected to reflection, comparison, memory, "passion recollected in tranquillity,"—into words possessing a peculiar life and power. The "accomplishment of ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... truth, it is just as Ohiyesa (Charles A. Eastman) the full-blooded Sioux, says in his book on Indian Boyhood: "There is scarcely anything so exasperating to me as the idea that the natives of this country have no sense of humour and no faculty for mirth. This phase of their character is well understood by those whose fortune or misfortune it has been to live among them day in and day out at their homes. I don't believe I ever heard a real hearty laugh away ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... that mouse; but toward the last I was offering rewards which were entirely beyond my means. I close-reefed my ears —that is to say, I bent the flaps of them down and furled them into five or six folds, and pressed them against the hearing-orifice—but it did no good: the faculty was so sharpened by nervous excitement that it was become a microphone and could hear through the overlays ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a bad disciplinarian. Nor had he even average powers of organization. He was in the field quite careless of the minutiae of drill. But he had a singularly happy faculty for choosing men to do his work for him. He was a very close calculator of all his movements. He worked out his manoeuvres to the barest mathematical chances, and insisted upon the unerring execution of what he prescribed; and above all be believed in mystery. ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... chose it, candidly confess to one another that we are greatly swayed by these feelings, and are by no means so rational in all points as we could wish; but this would be a betraying of the interests of that high faculty, the Understanding, which we so value ourselves upon, and which we more peculiarly call our own. This, we think, must not be; and so we huddle up the matter, concealing it as much as possible, both from ourselves and others. In Books indeed, wherein character, motive, and action, are all alike subjected ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... fact that there is a great and original difference between one empirical character and another; and it is a difference which, at bottom, rests upon the relation of the individual's will to his intellectual faculty. This relation is finally determined by the degree of will in his father and of intellect in his mother; and the union of father and mother is for the most part an affair of chance. This would all mean a revolting injustice in the nature of the world, if it were not that the difference ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... evolved an articulate language, whereas the lower animals seem to be without one. Man, therefore, has far outstripped them in reasoning faculty as well as in power of expression. This, however, does not bar the communications which the lower animals make to one another from possessing all the essential characteristics of language, and, as a matter ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... had spoken of the small olive tree on Drouva, of the Hermes of Olympia, even of Athens, she spoke of it, with a sort of protective affection, as if she thought of it as a living thing confided to her keeping. She possessed a faculty not very common in women, a delight in doing a thing for its own sake, rather than for the sake of some human being—perhaps a man. If she boiled an egg—she went to the kitchen and did this sometimes—she seemed personally interested in the ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... averse the king was from anything that might resemble the political practices and institutions of England." "M. Necker," says M. Malouet, "showed rare sagacity in espying in the greatest detail and on the furthest horizon the defects, the inconveniences of every measure, and it was this faculty of extending his observations to infinity which made him so often undecided." What with these doubts existing in his own mind, and what with the antagonistic efforts of parties as well as individual wills, the minister conceived the hope of releasing himself from the crushing burden of his personal ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... more important. He got into scrape after scrape with other boys of his way of thinking, and finally in his third year a midnight frolic led to his being dismissed. Mr. Cooper took his son's side and argued with the faculty, but the boy had to leave. His father looked about for some means of taming his son's wild habits and decided to send him ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... through the room in which Joe was sleeping, so as not to give suspicion to the man in the battery room, Slim slid into Jerry's chair and centered every faculty upon listening to the almost inaudible movements ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... minutes as they went through on a slow passenger train, and I must say that my heart ached when I thought of the town to which that family was going. What a place to bring a woman? But then women have a faculty of hanging on to their liege lords under all circumstances and conditions. God bless 'em. Baird, himself, looked wretched, being a mere shadow of his former self, but like all consumptives he imagined he was going ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... as it imagines to be present to it. If the mind, while imagining non—existent things as present to it, is at the same time conscious that they do not really exist, this power of imagination must be set down to the efficacy of its nature, and not to a fault, especially if this faculty of imagination depend solely on its own nature—that is (I. Def. vii.), if this ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... Emily to Lord Kildare,(1184) the richest and the first peer of Ireland, on a ridiculous notion of the King's evil being in the family—but sure that ought to be no objection: a very little grain more of pride and Stuartism might persuade all the royal bastards that they have a faculty ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... ease may be that perfect performance is ever more the effluence of a man's nature than the conscious labor of his hands. That the hands are faithfully busy therein, that every faculty contributes its purest industry, no one could for a moment doubt; since there could not be a total action of one's nature without this loyalty of his special powers. Nevertheless, there are times when the presiding intelligence descends into expression by a law and necessity of its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... Renovales, "What's the use? A whole medical faculty has been here and to no avail. She doesn't mind them; she refuses everything, perhaps to annoy me, to oppose me. There's no danger; you don't know her. Weak and small as she is, she ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... here. Though his poetry has not commanded any very wide attention, he had more of true poetry in him than many people imagine. He had all the qualifications of a really great poet except a sustained faculty for writing really good poetry. He had a sound philosophic conception of what the scope and functions of great poetry are; and it would be possible to select from his works isolated passages of high and complete beauty. ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... existence. But who can realize, or what language can express her feelings? The affectionate mother alone, who has watched over the sick or dying bed of a languishing daughter, or the agonized parent who has seen some mighty and incurable disorder befall his child—some member withered—some essential faculty enfeebled or destroyed—perhaps reason distracted; can imagine the emotions of that moment when the woman exclaimed, "Have mercy on me!!" What reason have we to be grateful for domestic health, while many are afflicted by ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... of that faculty it was now. If wishing could give him a pair of wings, or bring a convenient rope into his hands, the other end of which was tied to a neighboring tree, Fred was ready to devote himself heart and soul to ...
— Fred Fenton on the Track - or, The Athletes of Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... new types, and created an original style. But if during the three centuries preceding our era, sovereign Greece played the part of the demiurge who creates living beings out of preexisting matter, during the three following centuries her productive power became exhausted, her faculty of invention weakened, the ancient local traditions revolted against her empire and with the help of Christianity overcame it. Transferred to Byzantium they expanded in a new efflorescence and spread over Europe where they paved the way for the formation of the Romanesque ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... however, is not to be generally recommended, since few men have the faculty of rendering memorized parts so as to make them appear extempore. If you recite rather than speak to an audience, you may be a good entertainer, but just to that degree will you impair your power and ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... well ye that despise it, lest the wrath of God, which the men of Israel by their speedy obedience escaped, descend upon your heads. Ye may say that ye are banished men. 'Tis true: but thereby are ye not stripped of all faculty of rendering service; moreover, your assistance is asked for one who will restore ye to your homes. Ye may say that ye have been robbed of all your goods; yet many of you have still something remaining, and of that little ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Because one faculty is that which listens, And other that which the soul keeps entire; This is as if in bonds, and ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante
... uncouth forms, and worshipped their deities with absurd and debasing rites. Some of these remains being known to Mr. Wilson, on the evidence of the only pair of eyes in the universe which, in his estimation, have the faculty of seeing, he cannot treat them, according to his usual method in such cases, as fabrications of Spanish priests and lying chroniclers. How, then, does he account for them? He unfolds a theory on the subject, which he has stolen from the "monkish chroniclers" whom he treats with so much contempt, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... in the periods of the acquirement of the perfect plumage,—the size and shape of the eggs,—the nature of flight, and the powers of flight,—so-called "homing" birds having enormous flying powers; [1] while, on the other hand, the little Tumbler is so called because of its extraordinary faculty of turning head over heels in the air, instead of pursuing a direct course. And, lastly, the dispositions and voices of the birds may vary. Thus the case of the pigeons shows you that there is hardly a single ...
— The Perpetuation Of Living Beings, Hereditary Transmission And Variation • Thomas H. Huxley
... bottom, its motion being accompanied with a sound between a groan and 'jike.' There would have been something in this object very striking in any place, as it was impossible not to invest the machine with some faculty of intellect; it seemed to have made the first step from brute matter to life and purpose, showing its progress by great power. William made a remark to this effect, and Coleridge observed that it was like a giant with one idea. At all events, the object produced a striking effect in ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... my friend, I said, there is no special faculty of administration in a state which a woman has because she is a woman, or which a man has by virtue of his sex, but the gifts of nature are alike diffused in both; all the pursuits of men are the pursuits of women also, but in all of them a woman ...
— The Republic • Plato
... him—that perhaps he had come to depend too much on Sssuri's superior faculty of communication. It was time that he tried to use his own weaker powers to the utmost extent. So, while he climbed, Dalgard sent questing thoughts into the gloom. He located a nest of duck-dogs, those shy waterline fishers living in cliff holes. They were ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... Cosmas and Damian, were precursors of that excellent body of medical missionaries who wisely get at a man's soul by healing his body. There must be something in my theory about Cosmas and Damian, as the medical faculty of Prague University put up a sculptured group supposed to represent these two saints, on the Charles Bridge, early in the eighteenth century. As portraiture this ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... thus a unique personality, in its blending of intense mental energy with almost passionate emotions. Few natures can stand the strain of the excessive development of even a single faculty; and with William Cory the qualities of both heart and head were over-developed. There resulted a want of balance, of moral force; he was impetuous where he should have been calm, impulsive where ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... Whatever you wish, Dick," he said; "just turn on the tap. If my inventive faculty keeps on growing, I'll soon have a shower bath, hot and cold, ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... what the boy is trying to say, Miss Mayton," I interrupted. "Budge has a terrifying faculty for asking questions, and the result of some of them this morning was my endeavour to explain the nature of the respect in which ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... mysticism, philosophy, and poetry would be strained to its utmost capacity. Then a sense of incompleteness, of deficiency, of hopeless relativity would overcome the audience. The medium had exerted every spiritual faculty to receive the truth. But the visitor could not convey ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... been badgered to death over my part of the communication sent to you last week, for the young persons connected with this camp have a faculty of making mountains out of mole-hills, as you know, and I have to suffer for every careless little speech. However, as we didn't wish to bore you with six duplicate letters, we invented a plan for keeping off each other's ground, and appointed Geoff a committee of one to ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... magazine. Not a cheer broke the stillness; and even the wrangling, half-drunken bummers round the fires slunk sullenly away; while but few negroes showed their faces, and those ashen-black from indefinite fear; their great mouths gaping and white eyes rolling in curious dread that took away their faculty for noise. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... 2: The ultimate specific difference is the noblest because it is the most determinate, in the same way as actuality is nobler than potentiality. Thus, however, the intellectual faculty is not the noblest, because it is indeterminate and common to many degrees of intellectuality; as the sensible faculty is common to many degrees in the sensible nature. Hence, as all sensible things are not of one species, so neither ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... new social order, and open to us unfailing sources of happiness and inspiration, which would not only enable us to tide over the period of dissolution, but might make the whole world our debtor. No nation is better endowed by nature with a faculty for sane idealism than the English. We were never intended to be a nation of shopkeepers, if a shopkeeper is doomed to be merely a shopkeeper, which of course he is not. Our brutal commercialism has been a temporary aberration; ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... commended for valour? Meekness and mildness, and softness, and gentleness, and tenderness, and humility, and obedience to her husband, and faith in her confessor, and domesticity, or, as learned doctors call it, the faculty of stayathomeitiveness, and embroidery, and music, and pickling, and preserving, and the whole complex and multiplex detail of the noble science of dinner, as well in preparation for the table, as in arrangement over it, and in distribution around it to knights, and ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
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