"Prescience" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... credit of their science if they had reckoned with Mrs. Drabdump's next gas-bill when they predicted the weather and made "Snow" the favourite, and said that "Fog" would be nowhere. Fog was everywhere, yet Mrs. Drabdump took no credit to herself for her prescience. Mrs. Drabdump indeed took no credit for anything, paying her way along doggedly, and struggling through life like a wearied swimmer trying to touch the horizon. That things always went as badly as she had foreseen did not exhilarate her ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... know about before you were married, I suppose?" asked Richie, with what Jim thought unearthly prescience. ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... exploring the heavens for one, except what had been told me by H. P. Tuttle. But I gave him the best directions I could, and we parted. It is now rather humiliating that I did not inquire more thoroughly into the case. It would have taken more prescience than I was gifted with to expect that I should live to see the bashful youth awarded the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society for ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... not a bit tired when he came back to the blazing logs; but now he was perturbed, borne down by a prescience of coming change. From one point to another he walked—slowly, uneasily, pausing now and then. Finally he stood by his desk. Above it hung a large crucifix. His lips moved in prayer as he gazed on the crucified Christ. Then idly he picked up a book. It fell open in his ...
— Charred Wood • Myles Muredach
... Their authority in a word was so high, that the first fathers of the Christian church could no otherwise account for a reputation thus universally received, than by supposing that the devils were permitted by God Almighty to inform the oracles with a more than human prescience, that all the world might be concluded in idolatry and unbelief, [3] and the necessity of a Saviour be made more apparent. The gullibility of man is one of the most prominent features of our nature. Various periods and times, when whole nations have as ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... a prescience of disagreeable things. There was malice in Dredlinton's pallid face, the ugly twist of his lips and the light in his bloodshot eyes. He paused opposite to them, and leaning his hands on the back of the nearest chair, ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... too horrible," faltered Losely, thinking not of the conspiracy against his life, but of her prescience in detecting it. "It must be witchcraft, and nothing else. How could you learn ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was in his twenty-fourth year, and that the Abolition movement had then no actual existence, the orator evinced surprising prescience in his forecast of the future, and of the strife and hostility which the agitation ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... slavery, [55] a calamity which these people bear with more impatience for their women than themselves; so that those states who have been obliged to give among their hostages the daughters of noble families, are the most effectually bound to fidelity. [56] They even suppose somewhat of sanctity and prescience to be inherent in the female sex; and therefore neither despise their counsels, [57] nor disregard their responses. [58] We have beheld, in the reign of Vespasian, Veleda, [59] long reverenced by many as a deity. Aurima, moreover, and several others, [60] were formerly ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... his 'Pieta' he was in deep sympathy with the supreme drama of man's history. He found in the stone, once and for all time, the grief of the human mother for her son, not comforted by foreknowledge of resurrection, nor lightened by prescience of near glory. He discovered in the marble, by one effort, the divinity of death's rest after torture, and taught the eye to see that the dissolution of this dying body is the birth of the soul that cannot die. In the dead Christ there are two men manifest to sight. 'The first man is of earth, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... followed up her monograph on Mickiewicz with an admirable companion study of Zygmunt Krasinski, the 'Unknown' or 'Anonymous' Poet of Poland, second only to Mickiewicz in genius, and, in virtue of his personality, his strange gift of prescience, and the romantic and tragic conditions of his life, appealing to a wider audience than his great contemporary. He came on his father's side of an ancient, noble, and wealthy Polish family, related to the House of Savoy; ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... gone by since the Great War broke out. It needed no prescience, no remarkable statesmanship or gift of forecasting the future, to see that, when such mighty forces were unloosed, and when it had been shown that all treaties and other methods hitherto relied upon for national protection and for mitigating the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... judgment, reason, discernment, judiciousness, reasonableness, discretion, knowledge, sagacity, enlightenment, learning, sense, erudition, prescience, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... he's going to look as he gets older," thought Annie with a touch of prescience. "He's going to change into somebody else—little by little. This is the worst spell he's ever had. And all this mean blood's going to live again in my child. It goes ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... Cecily still a little disappointed. In later years I often wondered why the Story Girl refused to tell her fortune that night. Did some strange gleam of foreknowledge fall for a moment across her mirth-making? Did she realize in a flash of prescience that there was no earthly future for our sweet Cecily? Not for her were to be the lengthening shadows or the fading garland. The end was to come while the rainbow still sparkled on her wine of life, ere a single petal had fallen from her rose of joy. ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... instinctive awe at the words, and again a strange prescience of the future made itself felt in every mind. Here for the first time in history was being laid down that fine, fearless creed that has made the independent press what ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... strange ironic prescience had led Prince Albert, in the simplicity of his heart, to choose that motto for the Crimean brooch? The words hold a double lesson; and, alas! when she brought herself to realise at length what was indeed the fact and what there was no helping, ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... far forth, By accident most strange, bountifull Fortune (Now my deere Lady) hath mine enemies Brought to this shore: And by my prescience I finde my Zenith doth depend vpon A most auspitious starre, whose influence If now I court not, but omit; my fortunes Will euer after droope: Heare cease more questions, Thou art inclinde to sleepe: 'tis a good dulnesse, And giue it way: I know thou ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... empty pigeon-holes. Sixteen years later all three of these predicted elements had been discovered, one by a Frenchman, one by a German and one by a Scandinavian, and named from patriotic impulse, gallium, germanium and scandium. This was a triumph of scientific prescience as striking as the mathematical proof of the existence of the planet Neptune by Leverrier before it had been found by ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... into the crowd, giving place to others until all had seen. And so the strange sound from this strange congregation grew lower, until it was a sort of breathless, long-sustained and wavering note, a prescience, a premonition of something to come, a ghastly mockery or a tragedy to befall, until it was ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... contributions formed a run, which was easily to be traced, for miles along the prairie, by the scattering foliage and verdure which occasionally grew within the influence of its moisture. Hither, then, the stranger held his way, eagerly followed by the willing teams, whose instinct gave them a prescience of refreshment ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... with foul insurrection Have batter'd down her consecrated wall, And by their mortal fault brought in subjection Her immortality, and made her thrall To living death and pain perpetual: Which in her prescience she controlled still, But her foresight could not ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... of calm despair seems to have settled down upon De Maupassant's attitude toward life. Psychologically acute as ever, and as perfect in style and sincerity as before, we miss the note of anger. Fatality is the keynote, and yet, sounding low, we detect a genuine subtone of sorrow. Was it a prescience of 1893? So much work to be done, so much work demanded of him, the world of Paris, in all its brilliant and attractive phases, at his feet, and yet—inevitable, ever advancing death, with the question ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... forth, intent upon immediate prevention, if possible, of any further ordeals undertaken in behalf of herself. She was thoroughly frightened. A prescience of something ominous impending seemed to grip her very heart. She glanced about, helplessly, unfamiliar with the place. Van was nowhere in sight. She started to run around the cabin when ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... exploits. He accomplishes the destruction of the demon Kesi, one of those infernal beings who in vain attempted to kill the divine child, instigated by their prescience of their fate ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... came when the occurrence appeared to me in the light of prescience, but that was when I began to understand that all ideas, all reason and philosophy, are the result of outer impression. The primal language of our minds is in the concrete. Afterwards it becomes the cypher, and even at its highest it is ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a sentiment of profound gloom, as I listened to these sombre predictions. It seemed incredible that they could be well founded, but I had more than once had an opportunity to remark the extraordinary prescience of the remarkable ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... philosophic commentary on the folly of "throwing up their hand before the game was played out." But they were furnished with liquor, which in this emergency stood them in place of food, fuel, rest, and prescience. In spite of his remonstrances, it was not long before they were more or less under its influence. Uncle Billy passed rapidly from a bellicose state into one of stupor, the Duchess became maudlin, and Mother Shipton snored. Mr. Oakhurst alone remained erect, leaning against ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... on the infinite prescience that dictated the prophecies of the Bible—no tongue could speak more plainly to us than the scene around us did, the fulfilment of the denunciations that these cities of Moab and Ammon should remain as cities "without inhabitants"—"not a man to dwell therein"—and ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... during the eleventh and twelfth centuries many monasteries were founded and grew in importance, and what might have happened in Japan but for the somewhat unscrupulous prescience of Japanese statesmen actually did happen in Tibet. Among the numerous contending chiefs none was pre-eminent: the people were pugnacious but superstitious. They were ready to build and respect when built the substantial structures required to house monastic communities during the rigorous winter. ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... that uttermost blank beach Whereto the boldest thought may reach That voyages from the vaguest past— (Dim realm and ultimate of space)— Is vexed and troubled, stirs and shakes, In prescience of a god that wakes, Born of man's wish to see ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... forty-eighth Psalm they are mentioned AFTER the heavenly bodies and the "heaven of heavens," but BEFORE the terrestrial elements. As to their purpose, he hesitates between those who held that they were stored up there by the prescience of God for the destruction of the world at the Flood, as the words of Scripture that "the windows of heaven were opened" seemed to indicate, and those who held that they were kept there to moderate the heat of the heavenly bodies. ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... returned to the house, a letter was delivered to Emily Hastings, with which, the seal unbroken, she retired to her own room. The hand was unknown to her, but with a sort of prescience something more than natural, she divined at once from whom it came, and saw that the difficult struggle had commenced. An hour or two before, the very thought would have dismayed her. Now the effect ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... charge of the bridge, he came down the stairs and aft on the run. Not a word was spoken by either; but, with the prescience that men feel at the coming of a fight, the two cooks left their dishes and the engineers their engines to crowd their heads into the hatches. Riley showed his disfigured face over the heads of the other two; and on the bridge Forsythe watched ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... sky, was spread the first faint hint of a wondering dawn. Far out over the harbor a lightening could be seen, a prescience of day, and a ghostly half light, like that in a dim cathedral, replaced the flame-lit darkness. There were mists above the water, and the light gained progress slowly; still, it gained, and presently the salt sea odors came rolling in from the bay. The ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... ... but link by link Went courting all my chains, as if that so They never could fall off at any blow Struck by thy possible hand.... Why, thus I drink Of life's great cup of wonder. Wonderful, Never to feel thee thrill the day or night With personal act or speech,—nor ever call Some prescience of thee with the blossoms white Thou sawest growing! Atheists are as dull, Who cannot guess God's presence out ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... Russian-Jewish colony on the west side of Chicago were thrown into a state of intense excitement as soon as the nationality of the young man became known. They were filled with dark forebodings from a swift prescience of what it would mean to them were the oduim of anarchy rightly or wrongly attached to one of their members. It seemed to the residents of Hull-House most important that every effort should be made to ascertain just what did happen, that every means of securing information should be exhausted ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... suddenly began to show results. She plumped out, grew tall, vigorous, active, graceful and charming. She also acquired notable skill at weaving. His intimates congratulated Turpio on his luck or prescience and foretold for him notable profits from her sale. Turpio averred that he and his spouse were so fond of the girl that he was unwilling to part with her except to a master or mistress whom she took to and who seemed likely to be kind ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... party are gifted with prescience, and as the Deity has made no revelations as to the future results of any given measures, all the means of judging that remain to us, as before stated, are the laws of mind, and the records ...
— An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism - With reference to the duty of American females • Catharine E. Beecher
... by fore-knowing what will surely be, Does only, first, effects in causes see, And finds, but does not make, necessity. Creation is of power and will the effect, Foreknowledge only of his intellect. His prescience makes not, but supposes things; Infers necessity to be, not brings. Thus thou art not constrained to good or ill; Causes, which work the effect, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... sharpest appetite. He studied her head, the curves of her throat, the little gestures, the way her shoulders seemed to narrow when she shrugged; and all these pictures he stored away for future need. He would meet her again; a touch of prescience told him this. When, where, ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... not improbably arise, even in England itself. These are, in fact, the results which have accrued. Without doubt, it was difficult to foresee them, but it is worthy of note that, in spite of all adverse and possibly ephemeral appearances, symptoms are not wanting which encourage the belief that the prescience of the early Free Traders may, in the end, be tardily vindicated. It is the irony of current politics that at a time when England is meditating a return to Protection—but is as yet, I am glad to say, very far from being persuaded that the adoption of such a policy would be wise—the most advanced ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... think of the present situation of England? Is not this the great and fatal crush of their funding system, which, like death, has been foreseen by all, but its hour, like that of death, hidden from mortal prescience? It appears to me that all the circumstances now exist which render recovery desperate. The interest of the national debt is now equal to such a portion of the profits of all the land and the labor of the island, as not to leave ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... on this prescience, and in reference to public men and public affairs, when they interested me, have satisfied my curiosity by ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... by intemperance of knowledge the old age of the world drew on. This the mass of mankind saw not, or, living lustily although unhappily, affected not to see. But, for myself, the Earth's records had taught me to look for widest ruin as the price of highest civilization. I had imbibed a prescience of our Fate from comparison of China the simple and enduring, with Assyria the architect, with Egypt the astrologer, with Nubia, more crafty than either, the turbulent mother of all Arts. In history {*2} of these regions I met with a ray from the Future. The individual artificialities of the three ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and a heart which would have suited a Goliath, there was no one but trusted Barry, none that had not hurried to him in a difficulty; not because he was so wise, but because he was so true. He would never have made money, in spite of the fact that his prescience, his mining sense, his diagnosis of the case of a mine, as Byng called it, had been a great source of wealth to others, had it not been for ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in Berlin, in a sort of semi-diplomatic position, when the Assembly of Notables was convened. His keen prescience and profound sagacity induced him to return to his distracted country, where he knew his services would soon be required. Though debauched, extravagant, and unscrupulous, he was not unpatriotic. He had an intense hatred ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... of the army and the quartermasters ought to have inquired at the head-quarters of the defenses of Washington, if the roads are safe. But of course it was not done, as the big men here possess all the prescience, and need no valuable information. All of them appear to me as ostriches, who hide their heads and eyes, not to ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... in desperation. All this was sharpened by the certainty that the mineral was only valueless pyrites, and the prescience of Nate's anger when this fact should come to his knowledge, and prudence no longer restrain him. His rage would vent itself on his luckless victim for every cent, every mill, that the discovery of the "fools' gold" ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... feathers of the ostrich. Statesmen will modestly say that a study of the map showed them how the course of empire must take its way into this or that undiscovered wilderness, and that in consequence, at their direction, armies marched to open these tracts which but for their prescience would have remained a desert. But that was not the real reason. A woman wanted three feathers to wear at Buckingham Palace, and to oblige her a few unimaginative traders, backed by a man who owned a tramp steamer, opened up the East Coast of Africa; ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... This whole volume is but their masterful development. They prove that together with audacious sincerity in the coordination of facts and an infallible judgment, Ardant du Picq possessed prescience in the highest degree. His prophetic eye distinguished sixty years ago the constituent principles of a good army. These are the principles which lead to victory. They are radically opposed to those which enchant our parliamentarians or military politicians, ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... and went down the grand corridor. The bulldog tugged at his chain. Animals are gifted with prescience. He knew that his master had passed forever out of his life. Presently he heard the voice of the princess calling; and the glamour of royalty encompassed him,—something a human finds hard to resist, and he was ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... light itself is but the adumbration of God. How good it is that the child is ignorant of so many things. It leaves room for the existence and growth of a mind, of an imagination which, in time, shall lead rather than follow the processes of reason; which shall leap before it looks, conscious of prescience before proof, arriving on wings while the shoestrings are being tied. Blessed are the ignorance, the beliefs and the innocency of the country boy. For if he can maintain a remnant of these into maturity the world will be more beautiful; he will idealize his ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... why—and he knew at this minute. It was because he was afraid of Harlan—he feared him as a coward fears the death that confronts him. The sensation was premonitory. Nor was it that. It had been premonitory—it was now a conviction. In the time, in Lamo, when he had faced Harlan some prescience had warned him that before him was the man whom the fates had selected ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Sydney." and decided that that was there he would "plant." Every writer of mediaeval history who has had occasion to refer to the choice by Constantine the Great of Byzantium, afterwards Constantinople, as his capital, has extolled his judgment and prescience. Constantine was an Emperor, and could do as he would. Arthur Phillip was an official acting under orders. We can never sufficiently admire the wisdom he displayed when, exercising his own discretion, he decided upon Port Jackson. True, he had a great opportunity, but his signal merit ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... also heard, "we are taking you for granted, aren't we?" Steering only smiled at her again. He had fallen into the habit of smiling at her, and some prescience seemed to urge him to exercise the habit ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... eyes that had looked into his here appeared to clear and brighten with a sweet prescience. Was it the wind moaning in the chimney that seemed to whisper to him: "Too late, beloved, for ME, but not for you. I died, but Love still lives. Be happy, Philip. And in your happiness I too may ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... of Olivet, and the long line of the white city walls, with the gilding of the Temple glittering in the sunshine, burst upon their view, the multitude lifted up their voices in gladness. But Christ sat there, and as He looked across the valley, and beheld, with His divine prescience, the city, now so joyous and full of stir, sitting solitary and desolate, He lifted up His voice in loud wailing. The Christ wept because He must punish, but He punished ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... and as he saw the inevitable tendency of the Reformation to lead ultimately to a change of doctrine, he attached himself with increasing determination to the cause of the pope and of the old faith. As if with an instinctive prescience of what would follow from it, he had from the first been opposed to the divorce; and he had not concealed his feeling from the king at the time when the latter had pressed the seals on his unwilling acceptance. In consenting to become chancellor, he had yielded only to Henry's ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... Eliot thought so too, years before Evadne was born, and expressed the thought in a letter in which she also prophesied that "Ruth" would not live through a generation. The impression the book made upon Evadne is another proof of prescience in the great writer.] ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... are Christians, even to the very birds, and keep the festivals of the Church as eternal laws of nature. The voyage succeeds, not by seamanship, or geographic knowledge, nor even by chance: but by the miraculous prescience of the saint, or of those whom he meets; and the wanderings of Ulysses, or of Sinbad, are rational and human in comparison with those of ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... strange prescience vanished and I tried to reason out what I had heard. Of course the man was Carse; who could it have been save him, for were we not alone in the house? I sat for hours on the bed working up a determination ...
— The Homicidal Diary • Earl Peirce
... him, yet he was never more watchful, never more alert. The indefinable sixth sense, developed in him by the wilderness, had taken alarm; there was a presence in the forest, foreign in its nature; it was not sight nor hearing nor yet smell that told him so, but a feeling or rather a sort of prescience. Then an extraordinary thrill ran through him; it was an emotion partaking in its nature of joy and anticipation; he was about to be confronted by some danger, perhaps a crisis, and the physical faculties, handed down by a far-off ancestor, expanded ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the first, founded on one side upon the ignorance and weakness of man in the affairs of life, and on the other upon the prescience of the Divinity and his almighty providence, was true; but the consequence deduced from it in favour of auguries, false and absurd. They ought to have proved that it was certain, that the Divinity himself had established these ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... Curves the smooth and sandy shore, Flowing off in dimness hoar:— Eyes that roam like timid deer Sheltered by a thicket near, Peeping out between the boughs, Or that, trusting, safely browse:— Arched o'er all the forehead pure, Giving us the prescience sure Of an ever-growing light; As in deepening summer night, Over fields to ripen soon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... unassisted reason is very unfit to handle; and whatever system she embraces, she must find herself involved in inextricable difficulties, and even contradictions, at every step which she takes with regard to such subjects. To reconcile the indifference and contingency of human actions with prescience; or to defend absolute decrees, and yet free the Deity from being the author of sin, has been found hitherto to exceed all the power of philosophy. Happy, if she be thence sensible of her temerity, when she pries into these sublime mysteries; and ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... the one who accompanied Mrs. Barker to San Jose. But it was plain that the young girl had no complicity with the actions of the gang, whatever might have been her companion's confederation. In the prescience of a true lover, he knew that she must have been deceived and kept in utter ignorance of it. There was no look of it in her lovely, guileless eyes; her very impulsiveness and ingenuousness would have long since betrayed the secret. Was it left for him, at this very outset ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... difficult, when it is practicable, to a successful result. The flutter of haste is characteristic of a weak mind that has not the command of its thoughts; a strong mind, master of itself, possesses the clearness and prescience of reflection. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... if from some bank he could watch our supposed bird's first attempt to scramble over a short space of deep water, would at once declare that the bird was trying to swim—if not actually swimming. Provided then that there is a very little perception of, and prescience concerning, the means whereby the next desired end may be attained, it matters not how little in advance that end may be of present desire or faculties; it is still reached through purpose, and must be called purposive. Again, no matter how ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... of the Seers is not always prescience; they are impressed with images, of which the event only shews them the meaning. They tell what they have seen to others, who are at that time not more knowing than themselves, but may become at last very adequate witnesses, by comparing the ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... there awake, seeing many pictures through his wide-open eyes, Quebec, the lost Stadacona of the Mohawks, the St. Lawrence, Tandakora, the huge Ojibway who had hunted him so fiercely, St. Luc, De Courcelles, and all the others who had passed out of his life for a while, though he felt now, with the prescience of old King Hendrik, that they were coming back again. His path would lie for a long time away from cities and the gay and varied life that appealed to him so much, and would lead once more through the wilderness, which ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... England then lost can never be known. Vorontzoff, Russian ambassador at London, who had earlier been a bitter enemy of Pitt, now expressed the fervent desire that death had carried off his weary old frame, rather than that of the potential Saviour of Europe. The words are instinct with prescience. The personality and the actions of Pitt were alike a summons to a life of dignity and manly independence. His successors had perforce to take a course not unlike that which they were about to censure in him; and the distrust which the Czar Alexander felt for them in part ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... any other, is the deeper part of the riddle. The solution offered by the great German pessimist will not harmonize well with scientific psychology. The choice of the dead, evolutionally considered, would be a choice based upon remembrance rather than on prescience. And the ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... consideration to this document, and after he had made as complete an examination of the front as any Commander-in-Chief ever undertook—the General was in one or other sector with his troops almost every day for four months—General Chetwode's plan was adopted, and full credit was given to his prescience in General Allenby's despatch covering the operations up to ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... angrily at his smiling ones. The unabashed impudence, the unfluttered aplomb, but above all the uncanny prescience of this youth disturbed him because he could not understand them. Moreover, it happened that his suspicious mind had lingered on the chance of a betrayal at the hands of his chief. For which very reason he ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... of old loved to find in his name (or its Syriace quivalent, Nurono, [Greek: youra phyr], fire) a prescience of the torch of divine love which blazed in him. The fancy may pass, if etymologically unsound; for Ignatius, 'the Inflamed,' was a true child of the fiery East. Contrast him and his letters with St. Clement ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... the thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth Congresses. The day was fast coming when contests for the Speakership and battles over appropriation bills, ay, even the fierce struggle over Kansas, would sink into insignificance, and Mr. DAVIS, with that political prescience for which he was always remarkable, seemed to discern the first sign of the coming storm. The winds had been long sown, and now the whirlwind was to be reaped. The thirty-sixth Congress, which ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... billet lay, unknown to its writer as to him, the turning-point of his life! God help us! what avail are experience, prescience, prudence, wisdom, in this world, when at every chance step the silliest trifle, the most commonplace meeting, an invitation to dinner, a turn down the wrong street, the dropping of a glove, the delay of a train, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... spoke with accuracy of many events, without information other than that received directly from God. But this will astonish no one who is acquainted with man's power in prayer. Prayer was the secret of Peden's prescience. God proceeds on established principles, in His dealings with His people. "The secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him." "And the Lord said, Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I do?" Peden's prayers on certain occasions lasted all night. Communion with God was his delight; he lived ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... taste of the refreshment it craved. He sighed deeply, and the hot moisture smarted again upon his eyelids, but this time not all in grief. With his tender compassion for himself there mingled now a flutter of buoyant prescience, of exquisite expectancy. ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... The omniscience and prescience of God do not deprive men of free will. Maimonides explains this in the last chapter of the Shemonah Perakim (ed. Gorfinkle, p. ...
— Pirke Avot - Sayings of the Jewish Fathers • Traditional Text
... my name?" the astonished mother cried, drawing back with a little shudder of half superstitious alarm at such surprising prescience. ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... the dead poet had once told his friend that he thought the 'intensest pleasure he had received in life was in watching the growth of flowers,' and how another time, after lying a while quite still, he murmured in some strange prescience of early death, 'I feel ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... cannot help hazarding the conjecture, that Blake's prophetic vision recognised, in the lineaments of the 'priests in black gowns,' most of his future editors. Perhaps, though, if Blake's prescience had extended so far as this, he would have taken a more drastic measure; and we shudder to think of the sort of epigram with which the editorial efforts of his worshippers might have been rewarded. The present edition, ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... on a calm and summary review of the arguments by which the doctrines of freedom and necessity have been respectively supported, that those reasonings which are purely philosophical or metaphysical decidedly preponderate on the side of Necessity. The prescience of the Deity cannot, on any known principle, be reconciled with the contingency which attaches to the actions or determinations of man, on the hypothesis of freedom[2]. And, moreover, if every event requires ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... which his friend might be freed from the shackles that bound him to the effeminate serfdom of idleness; but the magic that could unrivet those fetters had not yet been revealed. Still he was sometimes stirred by a mysterious prescience that they would be ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... sayth). And as to the diuelles foretelling of things to come, it is true that he knowes not all things future, but yet that he knowes parte, the Tragicall event of this historie declares it, (which the wit of woman could never haue fore-spoken) not that he hath any prescience, which is only proper to God: or yet knows anie thing by loking vpon God, as in a mirrour (as the good Angels doe) he being for euer debarred from the fauorable presence & countenance of his creator, but only by one of these two meanes, either as being ...
— Daemonologie. • King James I
... the soul of man by reminding him of the Divine Attributes. His thirst for the beautiful belongs to his immortality, for it never rests in the appreciation of mere finite beauty, but struggles wildly to obtain the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of time, to attain a portion of that loveliness whose elements pertain to Eternity alone; and thus, when by poetry or music, the most entrancing of the poetic moods, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... the man in this most unconventional household, for Stryker, with all the prescience of a well-trained servant, had already decided that Peter belonged to a class accustomed to being waited on. Going to the door he blew one short blast on a police whistle, like Peter's, which he brought ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... waited in terrible anxiety. No one had told him what had taken place at Escorval, but he divined it by the aid of that strange prescience which so often illuminates the mind when death ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... the right to inquire into what may have happened before you met me? What young girl is there who, some time or other, has not modestly let her thoughts dwell upon innocent love? Is there wrong in this? Should there have been a spirit of prescience in my mind to forewarn me that I must keep my heart free and in vacant loneliness, because that, after many years, you were to come and lift me ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... oracles, and the priests, no doubt, intimately acquainted with all the affairs of the states around, and viewing the living contests of action with the coolness of spectators, were often enabled to give shrewd and sensible admonitions,—so that the forethought of wisdom passed for the prescience of divinity. Hence the greater part of their predictions were eminently successful; and when the reverse occurred, the fault was laid on the blind misconstruction of the human applicant. Thus no great design was executed, no city founded, no colony planted, no war undertaken, without ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of greed. The ample lands to be had for the taking guaranteed independence to all at the price of labor. With this resource no man needed to call another master. This may be considered the idyllic period of the republic, the time when De Tocqueville saw and admired it, though not without prescience of the doom that awaited it. The seed of death was in the state in the principle of private capitalism, and was sure in time to grow and ripen, but as yet the conditions were not favorable to its development. ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... His prescience, however, in this respect was demonstrated when a year later the Czar saluted a French squadron in the harbour of Cronstadt to the strains of the "Marseillaise" and signed a secret agreement that was alluded to four years later by the French Premier, M. Ribot, in the ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... his reins to a soldier, followed Greene into Nassau Hall, and was quickly running over the bundles of papers which the British, with more prudence than prescience, had for safety left behind. Presently he came upon a great package of signed oaths of allegiance, which he was shoving to one side as of no immediate importance, when the name signed at the bottom of the uppermost ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... Congress, with a wise prescience of the jealousies and bickerings always arising between Regulars and Volunteers, provides that Regulars shall be tried by Regular, and Volunteers by Volunteer Officers. In practice, the spirit of the law is evaded by ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... episode of this visit. One evening the composer outlined to his friends his plans for "Parsifal," adding that it probably would be his last work. The little circle was deeply affected, and Cosima wept. Strange prescience! "Parsifal" was not produced until twenty years later, yet it proved to be the ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... is in the affections and therefore it is one of thought. She sees clearly the facts of her experience and condition, and she knows exactly how those facts look in the eyes of others. She is one of those persons who possess a keen and just prescience of events, who can look far into the future and discern those resultant consequences of the present which, under the operation of inexorable moral law, must inevitably ensue. Self-poised in the right and free from the disturbing force of impulse and desire, she can await the justice of time, she ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... arrived, it seems the most natural thing in the world that there should have sprung up on the Saskatchewan this rich metropolis, anticipating for itself a future expansion second to no city in commercial Canada. But some one had to have faith and prescience before Edmonton got her start, and the god-from-the-machine was the Canadian Northern, in other words, William Mackenzie and D.D. Mann. Individuals and nations as they reap a harvest are apt to forget the hands that sowed the seed in faith, nothing doubting. ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... from Rome, I began to compile this book, to the reverence of God and Saint John and the praise of this our city Florence.' The key-note is struck in these passages. Admiration for the past mingles with prescience of the future. The artist and the patriot awake together in Villani at the sight of Rome and the thought ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... as if moved by some strange prescience, had fallen back and allowed her to enter alone. The buzz of subdued chatter ceased, and a great silence came over all as they looked. Some swore, in awed whispers, when the dramatic day had ended, and ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... firmer," said Paul, who had some of the prescience of the seer, "but the skies are no brighter. They look ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... God the faculty of foreseeing, or knowing beforehand whatever will happen; but this prescience seldom turns to his glory, nor protects him from the lawful reproaches of man. If God foreknows the future, must he not have foreseen the fall of his creatures? If he resolved in his decrees to permit this fall, it is undoubtedly because it was his will that this fall should take place, otherwise ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... the now unfriendly elements combined to check his career, still, with unswerving purpose, undaunted courage, she saw him march constantly forward. Spirits of evil could not drive from his heart the prescience of greatness; and his soul dwelt calmly under the foreshadow of a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Destiny Identity Prescience Alec Yeaton's Son Memory Tennyson (1890) Sweetheart, Sigh No More Broken Music Elmwood Sea Longings A Shadow of the Night Outward Bound Reminiscence Pere ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... falsehood of others. A man who lives from the past, yet knows that its honey can but moderately avail him; whose comprehensive eye scans the present, neither infatuated by its golden lures nor chilled by its many ventures; who possesses prescience, as the wise man must, but not so far as to be driven mad to-day by the gift which discerns to-morrow. When there is such a man for America, the thought which urges her on ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... word which could spoil their happiness, all—all told her. He was too inexorably gay and loving. Not for her—to whom every word and every kiss had uncannily the desperate value of a last word and kiss—not for her to deprive herself of these by any sign or gesture which might betray her prescience. Poor soul—she took all, and would have taken more, a hundredfold. She did not want to drink the wine he kept tilting into her glass, but, with the acceptance learned by women who have lived her life, she did not ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... was now relieved, since, as he instantly foresaw, the whip-lash of this frank appeal to force brought conviction where marshalled arguments were powerless to move. He had done what the religious enthusiasm of Livingstone, the political sagacity of Grey, the splendid devotion and prescience of Frere, and the Elizabethan statecraft of Rhodes, had failed to do. He had made the ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... drugged with nature's sophistries. The jungle! That was what Nan had called it, this welter of human misery. Who else had been talking to him about it? Why, Old Crow! He had not called it the jungle, but he had been lost in its tortuous ways. This prescience to Old Crow brought a queer feeling, as if a cool air blew on him. The jungle feeling passed. Almost he had the vision of an eternal city, built up by the broken but never wholly failing strength of man, and ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... the chalk deposit thrown up in course of the erection of a public lamp, in the vicinity of the Assembly Room. As the heavy rains of the last few days have unfortunately obliterated this interesting impression, the society is to be congratulated on the prescience of the member who was energetic enough to measure ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... all—whether they reside in their own comparatively small localities, nor ever wish to leave them—or at stated seasons instinctively fly away over thousands of miles, to drop down and settle for a while on some spot adapted to their necessities, of which they had prescience afar off, though seemingly wafted thither like leaves upon the wind! Verily, as great a mystery is that Natural Religion by the theist studied in woods and on mountains and by sea-shores, as that Revelation which philosophers will not believe because they do ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... few extracts from that diary still preserved in his own hand which give the intimation of a prescience that should in itself hold for him a grateful place in the memory of the west and of a concern about little things that should bring him a bit nearer to ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... on, the silent woman slept, and in silence the watcher gazed. And as he looked a great fear, a prescience of evil that should come, entered into Geoffrey and took possession of him. A cloud without crossed the ray of sunlight and turned it. It wavered, for a second it rested on his breast, flashed back to hers, then went out; and as it flashed and died, ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... upon as the embodiment of sagacious statesmanship and political prescience, but how far he fell short of comprehending the real magnitude of the crisis then impending, was shown by his prediction that the war would last but ninety days. His famous dictum about the "irrepressible ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... alarm. She hastened after him, dragging me with her. Lord Cheisford was past middle age, but he was running along the cliff path like a boy. We followed. Lady Angela would have passed him, but I held her back. She did not speak a word. Some vague prescience of the truth even then, I think, ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... drawn up in three squares, speedily brushed aside the enveloping clouds of orientals; finally, by well-combined efforts the French hurled back the enemy on passes, some of which had been seized by the commander's prescience. At the close of this memorable day (April 15th) an army of nearly 30,000 men was completely routed and dispersed by the valour and skilful dispositions of two divisions which together amounted to less than a seventh of that ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... largely through his efforts Company H of the 20th Regiment, Illinois Infantry, was raised in Putnam County. When the regiment was organised at Joliet, Illinois, he was appointed sergeant-major, and in this capacity went to the front. When the force was sent to Cape Girardeau, Missouri, his prescience in studying military engineering made him invaluable. He was practically given charge of planning and laying out and constructing the fortifications at that place, a work he executed so well that it received the unqualified commendation of General Fremont. The second lieutenant of Company ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... fair, neither red nor brown, it was of a pale hazel colour and fell in straight masses nearly to her feet. Her eyes were of a deep grey fringed with dark lashes; they had a mysterious and pathetic look—a look caused by longing after something indefinite and yet desired, or by a prescience perhaps of ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... of such prescience, on I went;— The youthful monarch was content. 'Edgar de Langton, take this ring— No! hither the young Minstrel bring: Ourself can better still dispense The honour and the recompence.' I came, and, trembling, bent my knee. He wonder'd ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... Remark of the Infant of his coming home, and joining the Time with it, was a certain Indication that he would be a great Historian and Chronologer. They are neither of them Fools, yet received my Compliment with great Acknowledgment of my Prescience. I fared very well at Dinner, and heard many other notable Sayings of their Heir, which would have given very little Entertainment to one less turned to Reflection than I was; but it was a pleasing Speculation to remark on the Happiness of a Life, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... By accident most strange, bountiful Fortune— Now my dear lady—hath mine enemies Brought to this shore; and by my prescience I find my zenith[379-52] doth depend upon A most auspicious star, whose influence If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes Will ever after droop.[379-53] Here cease more questions: Thou art inclined to sleep; 'tis a good dulness, And give it way: ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... passed in the opposite room, the one which had been tenanted by Phillips. For some reason, the end of the voyage, instead of bringing her the relief which she had expected, had only increased her nervous excitement. She was filled with an extraordinary prescience of some coming crisis. She found herself trembling as she listened to Doctor Gant's harsh voice and the smooth accents ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... went down she found everybody had got up early, and Mary Nellen, with some prescience of it, had breakfast ready. Jeff, now in his coat, stood by the dining-room door with his father, talking in a commonplace way about the house as it used to be, and the colonel was professing himself glad no newer fashions had made ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... farms and small towns. The Havaneros or natives of the Havannah were the first among the rich inhabitants of the Spanish colonies who visited Spain, France and Italy; and at the Havannah the people were always well informed of the politics of Europe. This knowledge of events, this prescience of future chances, have powerfully aided the inhabitants of Cuba to free themselves from some of the burthens which check the development of colonial prosperity. In the interval between the peace of Versailles and the beginning of the revolution of San Domingo, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... moments of prescience and a woman's, is that the man puts them out of his consciousness as quickly as he can, while a woman clings to them fearfully and goes her way a little more carefully for the momentary flash of ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... of the possibility of transmitting power by a wire, and converting it again into mechanical energy, is a strange story of the human blindness that almost always attends an acuteness, a thinking power, a prescience, that is the characteristic of humanity alone, but which so often stops short of results. This discovery has been attributed to accident alone; the accident of an employ mistaking the uses of wires and fastening their ends in the ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... little child. What would you have, my friend? I joined my hands as in my younger days, I felt too wretched, too forsaken, I had too keen a need of a superhuman help, of a divine power which should think and determine for me, which should lull me and carry me on with its eternal prescience. How great at first was the confusion, the aberration of my poor brain, under the frightful, heavy blow which fell upon it! I spent a score of nights without being able to sleep, thinking that I should surely go mad. All sorts of ideas warred within me; I passed through ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... little did I then think that the very first news I should hear from Mrs. Smith, when I next came into the country, would be that Barton cottage was taken: and I felt an immediate satisfaction and interest in the event, which nothing but a kind of prescience of what happiness I should experience from it, can account for. Must it not have been so, Marianne?" speaking to her in a lowered voice. Then continuing his former tone, he said, "And yet this house you would spoil, Mrs. Dashwood? You would rob it of its simplicity ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... teachers of the primitive Church. And now it is conventionally used to denote a somewhat less honourable class. "The prophets of our day" are many. From the positive style they have adopted, you would suppose that the gift of prescience had come upon them in a far more absolute form than upon the prophets of old. With more dogmatism and less authority do they pronounce upon "the times and seasons." Though failure on failure happens, this seems rather ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... cannot foresee or control. Many events may thus be casual, accidental, or unexpected to men, which are not so to the supreme governing Intelligence. The first part of the position is proved by the general evidence which warrants us in ascribing omniscience, and especially an unerring prescience, to the Divine Mind; and it cannot be denied, without virtually ascribing ignorance to God. The second part of the position is established by some of the most familiar facts of experience. We know and feel that however ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... all this perfectly coolly and in full possession of my reason; I have perfect prescience of what my resolve entails, and of this blind rush towards death. I feel that my very minutes are numbered, and that I no longer have anything in my skull, in which some fire, though I do not quite ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... community that by contrast ordinary persons seem to be without character; such men are therefore called, distinctively, 'characters'; and it is a matter of common experience that, whether through the unconscious prescience of parents or through that felicitous sense of propriety which often guides the hazards of destiny, they usually bear names to match their qualities. Meshach Myatt! Meshach Myatt! What piquant curious syllables to roll glibly off the tongue, and to repeat for the pleasure of repetition! ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... Burroughs, I shall quote the following letters received by him from David A. Wasson, a Unitarian clergyman of Massachusetts, and a contributor to the early numbers of the "Atlantic." Their encouragement, their candor, their penetration, and their prescience entitle them to a high place in an attempt to trace the evolution of our author. One readily divines how much such appreciation and criticism meant to the ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... our chief institutions arise. By precept we may be taught their propriety; by example we may see their advantages. But until the necessity is personally felt they are sure to be neglected; and men wonder at their want of prescience and upbraid their shortsightedness when, with a sudden and sometimes startling success, the proposal they have slighted arises through ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... Austrian, nor weak and haughty Bourbon shall flame their colors from the palaces of France. No, my countryman! he who serves you, who leads your armies to victory, who raises your citizens to distinction, he whose courage is undaunted, he who has the power of prescience—is Napoleon. ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... it was draining the productive parts of the country, especially the South and West, for the profit of a lucky financial group in the Eastern States. He knew also that such financial groups are never national: he knew that the Bank had foreign backers, and he showed an almost startling prescience as to the evils that were to follow in the train of cosmopolitan finance, "more formidable and more dangerous than the naval and military power of an enemy." But above all he knew that the Bank was ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... is free-will reconcileable, either with the influence of motive upon will? or with the order of the universe, prescribed by the Deity? or, with his prescience? For that, which his infinite mind prescribes or foresees, ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... the generals are in consultation, for all the armies are in the same lamentable predicament—to the great triumph of Col. N., whose prescience is triumphantly vindicated! But Gen. Wise, when I mentioned these things to him, said we would starve in the midst of plenty, meaning that Col. N was incompetent to hold ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... to signify the time fixed in the decrees of heaven for the period of life. The record of futurity is, indeed, no accurate expression, but as we only know transactions past or present, the language of men affords no term for the volumes of prescience, in which future events may ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... (helped by the fact that Sister Mary was on duty at breakfast-time, so that I escaped the addition of punishment to hunger), and, as the week wore slowly by, hope rose in my breast once more, and with it a return of what I now regard as the common-sense prescience which made me hesitate to adopt a swagman's life. I could not honestly say that I had any definite ideas as to another and more reputable sort of occupation or career. As yet, I had not. But I did vaguely feel that there would be derogation in becoming what ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... silence. He had deciphered the pencilled scrawl with difficulty. The name was Catherine Pursill, Charleswood, Surrey. It remained in his mind for a special reason. Sisily was afraid she might lose the paper (perhaps, like her mother, she had some prescience of the future) and he had endeavoured to divert her thoughts by making "memory pictures" of the name and address after the method of a thought reader. He had told her to picture a cat sitting on a window ledge, and that would fix the name ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees |
