"Volition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... now lying at the foot of my bed thinking matters out, and bids me tell you that after various attempts to escape Home Rule, not being (like her mistress) one of those natures made perfect through suffering, she is only 'kept alive by the force of her own volition,' in this house that is full of old maids and has nothing better in it than one old cat, and he isn't worth hunting, being destitute of a tail. Naturally she is doing her best (like somebody else) to keep herself unspotted from that world which is a source of so much temptation, ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... dangerous tendency. When the traces of individual action upon nations are lost, it often happens that the world goes on to move, though the moving agent is no longer discoverable. As it becomes extremely difficult to discern and to analyze the reasons which, acting separately on the volition of each member of the community, concur in the end to produce movement in the old mass, men are led to believe that this movement is involuntary, and that societies unconsciously obey some superior force ruling over them. But even when the general ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... the divine existence. He first proves the existence of personality and will,(569) and uses this idea for the purpose of exploring the outer world; arguing that matter is inert and not self-active, he regards matter in motion as indicating force, and therefore volition; uniformity in its motion as proving a law, and therefore an intelligent will,(570) in which wisdom, power, and goodness combine.(571) This being is God, to whom man is subject. The universe is universal order. The physical evil ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... one; he ascribes the success, the carrying out of the willing, to the will itself, and thereby enjoys an increase of the sensation of power which accompanies all success. "Freedom of Will"—that is the expression for the complex state of delight of the person exercising volition, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor of the order—who, as such, enjoys also the triumph over obstacles, but thinks within himself that it was really his own will that overcame them. In ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... I've learned to wait. [Sits. A bachelor at sixty, I found myself Encumbered with a ward—nay, not that— Enriched with female loveliness and grace Bequeathed unto me by a dying friend. Volition had no part in that, nor in My sudden recrudescency of love. I willed our marriage; but 'twas fate bestowed The joys I long had fled. Then came our life In Amsterdam; each day so filled with bliss It overflowed into the next, and days Of joy grew into weeks ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... of time; he would effect a moral eclipse of its influence. He loved Henrietta Temple. She should be his. Who could prevent him? Was he not an Armine? Was he not the near descendant of that bold man who passed his whole life in the voluptuous indulgence of his unrestrained volition! Bravo! he willed it, and it should be done. Everything yields to determination. What a fool! what a miserable craven fool had he been to have frightened himself with the flimsy shadows of petty worldly cares! He was born to follow his own pleasure; it was supreme; ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... of you. As to what that power is, I will not dare to say. There is such a power. I have had evidences of it. And you will undoubtedly have evidences of it. Now please be quiet, everybody. Touch the board very lightly, but firmly, Mrs. Story; but do nothing of your own volition." ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... Maurice that he was being swept away by the simple power of the emotion of Frontford. He felt the tears in his eyes, and almost without his volition his hand responded to the pressure of the hand that clasped it. He made a strong effort to call back ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... all signed, the songs prepared for him, when Ramponneau, worked upon by the Jansenists, suddenly refused to appear. In a statement drawn up before a notary, we read: "To-day appeared before me, the Sieur Jean Ramponneau, cabaretier, living in the basse Courtille, who has of his own free will and volition declared that the serious reflections which he has made upon the dangers and the obstacles to the salvation of those persons who appear upon the stage of a theatre, and upon the justness of the censures ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... psychology must be based upon the observation and classification of mental phenomena, as revealed in consciousness, and not constructed in an "independent" and a priori method. The most careful psychological analysis has resolved the whole complex phenomena of mind into thought, feeling, and volition.[61] These orders of phenomena are radically and essentially distinct. They differ not simply in degree but in kind, and it is only by an utter disregard of the facts of consciousness that they can be confounded. Feeling is not reason, nor can it ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... can hold commune. Idle thought! But still the living spirit in our frame, That loves not to behold a lifeless thing, Transfuses into all its own delights, Its own volition, sometimes with deep faith And sometimes with fantastic playfulness. Ah me! amus'd by no such curious toys Of the self-watching subtilizing mind, How often in my early school-boy days With most ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... become more cautious and cunning, and transmit these acquired faculties to their posterity. But not satisfied with such legitimate speculations, the French philosopher conceived that by repeated acts of volition animals might acquire new organs and attributes, and that in plants, which could not exert a will of their own, certain subtle fluids or organising forces might operate so as to ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... Street and a country house on Long Island; and who had applied to him to find her fugitive butler and a pint or two of family jewels. And, after her talk with the Tracer of Lost Persons, Mrs. Gatewood knew that her favorite among all her husband's friends, Mr. Kerns, would never of his own volition go near that same Marjorie Manners who had flirted with him to the very perilous verge before she told him why she was going to England—and who, now a widow, had returned with her five-year-old daughter to dwell once more in the ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... professor (professor of divinity though he was) were totally inadequate to restrain the inextinguishable laughter of the students, and sometimes even to repress his own. The long, sallow visage, the goggle eyes, the huge under-jaw, which appeared not to open and shut by an act of volition, but to be dropped and hoisted up again by some complicated machinery within the inner man, the harsh and dissonant voice, and the screech-owl notes to which it was exalted when he was exhorted to pronounce more distinctly,—all added fresh subject for mirth ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... verb, signifying "to exercise volition," in the past tense of the indicative. Have, a verb, in the infinitive, to understood. Been, a perfect part. of to be, referring to Johnson, Blair, and Lowth. Laughed at, perf. part, of to laugh at, ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... that bent above hers. This was a naked savage with hawk-like face. Yet the eyes were the ones that she had come to know so well, half tragic, somber, but clear and, toward her, tender, very, very tender. With a shuddering sigh, Rhoda looked away. But against her own volition she ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... not, but they never fired that volley. Our muskets seemed to poise and discharge themselves of their own volition, and a score of the villains, white and red, tumbled before us. Gardenier's men had recovered their senses as well, and, pouring in a deadly fusillade, dashed furiously forward with clubbed muskets upon the unmasked foe. These latter would now have retreated up the hill again, ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... perfectly well recognize the different mental states of volition implied by "lying," "sitting," and "standing," which are to some extent indicated to a beholder by a slight increase of lustre corresponding ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... called the god-inflicted diseases, that to his mind they were neither more nor less god-inflicted than all others. The doctrine of abstract entities was a kind of instinctive conciliation between the observed uniformity of the facts of nature, and their dependence on arbitrary volition; since it was easier to conceive a single volition as setting a machinery to work, which afterwards went on of itself, than to suppose an inflexible constancy in so capricious and changeable a thing as volition must then have appeared. But though the regime ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... his emotional nature had reached the saturation point. Without any conscious volition on his part, his feet carried him to the gate and refused to carry him farther. His voice then decided to speak for itself, and in strange, hollow tones he ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... they early observed that something happened in the world. The world was not dark, nor still, nor dead. The sun rose, and man awoke, and asked himself and the sunshine. 'Whence?' he said; 'stop, what is there? who is there?' Such an object as the sun cannot rise of its own volition. There is something behind it. At first the sun itself was considered a labourer; it accomplished the greatest work on earth, gave light, heat, life, growth, fruits. It was quite natural, then, to pay great honour to the sun; to be ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... Similarly the phenomena of prophecy, which the Jews ascribed to the Spirit of God, remain. There has never been a generation lacking in men who believe that their action and speech are being governed by a compelling force, separate from the ordinary process of volition. Those who have this experience seem to themselves to be, as it were, the spectators of their own deeds, or to be listening to their own utterances. Under its influence individuals, groups of men, or even nations, are carried away by inexplicable waves of passion or enthusiasm ...
— Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity • Kirsopp Lake
... are either to go home or not, does not prevent your freedom; because the liberty of choice between the two is compatible with that certainty. But if one of these events be certain now, you have no future power of volition. If it be certain you are to go home to-night, you must go home.' JOHNSON. 'If I am well acquainted with a man, I can judge with great probability how he will act in any case, without his being restrained by my judging. GOD may have this probability increased to certainty.' BOSWELL. ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... between the intelligence and the object. Similarly, all reasoning has an object; there must be matter on which to reason, whether this matter be supplied by the facts or the ideas. Again, a desire, a volition, an act of reflection, has need of a point of application. One does not will in the air, one wills something; one does not reflect in the void, one reflects over a fact or over ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... at the office of Colonel Mapleson an hour or so before the beginning of the opera. The arrangements perfected, he informed his client of what had been done. But there remained a kindly spot in the costumer's soul, and of his own volition he called on the manager in the afternoon of the day set apart for the coup in order to give him one more opportunity to save ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... that if a big case came my way I should be found able to do something with it something more, that is, than I had seen accomplished by the police of the District of Columbia since I had had the honor of being one of their number. Therefore, when I found myself plunged, almost without my own volition, into the Jeffrey Moore affair, I believed that the opportunity had come whereby I ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... reason why she should have chosen the southernmost bench; but she had chosen it. She had chosen it, afar off, while it was yet empty and Mr. Ollerenshaw was on his feet. When Mr. Ollerenshaw dropped into a corner of it the girl's first instinctive volition was to stop, earlier than she had intended, at one of ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... for victims. I believe that only a small proportion of the women who are in the houses of ill-fame—only a small proportion—make their way there of their own volition, and that small proportion are of the degenerate class who are born with a screw loose somewhere. From their babyhood they who are born with this taint—and we could, perhaps, trace that taint back—but born with that taint, they gradually go into that life—but they make a small proportion. The ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... uncertainty was setting her limbs a-quiver. Her elbow was touching his, her will driving her feet forward desperately. Suddenly she was gazing down, down, down, into black depths which seemed calling irresistibly and melting her power of muscular volition, while he with another step was on the very edge, leaning over and smiling. She dropped back convulsively. He was all happy absorption in the face of that abyss. How easy for him to topple over and go hurtling ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... finally controlled the situation. I mean that if they had failed for the first year or two because they couldn't help it they kept up the habit because they had—what shall I call it?—grown nervous. It really took some lurking volition to account for anything ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... impress us! What a thrill passes through the living, as it bends over the inanimate body, from which the spirit has departed! The clay that returns to the dust from which it sprung, the tenement that was lately endued with volition and life, the frame that exhibited a perfection of mechanism, deriding all human power, and confounding all human imagination, now an inanimate mass, rapidly decomposing, and soon to ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... does a man never kill a man? Why does a man never kill himself? Why is nothing ever accomplished? In real life murder, adultery, and suicide are of common occurrence; but Mr. James's people live in a calm, sad, and very polite twilight of volition. Suicide or adultery has happened before the story begins, suicide or adultery happens some years hence, when the characters have left the stage, but bang in front of the reader nothing happens. The suppression or maintenance of story in a novel is a matter of personal ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... Carson had hoped, to mellow things. Indeed, the succeeding weeks brought more trouble, and most of it came through the organ. Some of the rattling panels, in spite of every effort to make them fast, rattled the more. One night when the servants were alone in the house, of its own volition the organ sent forth, to break the still hours, a blood-curdling basso-profundo groan that suggested ghosts to their superstitious minds. The housemaid came to regard the instrument as something uncanny, and, even as the cook had done before her, shook the ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... has been followed by an act of volition, and each act of volition by a muscular action, which is composed of many minor actions; some so small that we can no more follow them than the player himself can perceive them; nevertheless, it ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... speak—my voice utterly failed me; I could only think to myself: "Is this fear? it is not fear!" I strove to rise—in vain; I felt as if weighed down by an irresistible force. Indeed, my impression was that of an immense and overwhelming power opposed to my volition—that sense of utter inadequacy to cope with a force beyond man's, which one may feel physically in a storm at sea, in a conflagration, or when confronting some terrible wild beast, or rather, perhaps, the shark of the ocean, I felt morally. Opposed to my will was ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... traditional past, and aim at the cultivation of an exclusively national spirit. The other party declared such a course to be folly, contending that literature must be a product of gradual development rather than of set volition, and that, despite the shifting of the political kaleidoscope, the national literature was so firmly rooted in its Danish past that its natural evolution must be an outgrowth from all that ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne
... the modes of thinking of which we are conscious may be referred to two general classes, the one of which is the perception or operation of the understanding, and the other the volition or operation of the will. Thus, to perceive by the senses (SENTIRE), to imagine, and to conceive things purely intelligible, are only different modes of perceiving (PERCIP IENDI); but to desire, to be averse from, to affirm, to deny, to doubt, ...
— The Principles of Philosophy • Rene Descartes
... only by some desperate chance he could hope to meet her in his random wanderings, it seemed to him that he was more likely to be successful by resigning as far as possible all volition, and leaving the guidance of the search to chance; as if Fortune were best disposed toward those who most entirely abdicated intelligence and trusted themselves to her. He sacredly followed every impulse, never making up ...
— Lost - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... faces of the soldiers now close upon us. It darted at their throats, striking, coiling, and striking again; coiling and uncoiling with incredible rapidity and flying from leverage points of throats, of faces, of breasts like a spring endowed with consciousness, volition and hatred—and those it struck stood rigid as stone with faces masks of inhuman fear and anguish; and those still ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... we excused her, she did not excuse herself. Without being shaken awake by an earthquake, or forced to action by a devastating fire or flood, she set to work, calmly and of her own volition, to reform her character. ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... spectators and auditors, and through constant schooling the warriors became most consummate actors. To the casual observer, they were stoics or stupids according to the conditions of observation; to many observers, they were cheats or charlatans; to scientific students, their eccentrically developed volition and the thaumaturgy by which it was normally accompanied suggests early stages in that curious development which, in the Orient, culminates in necromancy and occultism. Unfortunately this phase of the Indian character (which was shared by various ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... of their time on the other side. During the past decade it has come about that every European city of any consequence has its "American Colony," a society no longer composed of poor art students or those whose residence abroad is not a matter of volition, but consisting now of many of the wealthiest Americans. By these expatriates money is spent extremely freely, their drafts on London and Paris requiring the frequent replenishment, by remittances of exchange from this side, of their bank balances ...
— Elements of Foreign Exchange - A Foreign Exchange Primer • Franklin Escher
... the higher animals that the soul-life is found to be localised and connected with special organs. As a consequence of division of labour, there have here been developed various sense-organs as organs of specific sensibility, muscles as organs of motion and volition, nerve-centres or ganglia as central co-ordinating and regulating organs. In the most highly developed families of the animal kingdom, these last come more and more into the foreground as independent soul-organs. In correspondence with the extraordinarily complicated ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... that I would construct an iron giant that, upon its completion, if I could only procure the brain of a man who had died of a lightning stroke or other electric agency, I could, by installing this brain in the brain cavity of the giant, give it volition, make it a superman without feeling or conscience. It was a ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... only done his duty! He had only done, or heroically tried to do until stricken down by the enemy's fire, what his commander had ordered! Some other standard of soldierly honor was set up, not involving obedience to orders nor discharge of duty, but instead of that some act of each soldier's own volition, as if what a nation most highly honored was independent action of each one of its million of soldiers, without any special regard to the orders of the commander-in-chief or any of his subordinate commanders! Thus the most dearly bought honor of a citizen of this great republic, ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... something with my material, I suppose. And you know that if I didn't wish to give up my project I couldn't. It's a sign of my unfitness for it that I'm able to abandon it. The man who is born to write the history of Venice will have no volition in the matter: he cannot leave it, and he will not die till he has finished it." He feebly crushed a bit of bread in his fingers as he ended with this burst of feeling, and he shook his head in sad negation to his wife's tender protest,—"Oh, you will come back ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... impulse that had been stunned to impotence by his violence—stirred within her at his words and awoke. Yet it was scarcely of her own volition that she ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... exposure. He considered the vulgar passenger as so much troublesome freight, which, while it brought the advantage of a higher remuneration than the same cubic measurement of inanimate matter, had the unpleasant drawback of volition and motion. With this general tendency to bully and intimidate, the wary patron had, however, made a silent exception in favor of the Italian, who has introduced himself to the reader by the ill-omened name of Il Maledetto, or the accursed. This formidable personage had enjoyed ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... was sitting was near the next window in Miss Wildmere's room, and within two or three feet there was the customary thin-panelled door which enables the proprietor to throw rooms together, as required, for the accommodation of families. Therefore, without moving or volition on her part information vital to her relatives had been brought to her knowledge. She was perfectly overwhelmed at first, and sat as if stunned, her cheeks scarlet with shame for the act of listening, even while she felt that for the sake of the innocent ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... was a strange enough symptom to me of the bewildered condition of the world, to behold a man of this temper, and of this veracity and nobleness, self-consecrated here, by free volition and deliberate selection, to be a Christian Priest; and zealously struggling to fancy himself such in very truth. Undoubtedly a singular present fact;—from which, as from their point of intersection, great perplexities and aberrations in the past, and considerable confusions in the future might ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... mishap. If he had not known the nature of the islands he could almost have guessed it from the behaviour of the aeroplane, which now tended to shoot upwards, now to sink downwards, irrespective of any volition of his own. This proved to Smith that he had come into a region of variable currents of wind, such as might be set up by the hollows and ridges of mountain tops. The forcing of the machine upwards implied that the pressure of the air ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... persuade them, too, to lay down their arms. As to your other objection, it falls to the ground the moment you agree with me that all the nations of the world must ultimately become democracies. At first, it is true, men fought of their own volition, but it was to secure food, to guard their homes, or to replenish their supply of women. But since those very early days, all wars have been wars not of the people, but of their rulers. They were wars of revenge or of ambition, ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... liberty of will. But, I say, this declination of atoms in their descent was itself either necessary or voluntary. If it was necessary, how then could that necessity ever beget liberty? If it was voluntary, then atoms had that power of volition before; and what becomes then of the Epicurean doctrine of the fortuitous productions of worlds? The whole business is contradiction and ridiculous nonsense."—Bentley's Works, Vol. ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... searching party of her own volition, was the only one of the Martians whose face had not been twisted in laughter as I battled for my life. She, on the contrary, was sober with apparent solicitude and, as soon as I had finished the monster, rushed to me and carefully examined my body for possible wounds or ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Head of all the Creed—explaining the Manifestation in the most beautiful language and soaking up all the credit of it for himself. The Englishman, said the letter, was not there at all. He was a backslider without Power or Asceticism, who couldn't even raise a table by force of volition, much less project an army of kittens through space. The entire arrangement, said the letter, was strictly orthodox, worked and sanctioned by the highest Authorities within the pale of the Creed. There was great joy at this, for some of the weaker brethren seeing that ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... stiffness, never changing his course, and occasionally stumbling as if unaware of the character of the ground over which he passed. His head swung out slightly to either side and he snapped each time. There was something sinister in every move, as if his body was driven on without conscious volition, actuated by some dreadful, unclean force. Breed knew it for some sort of poisoning, and his muscles bunched for flight. Shady barked angrily as if to drive the thing away. Then Breed saw a hairless ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... be hope. Now there is none!! O God! how willingly would I place myself under Dr. Fox, in his establishment; for my case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement, an utter impotence of the volition, and not of the intellectual faculties. You bid me rouse myself: go bid a man paralytic in both arms, to rub them briskly together, and that will cure him. 'Alas!' he would reply, 'that I cannot move my arms, is my complaint and my misery.' May ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... 1207-1229. The ascetic element in Wordsworth's ethics should by no means be forgotten by those who envy his brave and unruffled outlook upon life. As Hutton says excellently (Essays, p. 81), "there is volition and self-government in every line of his poetry, and his best thoughts come from the steady resistance he opposes to the ebb and flow of ordinary desires and regrets. He contests the ground inch by inch with all despondent and indolent humours, and often, ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... suppose you ordered them picked up. The news services are going wild about this. I had to make a preliminary statement, to the effect that Salgath Trod was not arrested, came to Headquarters of his own volition, and is under ...
— Time Crime • H. Beam Piper
... unimagined apprehensions through her heart. They seemed to satisfy him so little while they sapped from her every atom of vitality, leaving her helpless as an infant, her body drawn to his as a needle to the magnet, not of her own volition, but simply by his strength. And ever the fire of his passion grew hotter till she felt as one bound on the edge of a mighty furnace which scorched her ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... Erebus, which by will of Providence had for once mounted itself into dominion and the Azure: is not this properly the nature of Sansculottism consummating itself? Of which Erebus Blackness be it enough to discern that this and the other dazzling fire-bolt, dazzling fire-torrent, does by small Volition and great Necessity, verily issue,—in such and such succession; destructive so and so, self-destructive so ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... more dangerous than an automobile, an IBM calculator or a thermometer. They have no more consciousness or volition than those things. The watchbirds are built to respond to certain stimuli, and to carry out certain operations when they ...
— Watchbird • Robert Sheckley
... and so I shifted along down-town—Madison Square, Union Square, then westward by Jefferson Market and West Tenth Street. Ever edging a little closer to the river, you observe, and yet, upon my honor, I was not conscious of any definite volition in the matter; it was as though some one were gently pushing me along. Then Abingdon Square and your entrance upon the boards of my little drama—you and Mr. Bardi. Gentlemen, I thank ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... they had come were set the records of their infamy, in rapine and ruthless slaughter of the innocent. Just at first, as he sat alone in his room, Michael but contemplated images that seemed to form in his mind without his volition, and, emotion-numb from the shock, they seemed external to him. Sometimes he had a vision of Francis lying without mark or wound or violence on him in some vineyard on the hill-side, with face as quiet as in sleep turned towards a moonlit sky. Then came another picture, and Francis was walking ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... eyes with a steady, inquiring glance, and Joan experienced a new emotion. Joe had never looked like that; nor yet her father. She felt a will stronger than her own was busy with her inclinations. Volition remained free, and yet she doubted whether under any circumstances could she refuse his petition. As it happened, however, she already liked the man. He was so respectful and polite. Moreover, she felt sad to hear that he suffered in health. He would ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... daughters in the bright days of the Sailor King. He invented enormities which she had committed, and there would have been no obscene infamy of which Maggie was not guilty, if Edwin—more by instinct than by volition—had not pushed open the door and entered ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... grasped the three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre; while so doing, suddenly and nervously twitched them; meanwhile, glancing intently from Starbuck to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as though, by some nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life. The three mates quailed before his strong, sustained, and mystic aspect. Stubb and Flask looked sideways from him; the honest eye ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... yoga it is laid down that the main duct should be brought under the control of the will. The soul may then, by an act of volition, be withdrawn from the whole physical system into the convolutions of the brain in the head. The brain, in the language of yogins, is a lot us of a thousand leaves. If the soul be withdrawn into it, the living creature will then be liberated ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... difference though. MacRae, as he grew calmer, marked that. Old Donald had lost his sweetheart by force and trickery. His son must forego love—if it were indeed love—of his own volition. He had no choice. He saw no way of winning Betty Gower unless he stayed his hand against her father. And he would not do that. He could not. It would be like going over to the enemy in the heat of battle. Gower had wronged and persecuted his father. He had beaten old Donald without ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... sociologist, nothing could be simpler than the conception of that part of our nature that is appealed to for securing obedience. He assumes a certain effort of the intelligence for understanding the signification of a command or a law; and, for the motive part, he counts upon nothing but volition in its most ordinary form—the avoidance of a pain. Intelligence and Will, in their usual and recognised workings, are all that are required for social obedience; law is conceived and framed exactly to suit the every-day and every-hour manifestations ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... not believe they exist; they are told they are delusions," I heard myself answering. I was surprised to hear my voice, for it came with no conscious volition on ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... boy's; then her lovely, curved lips; then these sentient hands of hers. He wished that he had the courage to take the hand in his own, to hold it against his breast, his cheek. It had been his often enough to hold, and even to kiss; but always of her own volition. She was as generous of caresses as her youngest daughter; but it never occurred to Philip, nor had it perhaps occurred to other men who loved her, that they might venture to take what she did not offer. Kate ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... "fine" as opposed to merely serviceable art, exists. Literary art, that is, like all art which is in any way imitative or reproductive of fact—form, or colour, or incident—is the representation of such fact as connected with soul, of a specific personality, in its preferences, its volition and power. ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... Will. — N. will, volition, conation[obs3], velleity; liberum arbitrium[Lat]; will and pleasure, free will; freedom &c. 748; discretion; option &c. (choice) 609; voluntariness[obs3]; spontaneity, spontaneousness; originality. pleasure, wish, mind; desire; frame of mind &c. (inclination) 602; intention &c. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... yelled the tall fellow, who had first challenged his right to remain in Pleasantville or its environs. As the crowd fell apart to make way for him, willing hands were extended to give him the needed impetus, and without special volition ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... last, by long and patient waiting, he, too, allowed me to come near and present my seductive food to his notice—the wiry proboscis was uncoiled and felt about for the honey; once plunged into that, all volition seemed to cease, he allowed me to coax him upon my finger, and he, too, was safely caged; but he behaved very differently from "fair Cynthia." The moment his repast was ended he flapped with desperate force against the bars, ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... all this we can draw an extremely practical conclusion. If, namely, we wish our trains of ideation and volition to be copious and varied and effective, we must form the habit of freeing them from the inhibitive influence of reflection upon them, of egoistic pre-occupation about their results. Such a habit, like other ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... idea of future destination, dependent upon the volition of the agent—will. Shall is simply predictive; will is predictive and promissive ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... glowing and changing in the sun, and recalling the precious stones that adorned the walls of the celestial city. When they reach the platform where they leave the elevator, they seem to step off like things of life and volition; they are still in pairs and separate only as they enter upon the 'runs.' But here they have an ordeal to pass through, for they are subjected to a rapid inspection and the black sheep are separated ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... me without premise. What of my own fortunes? I thought the wind of the desert, had blown upon them and they were dead. I remember, in the trembling of my heart as I sat and listened and mused, and thoughts trooped in and out of my head with little order or volition on my part, one word was a sort of rallying point on which they gathered and fell back from time to time, though they started out again on fresh roamings - "Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations"! - I remember, - it seems to me now as if it had ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the most delicate and derisive and fleeting sunlight of pleasure; and the temperament of his race delivered Lawrence hand and foot into its power. The deep waters went over him and he ceased to struggle—"Isabel," he heard himself saying in a level voice but without his own volition, "should you mind if I were to ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... victim, nearly dead at the belief that she is about to die. With her head resting on her shoulder, she has glided before the smoking altar. Her body has lost all rigidity on her bending legs, her arms hang down at her side; her glance is distracted; she has lost all volition in the use of her limbs; and she is there, sinking motionless, her throat scarcely distending with a breath, turning white under her crown of roses, which the painter's brush has made to pale in sympathy. Between ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... intensifies and excites the instinct of rhythm that a strong volition is required to repress its physical expression. The universality of this is well illustrated by the legend, found in some shape in many countries and languages, of the boy with the fiddle who compels king, cook, peasant, clown, and all that kind of people, to follow him ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... these functions, tact is considered passive; as, when any part of the system comes into contact with another body, a sensation of its presence is given, without the exercise of volition. On the contrary, touch is active, and is exercised voluntarily, for the purpose of conveying to the mind a knowledge of the qualities or properties of the surfaces of bodies; as when we feel ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... for nothing: I know you to be a weak and wavering coward, who of your own volition would never rise from the level of a ruined spendthrift and penniless vagabond. You forget, perhaps, that I hold a bond which gives me an interest in your fortunes. I do not forget. When my own wisdom counsels action, I shall act, without asking your advice. If I am successful, you will thank me. ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... length of his own volition and with a wag of his tail set off westward along the rim. Remounting my mustang I kept as close to Don's heels as the rough going permitted. The hound, however, showed no disposition to hurry, and I let him have ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... enthusiasm, prolonged as it often has been by the operation of the imaginative existence, becomes a state of perturbed feeling, and can only be distinguished from a disordered intellect by the power of volition possessed by a sound mind of withdrawing from the ideal world into the world of sense. It is but a step which may carry us from the wanderings of fancy into the aberrations of delirium. The endurance of attention, even in minds of the highest order, is limited by a law of nature; ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... Blake realized that his huddled position was not a thing of his own volition. Some impact had thrown him against the wall like a toppled nine-pin. The truth came to him, in a sudden flash; Binhart had shot at him. There had been a second revolver hidden away in the hand bag, and Binhart had attempted to ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... are taken from the nest and reared by hand, they insist for a long time on being fed in the juvenile manner. However, by and by they begin of their own volition to pick up food after the manner of the adults. At first they are very clumsy about it, but they persevere until they acquire skill, and presently they refuse entirely to open their mandibles for ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... wish them to climb in at the window, or creep through the pantry, or, worst of all, float through the keyhole, and catch me in undress. So I believe that in all worlds thoughts will be the subjects of volition,—more accurately expressed when expression is desired, but just as entirely ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... kingdom,—while on the other hand, this indefinable principle, this vegetable animula vagula, blandula, graduates into the higher sensitiveness of the lower class of animals. Nor need we hesitate to recognize the fine gradations from simple sensitiveness and volition to the higher instinctive and other psychical manifestations of the higher brute animals. The gradation is undoubted, however we may explain it. Again, propagation is of one mode in the higher animals, of two in all plants; ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... report as chairman of the Congressional Committee, said that it had not been necessary to request members to introduce a resolution for a Federal Suffrage Amendment as six were offered by as many Representatives of their own volition. Senator Works of her own State of California had been glad to present it. She told of the "hearings" before the committees of the two Houses on March 13, when the National Association sent representatives to Washington. The preceding day ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... utterly failed me; I could only think to myself, "Is this fear? It is not fear!" I strove to rise,—in vain; I felt as if weighed down by an irresistible force. Indeed, my impression was that of an immense and overwhelming Power opposed to my volition,—that sense of utter inadequacy to cope with a force beyond man's, which one may feel physically in a storm at sea, in a conflagration, or when confronting some terrible wild beast, or rather, perhaps, the shark of the ocean, I felt morally. Opposed to my will was another ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... himself in conversation with two or three men and women who were watching the youngsters' game, and presently found himself applauding his son for a brilliant ace. But after perhaps five minutes he walked quite without volition, straight to Harriet's neighbourhood, and she rose at once, introduced her new friend, and with a glance at her wrist, announced ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... selection, election, alternative, option, preference, discrimination, preferment, volition. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... expressed by the product of two factors which cannot be separated, namely, the sum of available means and the strength of the Will. The sum of the available means may be estimated in a measure, as it depends (although not entirely) upon numbers; but the strength of volition is more difficult to determine, and can only be estimated to a certain extent by the strength of the motives. Granted we have obtained in this way an approximation to the strength of the power to be contended with, we can then take of our own means, and either increase them so as to obtain a preponderance, ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... where the life-raft was lashed to the deck. He ordered Mrs. Goles to sit down on the raft. Goles sat down beside her. Goles seemed bereft of all volition. ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... Nell Darrel there not more than twenty minutes since, drugged into complete insensibility. She could not have gone from the seat of her own volition. ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... (not into) the patient. The assertion that the chairs "have swiftly moved away" would seem from analogy to mean that the disease has been placed upon the seats and thus borne away. The verb implies that the seats move by their own volition. Immediately afterward it is declared that relief is accomplished. The expression "us[^u][']hita nutan[^u][']na" occurs frequently in these formulas, and may mean either "let it not be for one night alone," or "let it not stay a single ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... of this involution of pain and pleasure in all deliberate forecast and volition, pain and pleasure are not the ultimate sources of value. A correct psychology and logic cannot allow that an eventual and, in strictness, unpresentable feeling, can determine any act or volition, but must insist that, on the contrary, all beliefs about future experience, with ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... that Bakuma had broken the magic circle of her own volition, he had the shrewd imagination to suggest that she had either fled with the other women during the attack or that, even if she had stayed, the askaris would have taken her from the hut. Therefore did he demand an assembly of the craft ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... considering myself as if alone in the world. O, well I can conceive the interest excited in the French prisoner by a spider, even a spider! Total absence of all. of animation in a place of confinement, of which the term is unknown, where volition is set aside, and where captivity is the work of the elements, casts the fancy into a state of solemn awe, of fearful expectation, which I have not words to describe; while the higher mind, mastering at times that fancy, seeks resignation ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... not help that God had seen fit to make her the fairest being on earth, and the responsibility would have to lie where it belonged—with God; Mary would have none of it. Her attractiveness was not a matter of volition or intention on her part. She was too young for deliberate snare-setting—though it often begins very early in life—and made no effort to attract men. Man's love was too cheap a thing for her to strive for, and I am sure, in her heart, she would ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... These are all based upon the trustworthiness of consciousness, and if this is false we have no foundation to build upon. When we interrogate consciousness it testifies to our freedom. But if every volition is fixed, as it is held it is, by a power ab extra from the mind exercising the volition, then consciousness is mendacious; it lies when it testifies to our freedom, and, therefore, cannot be trusted; thus, science, philosophy, and religion become impossible. The old Latin saw falsum in ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... used to see all manner of papers come in as regularly as hot rolls. 'Why, you never can know anything! We didn't take in society papers, because father does not care for gossip or grandees. He has other pursuits. I can show you some of dear mother's articles. There's one called 'Unconscious Volition,' and another on the 'Progress of Species.' I'll bring them down next ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... kept tied down to these, there is a maximum reinforcement of the images. But this is not all. When the attention is thus held captive by the image, it approximates in character to an external impression in another way. In our waking state, when our powers of volition are intact, the external impression is characterized by its fixity or its obdurate resistance to our wishes. On the other hand, the mental image is fluent, accommodating, and disappears and reappears ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... more than the assessments yield. There is no capital, no risk, no insurance! It is a voluntary association of individuals. There is usually but little if any penalty for discontinuance of membership, and the permanence of such institutions depends mainly upon the volition of their members. They spring into existence suddenly by the voluntary association of a few individuals without capital or personal risk, and as suddenly they may go out of existence by the voluntary act or withdrawal ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... editors suffer this fate. My good friends in Boston were sincere in thinking that my day of doom would never come; but they didn't offer me any guarantee—part ownership, for instance; and the years go swiftly. I could afford, of my own volition, to leave the Atlantic. I couldn't afford to take permanently the risks that a hired editor must take. Nor should I ever again have turned my hand to such a task except on a magazine of my own. I should have sought other employment. There are many easier and better and more influential ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... unavoidable; and indeed these comments were of the most flattering kind to one's vanity. But in that matter I have no vanity that could be flattered. I could not have it. The first object of this Note is to disclaim any merit there might have been in an act of deliberate volition. ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... died!'—it had not died. Seventy years had passed, and the love-story was presently enacting itself, as all past and all future must for ever be enacting to beings for whom time is not. Then, too, where was he who, by some means, whether of his own volition or not, had become so much a part of the pulsing life of a young girl that, when all else of life passed from her with the weight of years, her heart still remained obedient to him? Where was he? Had his life gone out like the flame of a candle when ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... answer to his hail, and Stevens paused in shocked amazement. He knew that never of her own volition would she be out so late—Nadia was gone! A rapid tour of inspection quickly confirmed that which he already knew only too well. Forgotten was his hunger, forgotten the power plant, forgotten everything except the ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... dark stain, the depression in the mattress where the two bodies had rested. Those physical objects forced on him the probability of his guilt. Then he recalled that both men, dead for many hours, had moved apparently of their own volition; and his grandfather had come back from the grave and then had disappeared, leaving no trace; and he comforted himself with the thought that the explanation, if it came at all, must arise from a force outside himself, whether of the living ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... written or printed page and convey it to others. To make the machine requires a vast amount of labor expended upon matter; to get the thought requires the awakening of a human spirit. The work of the machine is done when the crank stops; the mental work, through internal volition, goes on ...
— Friends in Feathers and Fur, and Other Neighbors - For Young Folks • James Johonnot
... because He willed to die. The whole of the narratives of the Crucifixion in the Gospels avoid using the word 'death.' Such expressions as He 'gave up the ghost,' or the like, are used, implying what is elsewhere distinctly asserted, that His death was His offering of Himself, the result of His own volition, not of exhaustion or of torture. Thus, even in dying, He showed Himself the Lord of Life and the Master of Death. Men indeed fastened Jesus to the Cross, but He died, not because He was so fastened, but ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... Martian tongue, while I stood looking backward every few steps, delighted to trace the broad river of the canal winding through the desolation for miles beyond. Then I noticed how rapid and effortless is motion in Mars. Volition is so easy and penetrating, the body becomes a mere plaything for the mind. Every function, every part is swayed into vitality by the mind. There is the apparent motion of the limbs, but really the whole frame sweeps on as by an intangible process of translation, and the ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... Don't be so scared! They'll never know we did it." Already she was shouldering her share in crime, with a woman's willingness; she said "we" quite unconsciously; but she added (and this was of direct volition): "I did it more'n you; you were just trying to keep the nasty thing straight; I was a heap more to blame. Anyhow, I guess it ain't so awful bad. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... astounding proposition, but only for the briefest possible moment. His gentle, dreamy, wistful countenance seemed almost to light up from within. His answer was given in one breath and as if entirely without conscious volition. ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... God's action is upon us, the more we are masters of our actions. 'Quia enim Deus operatur ipsum velle, quo efficacius operatur, eo magis volumus; quod autem, cum volumus, facimus, id maxime habemus in nostra potestate.' It is true that when God causes a volition in us he causes a free action. But it seems to me that the question here is not of the universal cause or of that production of our will which is proper to it in so far as it is a created effect, whose positive ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... snake when he tries to secure the perfume of Baliwan, but is restored to human form when he bathes in a magic well (p. 137). These and other mysterious happenings, many of which are not explained as being due to their own volition, befall them; thus Ingiwan, while walking, is confronted by an impassable hill and is compelled to cross the ocean, where he finds his future wife, but upon his return the hill has vanished (p. 86). In other instances the finger rings of people meeting for the first time exchange themselves ...
— Traditions of the Tinguian: A Study in Philippine Folk-Lore • Fay-Cooper Cole
... love held out to them. Such women as Emilia in Cinna and Rodogune, must surely be unsusceptible of love. But if in his principal characters, Corneille, by exaggerating the energetic and underrating the passive part of our nature, has departed from truth; if his heroes display too much volition and too little feeling, he is still much more unnatural in his situations. He has, in defiance of all probability, pointed them in such a way that we might with great propriety give them the name ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... as though each of them reacted to the command of some controlling volition beyond themselves. The man's arms closed about her slender body and pressed it close to his breast. His lips met her upturned ones, and held them in a long kiss that was returned. Each felt the stir of the other's breath. To ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... extraordinarily brave acts by individual burghers, but it was extremely difficult to hear of them owing to the Boers' disinclination to discuss a battle in its details. No Boer ever referred to his exploits or those of his friends of his own volition, and then only in the most indefinite manner. He related the story of a battle in much the same manner he told of the tilling of his fields or the herding of his cattle, and when there was any part of it pertaining to his own actions he passed it over without ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... gripping the pen as a drowning man holds to a stave, was moving without his volition. It was scrawling in huge letters, over and over, "NO ...
— The Worshippers • Damon Francis Knight
... titled foreigners have proved a drain upon the Vanderbilt fortune, although, thanks to their large share in the control of laws and industrial institutions, the Vanderbilts possess at all times the power of recouping themselves at volition. The American marriages, on the other hand, contracted by this family, have interlinked other great fortunes ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... reproach that now the very horse he wanted had just been driven away, and would not be brought back, as his owner lived in Billerica, and only happened to be down. A few equipages really appeared desirable, but in regard to these his jaded faculties refused to work: he could decide nothing; his volition was extinct; he let them come ...
— Buying a Horse • William Dean Howells
... clutched at sustained us for the while, or treacherously yielded to our grasp. For my own part, I scarcely knew whether I was helplessly falling from the heights above, or whether the fearful rapidity with which I descended was an act of my own volition. ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... since that terrible ride began, and yet there was neither halt nor intermission. Blindfold, pinioned, and bound into the saddle, I sate almost mechanically and without volition, amidst the ranks of the furious Hulans, whose wild huzzas and imprecations rung incessantly in my ears. No rest, no stay. On we sped like a hurricane across ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... any Reality would—of its own Volition—draw near to my still quite substantial Self; I say that my House (if the Spring do not prove unkindly) will be ready to receive—and the owner also—any time before June, and after July; that is, before Mrs. Kemble goes to the Mountains, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... day Fabio was putting the finishing touches to the picture of his Cecilia; Valeria was sitting at the organ, and her fingers were wandering over the keys.... Suddenly, contrary to her own volition, from beneath her fingers rang out that Song of Love Triumphant which Muzio had once played,—and at that same instant, for the first time since her marriage, she felt within her the palpitation of a new, germinating life.... Valeria started and ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... itself or by its correlative; as the word brother. From these instances, it may be seen how large a portion of the connotation of names consists of actions. Now what is an action? Not one thing, but a series of two things: the state of mind called a volition, followed by an effect. The volition or intention to produce the effect, is one thing; the effect produced in consequence of the intention, is another thing; the two together constitute the action. I form the ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... it was he, knelt down by me, and putting his arms round me, raised me from the ground, without any volition of my own. I know not what state I was in. I was perfectly conscious; but had no more power over the movement of a muscle than if I were dead. My eyes were closed, and my head drooped on his breast, as he raised me, bowed by its own ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... candles, a great jewelled cross, and a tall saint's figure swaying, more than shoulder high, and disappearing up above into the darkness. For me, under my cowl, it was suffocatingly hot; but I seemed to move forward, following, swept along without any volition of my own. It appeared an immensely long journey; and then, as we went at last up the cathedral steps, a voice cried harshly, "Death to the heretic!" My heart stood still. I clutched frantically at the handle of a pistol that I could not disengage from folds of black cloth. But, ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... I insist!" He seized her hand, and then volition seemed to leave her, and she went off into a state of passivity. He, still holding her, came up the room, and thus, hand in hand, Troy and Bathsheba ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... his balance without being aware what had threatened it, while his elbow, apparently of its own volition, groped for its former pedestal. Noble evaded ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... of the woman is her duality, her double power. She can, by an act of volition, become hypnotic, clairvoyant—whatever you choose to call it. Or, if her visitor is at all sensitive, she can reverse the situation and play the part of the hypnotiser. I never heard of a ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... pleasure; and, dwelling also with pleasure upon her grievances against her mother, would gradually arrive at a state of dull-glowing resentment. She could, if she chose, easily free her brain from the obsession either by reading or by a sharp jerk of volition; but often she preferred not to do so, saying to herself voluptuously: "No, I will nurse my grievance; I'll nurse it and nurse it and nurse it! It is mine, and it is just, and anybody with any sense at all would admit instantly that I am absolutely right." Thus ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... appear to have a means of communication more rapid than by words. The point most worthy of remark, in regard to their actions and movements, is, that they seem, generally speaking, to be actuated but by one will; and that from whichever of them the volition of the moment proceeds, it seems imperative upon both. Occasionally, there is an exception to this remark—as, on the voyage from Siam to the United States, when one wanted to bathe, and the other refused, on account of the coldness of the weather, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 401, November 28, 1829 • Various
... me how it is that women possess tenacity of will in precise proportion to the frivolity of their lives? All these butterflies have a volition of iron." ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... formed for attack. Only one of those three brigades—Opdycke's—came in at the proper time and took its appropriate place; and that, it was asserted, and no doubt truly, was by the brigade commander's own volition, he having been a soldier enough to know his duty in such a case, without the necessity for any orders. The other two brigades remained in their advanced position until they were run over by the enemy. Much idle controversy was indulged ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... indicative of the designs of God. Thus "has He written His claims for our profoundest admiration and homage all over every object that He has made." If you ask: Is there any advantage in considering the phenomena of nature as the result of DIVINE VOLITION? we answer, that this belief corresponds with the universally acknowledged ideas of accountability; for, with a wise, and efficient Cause, we infer there is an intelligent creation, and the desire to communicate, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... front seat, erect in her accustomed majesty, sat Aunt Melissa Adams; and Uncle Hiram, ever a humble charioteer, was by her side. They, too, had driven out to see the circus, but alas! it had not struck them that they might meet it midway, with no volition of drawing up at the side of the road and allowing it to pass. The old horse, hardened to the vicissitudes of many farming seasons, had necessarily no acquaintance with the wild beasts of the Orient; no past experience, tucked away in his ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... with a jerk, the wheelers set their feet; then the lead wagon heaved forward, the trail-wagon followed and Denver was alone on the road. His brain was in a whirl, he had lost all volition, even the will to control his wild thoughts; until suddenly he burst out in a fit of cursing—of Murray, of McGraw, of everything. McGraw had been a fool, he should have demanded the supplies anyway; and Murray was just trying to job him. He knew he was broke and had ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... manufacture beauty is as vain as to attempt to manufacture truth; and to give it to us in poems or any form of art, without a lion of some sort, a lion of truth or fitness or power, is to emasculate it and destroy its volition. ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... Jacqueline came into the room, but sometimes she stood behind the door and called in her soft, trembling voice, "Fossette! Fossette!" And on this morning she did not come into the room. The dog did not immediately respond. Sophia was in an agony. She marshalled all her volition, all her self-control and strength, ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... nurses and mothers, sometimes consciously, but more often unconsciously. We have now to consider a period when the child becomes possessed of a driving force of his own, and moves in this direction or that of his own volition. In this new intellectual movement through life he will not avoid tumbles. He will feel the restraints of his environment pressing upon him on all sides, and he will often come violently in contact with rigid rules and conventions to which he must ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... but one long chain of accidents, if by accident we understand all that falls out without our own intention or volition. We cannot control these accidents. There is a power above circumstance and accident that controls them, as gravitation controls the motions of material things. We can only turn them at our will, and make use of them, as the machinist turns ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... are the most powerful stimulus to exertion, and the best means of attaching the people to the institutions under which they live. It is apparent that this political effect upon the character of society cannot have any action upon slaves. Having no choice or volition, there is nothing for stimulus to act upon; they are in fact no part of society. So that, in the language of political economy, they are, like machinery, merely capital; and the productions of their labor consists wholly of profits of capital. But it is not perceived how the ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... experiences of external Nature we meet with nothing but succession, never with Causality. The Uniformity of Nature is a postulate of Physical Science, not a necessity of thought. The idea of Causality derived from our consciousness of Volition. CausalityActivity, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... and insight. Facts and laws are so blended with their personal being, that we can hardly decide whether it is thought that wills or will that thinks. Their actions display the intensest intelligence; their thoughts come from them clothed in the thews and sinews of energetic volition. Their force, being proportioned to their intelligence, never issues in that wild and anarchical impulse, or that tough, obstinate, narrow wilfulness, which many take to be the characteristic of individualized power. They may, in fact, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... the tall Kentuckian who aids her, nor John Bird, nor Uncle Tom himself in the final act of his drama, can help himself. For good or evil they are the products and results of the system; and yet they have and they give the illusion of volition. ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... appetite or inclination, by showing us the means of attaining happiness or avoiding misery: Taste, as it gives pleasure or pain, and thereby constitutes happiness or misery, becomes a motive to action, and is the first spring or impulse to desire and volition. From circumstances and relations, known or supposed, the former leads us to the discovery of the concealed and unknown: after all circumstances and relations are laid before us, the latter makes us feel from ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... supposing such forces to have been trained, organized, and, from the circumstances of the particular nation, to be permanently disposable for action, might prove redundantly effective, when pointed against a few personal authors of war, so presumably weak, and so flexible to any stern counter-volition as those must be supposed, whose wars argued so much of vicious levity. The inference is unexceptionable: it is the premises that are unsound. Anecdotes of war as having emanated from a lady's ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... in their analysis of legal sovereignty postulated the commands of a supreme lawgiver by simply ignoring the fact that, in point of time, custom precedes legislation and that early law is, to use Maine's own phrase, "a habit" and not a conscious exercise of the volition of a lawgiver or a legislature. The political philosophers, similarly, had sought the origin of political society in a "state of nature"—humane, according to Locke and Rousseau, barbarous, according to Hobbes—in which men freely subscribed to an "original contract" whereby each submitted ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... embodiment of volition, not a description of it. It is the expression of living interest, preference, and categorical choice. It leaves to psychology and history a free field for the description of moral phenomena. It has no interest in slipping far-fetched and incredible myths beneath the facts of nature, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana |
