"Psychic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to the human subject and consider a few examples of what is usually called the psychic side of our nature. Walt Whitman was quite right when he said that we are not all included between our hat and our boots; we shall find that our modes of consciousness and powers of action are not entirely restricted to our physical body. The ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... encouraging message from his father, who had failed to identify himself satisfactorily, but declared that everything was "on a higher plane" in his present state of being, and that all life was "continuous and progressive." Mrs. Horner spoke of herself as a "psychic"; but otherwise she seemed oddly unpretentious and matter-of-fact; and Eugene had no doubt at all of her sincerity. He was sure that she was not an intentional fraud, and though he departed in a state of annoyance with himself, he came to the ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... or an almighty State or an almighty anything, a huge misty symbol which demands everything you've got and gives in return only a feeling of belonging." Dalgetty's voice was harsh. "In short, you can't stand on your own psychic feet. You can't face the truth that man is a lonely creature and that his purpose must come from ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... the now disembodied voice. "What we call spirit, psychic force, hypnosis, spiritualism, the fourth dimension, is really only life on another scale of vibration. If we could see the whole scale, we would recognize it as a vast, coherent, perfectly natural and rational whole, in which we human beings fill but a very insignificant part. That, ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... the character of the factors that have ever been acting on the Japanese psychic nature, we see clearly that the characteristics under consideration are not to be attributed to her inherent race nature, but may be sufficiently accounted for by reference to the social order ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... possessed by the spirits of dead folks; drunkards by drunkards' spirits who wanted drink so badly they got into living bodies to satisfy their craving that even death couldn't kill. I used to laugh at him as a mad psychic. But I'm hanged if it doesn't look as if there's something in it. You know I couldn't talk to you like that, little girl, don't you? You forget that this is ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... Prof. Foster had been a man worthy the steel of Mr. Darrow. Not that Prof. Foster was an unscrupulous optimist. He was merely an intellectual whose congenital tendencies were idealistic, just as Mr. Darrow's psychic and subconscious tendencies were anti-idealistic. And apart from this divergence of congenital tendencies Mr. Darrow and Prof. Foster had a great deal in common. They both loved argument. They both doted upon ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... with soft violet eyes—and it was as though some psychic bathhouse attendant had poured ice water down his spine. For he had seen that look before, that liquid introspective look in the velvet eyes of cattle. He shivered. For a moment he had been thinking of them as human. And somehow the lack ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... and a redheaded man with his throat cut, had won him the deepest respect of the village, or rather hamlet, of Ardrochan. Twice he had constrained himself to wait in the tower till dusk, in the hope that his fearful, but inquiring, spirit would be gratified by the sight of one or other of these psychic curiosities. ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... he read in a letter he had found in a hallway, what he knew of those dark events in South Africa, now to culminate in a bitter war, and what, with the mysterious psychic instinct of race, he divined darkly and powerfully, all kept his eyes unsleeping and his mind disordered. More than any one, he knew of the inner story of the Baas' vrouw during the past week and years; also he had knowledge of what was soon ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... his friends and acquaintances who greeted him when he walked abroad were left unnoticed; his gaze fixed dreamily on space before him. What had happened? Had he come into possession of a new mine, or was he engaged in locating one through means of that psychic sense or inner vision of the seer which he seemed to possess? Had the real cause of his perturbation been guessed—that a woman's smile had suddenly opened heaven's gates to him, a ripple of laughter would have gone the rounds of Santa Fe. The ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... I said seriously, "judging by your eyes, I should say that you are remarkably psychic, and most people who are psychic are superstitious up ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... of the fall is to me a very absurd one. There was never an ideal state in the past, but there will be in the future. The Genesis allegory simply typifies the first awakening of consciousness of good and evil—of two wills in a mind hitherto only animal-psychic. ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... their union and separation to obey constant laws, is what a natural philosopher will inevitably do so soon as his interest is not merely to utter experience but to understand it. Democritus brought this scientific ideal to its ultimate expression. By including psychic existence in his atomic system, he indicated a problem which natural science has since practically abandoned but which it may some day be compelled to take up. The atoms of Democritus seem to us gross, even for chemistry, and their quality would have to undergo great transformation ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... spiritualism; he disliked spiritualists. The difference is tremendous. Unfortunately many of the interpreters of spiritualism have degraded it into a kind of blatant necromancy which is in no way dignified or useful. It is entirely opposed to proper psychic research. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... looking up at the interruption, was caught in this flood of charm and good will. Harry Banks, feeling a psychic current running about the room, looked up also; and that smile caught him. It carried away the last trace of his perverse mood. And Bertram heaved himself down the stairs and crossed at once to seat himself ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... me in quite a superior sort of way, such a smile as would have become the face of Malvolio, as he answered me, "The fly, my dear sir, has one striking feature. It's wings are typical of the aerial powers of the psychic faculties. The ancients did well when they typified the soul as ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... dangerous. She was young, the slimness of her shoulders and the narrow steel-chained wrists told me how very young she was, but her face had seen weather and storms, and her dark eyes had weathered worse psychic storms than that. She did not flinch at the sight of my scars, and met my gaze without ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... letter, written on a palm-leaf, dropped from the ceiling, but every one except Lone Sahib felt that letters were not what the occasion demanded. There should have been cats, there should have been cats,—full-grown ones. The letter proved conclusively that there had been a hitch in the Psychic Current which, colliding with a Dual Identity, had interfered with the Percipient Activity all along the main line. The kittens were still going on, but owing to some failure in the Developing Fluid, they were not materialized. The air was thick with letters for a few days afterward. Unseen hands ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... change in the matter and method of education. This instinct is far stronger and has more very ostensive outcrops than in any other age and land, and it is less controlled by the authority of school or the home. It is a period of very rapid, if not fulminating psychic expansion. It is the natal hour of new curiosities, when adult life first begins to exert its potent charm. It is an age of exploration, of great susceptibility, plasticity, eagerness, pervaded by the instinct to try and plan in ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... and even he was no longer in need of constant attention. With the relaxing of the strain came Philip's utter collapse. The fever was on him, and for weeks he talked deliriously of English lanes, of his sister Kate, of his rise in the service, but never of Eva Thornhill. It was as if some psychic power guarded his lips and loyally ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... and I found nothing more to say, for I knew quite well his words were true, and that I was the fool, not he. Up to a certain stage in the adventure he kept ahead of me easily, and I think I felt annoyed to be out of it, to be thus proved less psychic, less sensitive than himself to these extraordinary happenings, and half ignorant all the time of what was going on under my very nose. He knew from the very beginning, apparently. But at the moment I wholly missed the point of his words about the necessity ...
— The Willows • Algernon Blackwood
... desire produces a series of obscure movements in consciousness which eat at the soul as electricity is generated in a storage battery, and this accumulation of psychic energy must needs produce a ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... love, the deathless, in his blood, life seemed hard, brutally hard. Everything was hard, and wrong. He had come down here for practical purposes, he had come needing every ounce of his energies for those purposes, yet, day by day, and minute by minute, he was being confronted by psychic or moral crises, of one kind and another, that used up all the force in him. Here and now the demand upon him was terrific. His love for Sally Madeira had grown upon him daily, hourly, engaging all that was best in him, pulling him away beyond his old best, inspiring, and remaking ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... to be a publisher, And publish massive tomes Written in a massive style by blokes with massive domes— Science books, and histories of Egypt's day and Rome's, Books of psycho-surgery to mine the minds of momes, And solemn pseudo-psychic stuff to tell where Topsy roams When her poor clay is put away beneath the spreading holms; Books about electrocuting little seeds with ohms To sternly show them how to grow in sands, and clays, and loams, And bravely burst infinitives, ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... captain said, and cursed himself for the roughness in his tone. Though maybe no orator could persuade this boy. What did he know of psychic breaking stress, who had never been tried to his own limit? "We'll have to keep the secret, you and I, or—" No, what was the use? Within Mardikian's small experience, it was so much more natural to believe that ...
— The Burning Bridge • Poul William Anderson
... political and intellectual tendencies) of all moral barriers. They walked through the paths of wickedness with the serenity with which they would have trod the ways of righteousness; seeing no boundary, exercising their psychic limbs equally in the open and permitted spaces and in the forbidden. They plucked the fruit of evil without a glance behind them, without a desperate setting of their teeth; plucked it openly, calmly, as ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... in whom the psychic faculties are more prone to activity than in others is certain, as also some in whom these powers are native, by spiritual or hereditary succession; all of which may be determined from their genitures by the astrological art. In others, the determination ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... impression that she will—they never fail me. You know I've a singularly magnetic organisation. A great spiritualist in Boston once told me I only needed developing to exhibit extraordinary powers. But I hadn't the time or the patience to go in thoroughly for psychic development. Besides it's really a very ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... recognize in the memory of that first impression one glimpse of the race-soul, with its impersonal lovableness and its impersonal weaknesses—one glimpse of the nature of a life in which the Occidental, dwelling alone, feels a psychic comfort comparable only to the nervous relief of suddenly emerging from some stifling atmospheric pressure into thin, clear, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... countenance any theory of psychic additions to the object known in perception. For example, what is given in perception is the green grass. This is an object which we know as an ingredient in nature. The theory of psychic additions would ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... more sensitive soul the effect of colours is deeper and intensely moving. And so we come to the second main result of looking at colours: THEIR PSYCHIC EFFECT. They produce a corresponding spiritual vibration, and it is only as a step towards this spiritual vibration that the elementary physical impression is ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... and are chiefly of interest as presenting some physiologic basis for phenomena that are sufficiently obvious. The influence of the war-chant upon the warrior is known even to savage tribes. We are accustomed to regard this influence simply as an ordinary case of psychic stimuli ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... took a seat in a far corner of the concourse. He read but little and that without understanding. His mind was quite fully occupied in peering over the top of the sheet in the direction of the sheds. Finally he became convinced, by certain psychic processes of the mind, that some one was staring at him. He looked about in all directions. At last his eyes rested on a squat, misshapen figure far over by the ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... love-affair is of staggering import. Who are we to question this, when nine-tenths of us owe our existence to a summer flirtation? And while our graver economic and social and psychic "problems" (to settle some one of which is nowadays the object of all ponderable fiction) are doubtless worthy of most serious consideration, you will find, my dear madam, that frivolous love-affairs, little and big, were shaping history and playing ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... girl, who is also brought upon the scene. The other girl is represented as having married an old country parson, who sought a wife simply as a helpmeet in his work. By thus complicating the situations, room has been given for subtle psychic development. The action is all concentrated into one morning in the parlor of the old inn, reminding one much of the method of Ibsen in his plays of grouping his action about a final catastrophe. At the inn one is introduced first to the two gamblers in talk, the young man having won his ten ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... inclined towards the cult is that if these symbols convey anything at all, that thing is mysticism. The mystics are right. The familiar phrases, terms, and symbols of mysticism are not meaningless, and a glance at them shows that they do tend to express and evoke a somewhat definite psychic condition. ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... that her mind was expanding, was beginning to understand the psychic meaning of things; and these little scattered gleams in the landscape gave her, all at once, a keen sense of the isolation of all human lives, a feeling that everything detaches, separates, draws one far away from ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Cremation; Col. Henry S. Olcott; Jesse Shepard; Prohibition; Longevity; Increase of insanity; Extraordinary Fasting; Spiritual Papers Cranioscopy (Continued) Practical Utility of Anthropology in its Psychic Department ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... almost as an imprudence. You desire "Orpheus," "Tasso," and "Festklange" from me, dear friend! But have you considered that "Orpheus" has no proper working out section, and hovers quite simply between bliss and woe, breathing out reconciliation in Art? Pray do not forget that "Tasso" celebrates no psychic triumph, which an ingenious critic has already denounced (probably mindful of the "inner camel," which Heine designates as an indispensable necessity of German aestheticism!), and the "Festklange" sounded too confusedly noisy even to our friend ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... or lost," Curtis reflected. "Yet I don't feel as if that had happened, somehow! I trust my feelings a good deal—especially since this war, that's made us all a bit psychic—don't you?" ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... it is impossible for a steam engine to run with all its valves open, so is it impossible for you to waste your energy and run at your top speed. Each neuron in the gray layers of the brain is a psychic center of thought and action, each one is pulsating an intelligent force of some kind, and when this force, your thoughts and motions, are kept in cheek by a conservative, systematic and concentrated mind, the result will be magnetism, vitality and health. The muscles, bones, ligaments, feet, hands ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... once more this man whose armor of arrogance remained unpierced ... Whatever the urge, it had keyed him to a quivering determination. He had wondered what stupidity possessed him to send Ginger in warning to a man like Hilmer. ... With almost psychic power he had created for himself the scene at the depot with Ginger pouring her tremulous message into contemptuous ears. For it was certain that Hilmer had been contemptuous. ... Afterward, standing before the north gate of Hilmer's shipyards, a man at ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... of a Swiss, or a Belgian, literature. In this sense, too, it was no doubt once possible, with no small measure of justification, to deny the existence of an American, as distinguished from an English, literature. Yet, despite the subtle psychic bonds that link identity of speech to similarity of thought, the environment (which helps to shape pronunciation as well as vocabulary and the language itself) is, from the standpoint of literature, little removed from language as a determining ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... occupations of mankind. Let us call this psychotheism. With the mental, moral, and social characteristics in these gods are associated the powers of nature; and they differ from nature-gods chiefly in that they have more distinct psychic characteristics. ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... here long?" he asked, sipping his beer. He felt dimly that that imitation of love which must immediately take place demanded some sort of psychic propinquity, a more intimate acquaintance, and on that account, despite his impatience, began the usual conversation, which is carried on by almost all men—when alone with prostitutes, and which compels the ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... of Energy through Stimulation of the Distance Receptors, or through Representation of Injury (Psychic) ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... lap-dog sleeping quietly to the east of the bandstand should suddenly fall through the parasol of a lady on the west—in a slightly singed condition due to the extreme velocity of its movements through the air. In these absurd days, too, when we are all trying to be as psychic, and silly, and superstitious as possible! People got up and trod on other people, chairs were overturned, the Leas policeman ran. How the matter settled itself I do not know—we were much too anxious to disentangle ourselves from the affair and get out of range of the ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... he employs the activities of a German Professor, who produces what one might call a Kultur of the sterility germ. However, these cheery projects go astray, though in precisely what manner I have no very clear idea. But the end came at a gathering where the Prince played psychic music, and a chance union of hands between hero and heroine transmuted the former from "a dilettante" and "polished ladies' man" to "a virile male filled with the blasting vehemence of primary passions." Incidentally it proved ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 19, 1917 • Various
... rebelled at doing this. It was as though to go below the waters even in this condition choked her until she must gasp for breath. It was evidently some secret which lay there—the location of some shrine or hiding place which he most desired to locate through her while in this psychic state, for he insisted upon this while she struggled against it. Her head was lifted now as though, before finally driven to take the plunge, she sought aid—not from anyone here in the room, but from someone upon the borders of the lake where, in her trance, she ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... the art of therapeutics, mental healing has been a large factor in the cure. This was not recognized, of course, for only in the last century has the psychic element been admitted to any extent as a therapeutic agent. We can read back now, however, and see what a large element this really was. The cruder the art, the more powerful was the mental influence. The ways of primitive therapeutics are completely hidden from us except what we can gather from ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... handicaps this race will have in building religions? The greatest is this: they have such small psychic powers. The over-activity of their minds will choke the birth of such powers, or dull them. The race will be less in touch with Nature, some day, than its dogs. It will substitute the compass for its once innate sense of direction. ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism" "Advanced Course in Yogi Philosophy, etc."; "Hatha Yoga"; "Psychic Healing"; "Science of ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... no sooner spoken than I realized, with a sudden access of horror what I had done. In guessing I had sinned, but in guessing wrong I had ruined myself. All this came to me instantly and positively, as by a psychic message of unparalleled definiteness from the dead ancestors whose portraits hung upon the paneling. It was as though they had joined in a great ghostly shout of execration, which was the more awful because it was a silent shout that jarred upon the senses rather than the ear drums. ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... was enough to show that his deep interest in these psychic matters was intellectual rather than spiritual. There was no trace of asceticism upon his heavy face, but there was much mental force in his huge, dome-like skull, which curved upward from amongst his thinning locks, like a snowpeak above ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... huge numbers of abortions and the multiplication of foundlings' homes and orphans' asylums, infanticide is still an occasional crime in all countries. As to woman's share in the practice, let us add this word from Havelock Ellis, taken from the chapter on "Morbid Psychic Phenomena" in his ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... more palatable thing than dried meat-powder to which boiling water has been added. In the same way, a dry, hard biscuit plus liquid is a different thing from a spongy loaf of yeast bread with its high percentage of water. One must reckon with the psychic factor in eating. When sledging, one does not look for food well served as long as the food is hot, nourishing and filling. So the usage of weeks and a wolfish appetite make hoosh a most delicious preparation; but ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... of the society defined as "the study of the psychic powers latent in man" is pursued only by a portion of the members; those who wish to understand more clearly the working of certain laws of nature and who wish to give themselves up more completely to that life in which ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... and so, too, with spirit and matter in general. Spirit and Matter are not to be regarded as independent or as ranged against one another from all eternity. Matter is a product of Spirit or Consciousness, the underlying psychic force. "For want of a better word," says Bergson, "we have called it Consciousness. But we do not mean the narrowed consciousness that functions in each of us." [Footnote: Creative Evolution, p. 250 (Fr. p. 258).] It is rather super-Consciousness than ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... we are going to do, we should not know what we were going to decide. So long as we are undecided, we cannot foresee what we are going to decide; for under the conditions in which we live that part of the psychic process takes place outside of our consciousness. And since we do not know its causes, we cannot tell what will be its effects. Only after we have come to a certain decision can we imagine that it was due to our voluntary ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... you like," responded the liberal minded schoolmaster, "provided it is limited to your permitted field of psychic activity." ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... little the talk drifted into psychic research, and got lost in stories of "appearances" and "long-distance" communications. It appeared to me that intelligent people accepted this sort of story as true on evidence on which they wouldn't ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... eight days the swelling subsides and the joint returns to normal. A remarkable feature of the condition is that the effusion into the joint recurs at regular intervals, it may be over a period of years. Psychic conditions have been known to induce attacks, and sometimes to abort them or even to cause their disappearance. Hence it has been recommended that treatment by suggestion should be employed along with tonic doses of quinine ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... conclusively his own mental struggles, that he had called a halt, as it were, to his own intellectual development.... The name and family of the snake, hence, meant to him the least important things about it. He caught, wildly yet consistently, at the psychic links that bound the snake and Nature and himself together with all creation. Troops of adventurous thoughts had all his life "gone west" to colonize this land of speculative dream. True to his idea, he "thought" with his emotions as much as with his brain, and in the broken record of the adventure ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... was J. N. Free—the "Immortal J. N.," as he called himself, a gaunt, cadaverous figure in broad hat and linen duster, with hair flowing over his shoulders, who stalked into the offices at unseemly hours to "raise the veil" of ignorance and error, and "relieve the pressure" of psychic congestion in a town by turning upon it the batteries of ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... is going to happen up there"—he pointed to the distant mountains, then added—"to me, at least. I feel as though I were about to bid myself good-by—if you know what I mean. I hope that donkey of ours isn't a psychic donkey, or, if he is, that he'll listen to reason and be content with his escorts of flesh ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... witnesses to the supposed torture and killing of those who loved them. It was a tremendous psychic impact and served to drive their influence toward the side of the slaves. And even the adults slowly recognized the net loss to them of doing away with servants so skilled and useful in household tasks and caring for the ...
— Cubs of the Wolf • Raymond F. Jones
... lobe of the ear to the point of the shoulder—a passing maid with a tray of fruit upon her head—was enough to startle him with the richness of romance. It was not desire—but the great rousing abstraction, Woman, which descends upon full-powered young men at certain times with the power of a psychic visitation. His heart poured out in a greeting that girdled the world, ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... to power largely in uniform ways; that psychic foundation on which they draw is always grossly human, rather dull when you understand it, always conventional;—and the great Bismarck ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... Paris nocturne might be heard by the pensive traveller if he were not too intent on diabolising. Now, he has found out that Lucifer was chez lui everywhere. Je vise Satan et ses dogmes. All his psychic faculties have concentrated into a transcendental apparatus for scenting devildom, and he mournfully comes forward to tell us, with a variation of Fludd's utterance; Diabolus, in quam, diabolus ubique repertus est, et omnia diabolus et diabolus. "Let it suffice to say that the ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... entitled, "The Psychic Life of Insects," Professor Bouvier says that we must be careful not to credit the little winged fellows with intelligence when they behave in what seems like an intelligent manner. They may be only reacting. I would like to confront ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... shook in my shoes this afternoon. Didn't you notice the lurid mixture of colors I was daubing on my block? And all because I knew you were having psychic thoughts and I was so afraid you would say what I thought you were thinking and startle Estelle. I wanted so much to know myself just what you were driving at with your watch-chains that I almost chewed my tongue off trying not ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... a new religion of words. There is no doubt that the damnation or salvation of an individual has often been determined by a religious crisis, in which the magic of words have worked their witchery. There is plenty of evidence that a psychic conversion will effect an actual revolution in the whole way of living of the victim or patient, as you like it. William James, in his "Varieties of Religious Experience," established that pretty definitely. When it comes to groups, races, nations, the outlook ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... unlike that which accompanies old age, as it is usually experienced by men and women. Such a condition makes the entrance to the path impossible, because the first step is one of difficulty and needs a strong man, full of psychic and physical vigor, ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... on, she produced an album, through which I now turned, inspecting the annual photographs of her blond brood, each of which was labelled with the statistics of physical growth and the tests of psychic development. ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... that they will publish shortly the long-delayed work of Kegan Van Roon, the celebrated American traveller, Orientalist and psychic investigator, dealing with his recent inquiries in China. It will be remembered that Mr. Van Roon undertook to motor from Canton to Siberia last winter, but met with unforeseen difficulties in the province of Ho-Nan. He fell into the hands of a body of fanatics and was fortunate to escape with his ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... everyone except Lone Sahib felt that letters were not what the occasion demanded. There should have been cats, there should have been cats—full-grown ones. The letter proved conclusively that there had been a hitch in the psychic current which, colliding with a dual identity, had interfered with the percipient activity all along the main line. The kittens were still going on, but owing to some failure in the developing fluid, they were not materialized. The air was thick with letters for a few ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... that an avenue of sense is still open is sufficiently demonstrated by the readiness with which, in hypnotic experiments, seemingly insensible subjects respond to the suggestions of the operator. Here, therefore, we find our clue to the solution of the mystery of Lurancy Vennum. A victim of a psychic catastrophe, the cause of which must be left to conjecture in the absence of knowledge of her previous history, she was placed in precisely the position of the adventurous Mr. Tout and of the inert subjects of the hypnotist's art. That is to say, having lost momentarily all knowledge ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... definition, if adhered to strictly, would lead to confusion of thought perhaps more serious than a less accurate use of the term. Careful investigation of the relation of the different psychic communities to one another reveals the fact that geographically the areas of individual community interest overlap one another; and that in the better organized regions the centers of interests coincide and it is only the boundaries of the several interests that ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... one radical particular Athalie differed from any individual of either sex ever recorded in the history of hypnotic therapeutics or of psychic phenomena. ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... suggest this limitation in him, whether it be a psychic subject he is to handle or an historical period he is to cover. His manner of cogitating a theme has always been in terms of the theatre, and he is willing to curtail any part of his theme for a "point." His explanation, therefore, of the growth of ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: In Mizzoura • Augustus Thomas
... it is easy to exaggerate the physical and mental evil effects of it. But what is beyond all question is that it produces bad psychic consequences, and does so leave men out of conceit with themselves that when they realize that they have become victims to the habit their mental sufferings are often pitifully acute. Indeed, it is because my pity and sympathy have been so drawn out to many men I know ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... stories were at a premium, and any girl who could relate some creepy spiritual experience, which had happened to the second cousin of a friend of a friend of hers, was sure of a thrilled audience. This taste for the psychic was particularly strong among the girls of the Sixth Form, who leaned towards its intellectual and scientific aspects. They despised vulgar apparitions, but discussed such abstruse problems as phantasms of the living, thought transference, will power, hypnotism, ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... staggers one's thought. The most priceless possession of any child, I often say to my classes in education, is made up of their eyes, their ears, their noses, their tongues, and their finger tips—simply because thru them is poured the nourishment that sustains psychic life and ministers to the ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... in the wanderings of the many hallways, and from somewhere there came an occasional violent puff of wind. The cat stuck by my feet, with the hair on its back raised menacingly. I don't like cats; there is something psychic about them. ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... credited with the invention not many years afterwards. If we accept the principle on which I am basing my argument, that in bringing out the springs of our progress we should assign the first place to the birth of those psychic agencies which started men on new lines of thought, then surely was the ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... she laughed, "your wonderful clairvoyant gift and your trained psychic knowledge of the processes by which a personality may be disintegrated and destroyed—these strange studies you've been experimenting ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... history of mankind, in fact as far back as we can trace history, we find these psychic differentiations, as factors in the production of war. There are significant extensions and also restrictions of the consciousness of kind pertaining to the life of man, as distinguished from animals. Animals have not sufficient intelligence to establish such perfect group identities ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... out occasionally in Y.M.C.A. activities, and to do some visiting among the poor French families and refugees in Boulogne, close to which city our hospital was located. I could also visit other Units, and give lantern shows, which had, I thought, special value when psychic treatment was badly needed. Shell-shock was but very imperfectly understood at the beginning of the war. The football matches and athletic sports did not need the asset of being an antidote to shell-shock to attract my patronage. Never in my life had I realized quite so keenly what ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... a psychic process ignoring mechanical facts in the mind, nor a purely physical process ignoring the psychic facts in the body. It is a putting of the facts in a man's mind and the facts in his body inextricably together in his consciousness—as they should ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Coming Science," "The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism," "Death: Its Causes and Phenomena," "Modern Psychical Phenomena," "Your Psychic Powers: and How to Develop Them," "Higher Psychical Development," "True Ghost ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... that, as I have already said, it is a by-product of the great, complicated world-machine that we call modern civilization. Its specific causes, so far as they can be ascertained, are, on the educational side, the development of increased nervous and psychic sensibility, which makes men feel more acutely all wants, deprivations, misfortunes, and sufferings; and, on the manufacturing side, a monotony of employment which wearies and exhausts the body while it gives little exercise to the educated mind and leaves the latter free ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... endlessly. The apparent discontinuity of the psychical life is then due to our attention being fixed on it by a series of separate acts: actually there is only a gentle slope; but in following the broken line of our acts of attention, we think we perceive separate steps. True, our psychic life is full of the unforeseen. A thousand incidents arise, which seem to be cut off from those which precede them, and to be disconnected from those which follow. Discontinuous though they appear, however, in point of fact they stand ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... parade runs swift the psychic cackle Like thorns beneath a boiling pot that crackle. And the angels say to Yahveh looking down From the alabaster railing, on the town, O, cackle, cackle, cackle, crack and crack We wish we ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... "psychic theory," according to which "man consists of body and soul." Here the Professor shows a lucid interval. He points out that if the soul is really hampered by the body, it is strange that a blow on a man's ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... blindness we turn from the worship of the Creator to that of His creation, forgetting that all the visible universe is but the outcome or expression of the hidden Divine Intelligence behind it. What of the marvels of the age!—the results of science!—the strange psychic prescience and knowledge of things more miraculous yet to be!—these are but hints and warnings of the approach of God himself—'coming in a cloud with power ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... all. In this respect they resemble American girls, but only in this respect, for whereas there is a type of Polish young girl—and a charming type she is—I never in my life saw what I considered a really typical American girl. You cannot typify the psychic charm of the young American girl. It is altogether ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... suffering or, at the very least—it is often the same thing—of married life. Best of all, she should have a lover, a fierce and brutal lover who beats and caresses her in turns; for every woman worthy of the name is subject and entitled to fluctuating psychic needs—needs which must be satisfied to the very core, if the master is to ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... substance into atoms, molecules, tissues, and the like counted for nothing—for him the body would be simply Primary Substance entirely responsive to his will. Yet his reverence for the Law of Harmony would prevent any disposition to play psychic pranks with it, and he would use his power over the body only to meet ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... Gustav Fechner published his classical work called Psychophysik. That title introduced a new word into the vocabulary of science. Fechner explained it by saying, "I mean by psychophysics an exact theory of the relation between spirit and body, and, in a general way, between the physical and the psychic worlds." The title became famous and the brunt of many a controversy. So also did another phrase which Fechner introduced in the course of his book—the phrase "physiological psychology." In making that happy collocation of words Fechner ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... before any of these psychic waves were discussed or given the least credence, I remember a very celebrated American doctor telling me, as a curious fact, that he often got his patients over the crisis of typhoid fever by telling them cheerfully beforehand ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... influence on the study of spiritual experience, and may even prove to be the starting point of a new apologetic. Those who are inclined either to fear or to resent the application to this experience of those laws which—as we are now gradually discovering—govern the rest of our psychic life, or who are offended by the resulting demonstrations of continuity between our most homely and most lofty reactions to the universe, might take to themselves the plain words of Thomas a Kempis: "Thou art a man and not God, thou art flesh ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... are given to some people and some races. You read books—I read people. I wanted to warn you, and I do so. This has been lucky in a way, this meeting. Please don't treat what I've said lightly. Your plans are in danger and you also." Was the psychic and fortune-telling instinct of the Romany alive in her and working involuntarily, doing that faithfully which her people did so faithlessly? The darkness which comes from intense feeling had gathered underneath her eyes, and gave them a look of pensiveness not in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... stuff in which he has wrought is so novel in the poet's hands. Psychology itself is comparatively a new and modern study, as a distinct science; but a psychological poet, who has made it his business to clothe psychic abstractions 'in sights and sounds', is entirely a novel ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... political entity which would be an instrument in the hands of the Central Empires. The Bulgar knows the Turk, to whom he is more akin by race habits and temperament than to any of the Slav peoples, understands his psychic state, his mode of feeling and thinking, and is therefore qualified to serve as link between the Oriental and the Western. It was in view of this eventuality that the slow, plodding work of grafting Kultur on ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... his meaningless stare at the sea. Gyp turned away. She crossed back to the other side of the stream, but did not go in for a long time, sitting in the pine wood till the evening gathered and the stars crept out in a sky of that mauve-blue which the psychic say is the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... adventure had a greater influence on Helena's psychic development than might have been expected. The brutal outbreak of a natural instinct, the undisguised exhibition of which in the community of men is punished with a term of imprisonment, haunted her as if ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... ideals in a group which is the beginning of a nation; and the more strongly the ideal is held the more powerful becomes the national being, because the synchronous vibration of many minds in harmony brings about almost unconsciously a psychic unity, a coalescing of the subconscious being of many. It is that inner unity which constitutes the ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... Laws of Psychic Phenomena," Dr. Thomas J. Hudson lays down this proposition: "That the subjective mind is constantly amenable to control by suggestion." It is easy, when we once understand and appreciate this great fact, to see how the body builds, or rather ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... 5. The Valentinians conceive of three kinds of men: the pneumatic [or spiritual], the choic [or material],(45) and the psychic [or animal]; such were Cain, Abel, and Seth. These three natures are no longer in one person, but in the race. The material goes to destruction. The animal, if it chooses the better part, finds repose in an intermediate place; but if ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... believe in the reality of spiritual communications,' particularly dangerous in a case where 'spiritual communications,' were not in question! The question was, did an indicator move, or not, under a certain amount of pressure? Indiscreetly enough, to be sure, the pressure was attributed to 'psychic force,' and perhaps that was what Dr. Carpenter had in his mind, when he warned Dr. Huggins against 'the proclivity to believe in the reality of ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... can only reply that in this ascertainment of the character of Being lies an almost infinite speculative task. Let the voluminous considerations by which all modern thought converges toward idealistic or pan-psychic conclusions speak for me. Let the pages of a Hodgson, of a Lotze, of a Renouvier, reply whether within the limits drawn by purely empirical theism the speculative faculty finds not, and shall not always find, enough to do. But do it little or much, its place in ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... the Doctor, "that it would have happened without her coming. Undoubtedly it was she who supplied the necessary psychic conditions. There was that about her—a sort of atmosphere. That quaint archaic French of hers—King Arthur and the round table and Merlin; it seemed to recreate it all. An artful minx, that is the only explanation. But while she was looking at you, out ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... matter—Bubbles would very seldom discuss with him any of the strange happenings in which she was so absorbed. And yet, now and again, almost as if in spite of herself, she would ask him if he would care to come to a seance, or invite him to witness an exceptionally remarkable manifestation at some psychic friend's house. ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... Lucia's views on psychic phenomena were clearly known to Riseholme; those who produced them were fraudulent, those who were taken in by them were dupes. Consequently there was irony in the baby-talk of ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... and 8, the weaker force will be reduced so much more rapidly than the stronger that when it has been reduced to zero the stronger force will have a value of 5.69. The values mentioned indicated the actual fighting strength—strength made up of all the factors—material, physical, and psychic—that constituted it. Of course, none of these factors can ever be accurately compared; but nevertheless the tables seemed to prove that in a contest between two forces whose total strengths are as 10 and 8 one force will be reduced to zero, while the other will be reduced ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... same sense in which they exist among physical phenomena, that is, as fixed relations among variable forces. Human society has in it another element than mechanical causation or physical necessity, namely, the psychic factor, and this so increases the complexity of social phenomena that it is doubtful if we can formulate any such hard and fixed laws of social phenomena as of physical phenomena. This is not saying, however, that social phenomena cannot be understood and that there are not principles which are ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... it was as if he were impelled by a dull and pitiless logic; he waived all defense; his confession to the murder of Amos Carmack was straightforward and factual, unvarying to the point of boredom, insistent with repetition—and in the socio-legal aspect there was the rub! Whether it was true psychic shock or mere cunning, there seemed to be a blind spot in Beardsley's responses, a stumbling reticence to elaborative detail that left the Citizen's Disposition Council with a problem on its hands baffling as it was unprecedented. Judicially they were safe. ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse |
