"Psychical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... What is the psychical theory connected with so singular a belief? [14] I think it might be this: The Soul, within its own body, always remains viewless, yet may reflect itself in the eyes of another, as in the mirror of a necromancer. Vainly you gaze into the eyes of the beloved to discern her soul: you see there only ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... habits rendered them familiar with the body frankly exhibited. Mediaeval religion withdrew Italian sculptors and painters from the problems of purely physical form, and obliged them to study the expression of sentiments and aspirations which could only be rendered by emphasising psychical qualities revealed through physiognomy. At the same time, modern habits of life removed the ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... always did think there was a ghost about the place, and he was delighted to have his theory confirmed. He wants more details now. He invites me to furnish evidence. What for, you ask? Well, you see, he happens to be an active member of the Society for Psychical Research." ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... before the Society for Psychical Research in 1886, entitled "On Some Physical Phenomena commonly termed Spiritualistic, witnessed by the Author," Professor Barrett describes in detail the phenomena he referred to in the paper read ten years previously at the British Association, and the circumstances under which they ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... Jowett said, "He was one of those who, though not an upholder of miracles, thought that the wonders of Heaven and Earth were never far absent from us." In The Mystic, Tennyson, when almost a boy, had shown familiarity with strange psychological and psychical conditions. Poems of much later life also deal with these, and, more or less consciously, his philosophy was tinged, and his confidence that we are more than "cunning casts in clay" was increased, by phenomena of experience, which can only be evidence for the mystic himself, if even for him. ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... mind is in a passive state, these impressions may suddenly revive owing to the phenomenon of recurrence. This observation may afford an explanation of some of the phenomena connected with ocular phantoms and hallucinations not traceable to any disease. In these cases the psychical effects produced appear to have no objective cause. Bearing in mind the numerous visual impressions which are being unconsciously made on the retina, it is not at all unlikely that many of these visual phantoms may be due to ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... vision—unique in her experience—nor I, to whom she told it within eight hours, make any claim for it to a supernatural origin. It seemed to us an interesting example of the influence of mind and association on the visualizing power of the brain. A member of the Psychical Society, to whom I sent the contemporary record, classified it as "a visual hallucination," and I don't know that there is anything more to be said about it. But the pathetic coincidence remains still to be noted—we did not know it till afterward—that the seer of the vision was sleeping ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... position of a theory which should assume the existence of an "Unseen World" entirely spiritual in constitution, and in which material conditions like those of the visible world should have neither place nor meaning. Such a world would not consist of ethers or gases or ghosts, but of purely psychical relations akin to such as constitute thoughts and feelings when our minds are least solicited by sense-perceptions. In thus marking off the "Unseen World" from the objective universe of which we have knowledge, our line of demarcation would at ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... purely sentimental one - not a belief founded simply on emotion. There is a physical world - the world as known to our senses, and there is a psychical world - the world of feeling, consciousness, thought, and ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... fertilizing. It catches one's fancy in its own crude way, as pages and pages of infinitely more complicated stuff take possession of, germinate, and sprout in one's imagination in another way. We are all psychical parasites. Why, given his epitaph, given the surroundings, I wager any sensitive consciousness could have guessed at his face; and guessing, as it were, would have feigned it. What ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... vague and universal, but the words they are said to address to us are parochial and even private. While the Higher Thought Centre would widen worship everywhere to a temple not made with hands, the Psychical Research Society is conducting practical experiments round a haunted house. Men may become cosmopolitans, but ghosts remain patriots. Men may or may not expect an act of healing to take place at a holy well, but nobody expects it ten miles from the well; and even the sceptic who comes to ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... said that there was no atman (soul). He said that when people held that they found the much spoken of soul, they really only found the five khandhas together or any one of them. The khandhas are aggregates of bodily and psychical states which are immediate with us and are divided ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... simply means that in the attack on my brain the higher psychical centres are untouched. I can remember, I can think and reason. When that goes, I go. I am ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... story a very commonplace business man, middle-aged, quite unromantic and heavy, the sort of man who does not know what "nerves" means, who thinks suggestion "damned nonsense," and psychical research, occultism, and so forth, absurdities fit only to take up the time of "a pack of silly women." This worthy person lived in the suburbs of London in a semi-detached villa with a long piece of garden at the back. On the other side of the fairly high garden wall ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... ghost stories in those days, and haunted houses as well. The society of Psychical Research would have found many queer things if it had existed at that time. The sailors spun strange yarns over the power we call telepathy now. Many of the families had a retired captain or disabled first mate, or supercargo, who had seen mysterious appearances ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... institutions, in other words, with the exception of the penitentiaries and other institutions for segregation, should aim at overcoming defective character in individuals. Their work is mainly, therefore, a work of remedying psychical defects in the individual which prevent his proper adjustment to society. In the case of penitentiaries, however, the work is one mainly of segregation, of providing humane care under such conditions as least to burden society, and at the same ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... seems, that the magical powder was an error. One sees how the thing could be managed otherwise, with a slight strain on the resources of psychical research. But in no way could the story have attained "the probable impossible," which Aristotle preferred ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the organic scaffolding is dominated from on high by the aptitudes of the animal, especially that superior characteristic, the psychical aptitudes. That the Chimpanzee and the hideous Gorilla possess close resemblances of structure to our own is obvious. But let us for a moment consider their aptitudes. What differences, what a dividing gulf! Without exalting ourselves as high as the famous reed ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... familiarity with Manifestations of every kind. Their letters dropped from the ceiling—unstamped—and Spirits used to squatter up and down their staircases all night; but they had never come into contact with kittens. Lone Sahib wrote out the facts, noting the hour and the minute, as every Psychical Observer is bound to do, and appending the Englishman's letter because it was the most mysterious document and might have had a bearing upon anything in this world or the next. An outsider would have translated all the tangle ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... though he does in some instances believe in ghosts, and is inclined to the practice of what in former ages was called necromancy—the attempt to establish an illicit connexion with the spirits of the departed—under the modern name of psychical research. There are, no doubt, some forms of psychical research which are genuinely scientific and legitimate. It is probable enough that there exists a considerable area of what may be called borderland phenomena to which scientific methods of inquiry may be found applicable, and which ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... pertains to all that class of psychical states which are in process of being organised. It continues so long as the organising of them continues; and disappears when the organisation of them is complete. In the advance of the correspondence, each more complex ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... may imagine. I was a 'psychical researcher,' and a young woman of new tendencies, and proud of my liberty, but I did not care to find myself in an empty house with a stranger. Something of my confidence left me. Confidence with women, you know, ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... amount of infant mortality, of starvation, of chronic disease, of widespread misery. In abandoning that rule, as we have been forced to do, are we not left free to seek that our children, though few, should be at all events fit, the finest, alike in physical and psychical constitution, ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... forces? Possibly a calmer and more candid mood might have befitted the investigation. At any rate in these later days such a mood has been maintained by inquirers like William James and the Society for Psychical Research. These are straws, but it is hardly a straw that when Darwinism emerged upon the world, winning such speedy and almost universal adherence among scientific men and revolutionising in general the thought of the world as to the method of creation, ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... senses alone that they may obtain from sensibles the pleasurable, and avoid the painful. If, therefore, the body communicates in pleasure and pain, and is affected in a certain respect by them, it is evident that the psychical energies, (i.e. energies belonging to the soul) are exerted, mingled with bodies, and are not purely psychical, but are also corporeal; for perception is of the animated body, or of the soul corporalized, though in such perception the ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... whispered that from professional Believers I should get little sympathy, and probably less credence still. For to have my experience disbelieved, or attributed to hallucination, would be intolerable to me. Psychical investigators, I am told, prefer a Medium who takes no cash recompense for his performance, a Healer who gives of his strange powers without reward. There are, however, natural-born priests who yet wear no uniform other than upon their face and heart, ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... Psychical Research, are the cloud no bigger than a man's hand that is forcing the facts of Magic again on the attention of both the theological and scientific world. Hypnotism and Psychical Research are already becoming respectable and attracting the ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... impossible without words. Were we to take his words literally, then it would be wrong, for sensuous images (Sinnesbilder), such as white and black, do not require words for their realization. One glance at the psychical life of animals would suffice to prove that sensuous representation (Vorstellen) can be carried out without language, for it is equally certain that animals have sensuous images as ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... recently, in which there is but one small child, a boy of eight. One evening we were acting charades. Divided into camps, we chose words in turn, and in turn were chosen to superintend the "acting-out" of the particular word. It happened that the word "Psychical-research," and the turn of the eight-year-old boy to be stage-manager coincided. Every one in his camp laughed, but no one so much as remotely suggested that the word or the stage-manager ...
— The American Child • Elizabeth McCracken
... or, the Science of the Soul, and the Phenomena of Nervation, as revealed by Mesmerism, considered Physiologically and Philosophically; including Notes of Mesmeric and Psychical Experience. By JOSEPH WILCOX HADDOCK, M.D. Second and enlarged Edition, illustrated by Engravings of the Brain and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 82, May 24, 1851 • Various
... which lay outside my plan to depict the West, had long demanded to be written, and I now set about it with vigor. As a matter of fact, I knew a great deal about mediums, for at one time I had been a member of the Council of the American Psychical Society, and as a special committee on slate writing and other psychical phenomena had conducted many experiments. I had in my mind (and in my notebooks) a mass of material which formed the background of my story, The Tyranny of the Dark. It made a creditable serial and a fairly successful ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... bridge whether a woman, a child, and a dog had passed that way, but he had seen nothing. The apparition had disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. Mr. Stead's article ends here. Of course, one can only surmise as to the nature of the phenomena. No member of the Psychical Research Society could do more—and in the absence of any authentic history of the spot where the manifestations occurred, such a surmise can be of little value. Since the phenomena were seen by three people at the same time, it is quite safe to assume they ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... But my psychical character perplexed them much more than my zooelogical. It seems that these islanders had been accustomed to call themselves, in their own tongue, "rational animals with sentiments of justice and piety,"—all which, be it remembered, is expressed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... be the psychical aspects of the case, one thing was certain, that the influence of Kinnaird—Kinnaird alone of all those who had entered into relations with the lady—was useful at this time to come between her and the distressing symptoms ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... the Semites. But while race differences have followed mainly physical race lines, yet no mere physical distinctions would really define or explain the deeper differencesthe cohesiveness and continuity of these groups. The deeper differences are spiritual, psychical, differences undoubtedly based on the physical, but infinitely transcending them. The forces that bind together the Teuton nations are, then, first, their race identity and common blood; secondly, and more important, a common history, ...
— The Conservation of Races • W.E. Burghardt Du Bois
... editor of popular works such as his "Popular Astronomy" (1877); of his text-books on astronomy, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus; of his books on political economy, which science he was accustomed to call his "recreation"; and of magazine articles on all sorts of subjects not omitting "psychical research," which was one of the numerous by-paths into which he strayed. He held at one time the presidency of the American Society for ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... while she had gone down to the country with Mrs. More and her daughters; and now she was back once more, in a kind of psychical convalescence, at her aunt's new house on the river-bank ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... Growth.—Into the psychical characteristics and development of the child and all the interesting educational problems involved it is impossible to enter here, and reference must be made to the works cited above. But a knowledge of the more important features of normal physical development has a constant importance. Some ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... have followed mainly physical race lines, yet no mere physical distinctions would really define or explain the deeper differences—the cohesiveness and continuity of these groups. The deeper differences are spiritual, psychical, differences—undoubtedly based on the physical, but infinitely transcending them. The forces that bind together the Teuton nations are, then, first, their race identity and common blood; secondly, and ...
— The Conservation of Races - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 2 • W. E. Burghardt Du Bois
... are certainly subject to trances," answered Gilbert. "The matter is more in the line of psychical research than medical. What were the trances of ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... character? Can a nation fully possessed by one type of civilization reject it, and adopt one radically different? Do races have "souls" which are fixed and incapable of radical transformations? What has taken place in Japan, a profound, or only a superficial change in psychical character? Are the destinies of the Oriental races ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... slowly up into his round, boyish face. He looked at her with disconcerting steadiness. Perhaps something in his expression gave her the key to his thought, or it may have been that peculiar psychical receptiveness which in a woman we are pleased to call intuition; but at any rate Stella divined what was coming and would have forestalled it by rising. He prevented that move ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Calvinistic proportions. As for the dogs, of course there were many, and during their lives they were intimate and valued family friends, and their deaths were household tragedies. One of them, a large yellow animal of several good breeds and valuable rather because of psychical than physical traits, was named "Susan" by his small owners, in commemoration of another retainer, a white cow; the fact that the cow and the dog were not of the same sex being treated with indifference. Much the most individual of the dogs and the one with the strongest character was Sailor Boy, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... of affairs find relaxation in the mystery of the detective story. Real life often furnishes events sufficiently mysterious to make a special feature story that rivals fiction. Unexplained crimes and accidents; strange psychical phenomena, such as ghosts, presentiments, spiritism, and telepathy; baffling problems of the scientist and the inventor—all have elements of mystery that fascinate ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... the latent powers that are ready for manifestation. This process will continue until the germ can express most perfectly all the powers that are coiled up in its invisible form. As the doctrine of Reincarnation is in agreement with all the physical laws, so it is based upon psychical, moral and ethical laws. As on the objective plane the law of action and reaction governs the objective phenomena, so on the subjective plane of consciousness, if the mental action or thought be good, the reaction will be good, and the reaction will be evil if the ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... feeling of freedom, of subtlety, of power, of creatively fixing, disposing, and shaping, reaches its climax—in short, that necessity and "freedom of will" are then the same thing with them. There is, in fine, a gradation of rank in psychical states, to which the gradation of rank in the problems corresponds; and the highest problems repel ruthlessly every one who ventures too near them, without being predestined for their solution by the loftiness and power of his spirituality. Of what ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... lucidity. Materializations, they argue, are produced through the effluvia of the living and controlled by the subliminal forces of the participators in the seance. Spirits are nothing but thought-forms. The painstaking investigation recorded in the Proceedings and Journal of the Society for Psychical Research has to a great extent been carried on by inquirers unencumbered by any bias towards "spookery." But the theories in elaboration of psycho-pathological vagaries and dissociation of personality which have been substituted for the spirit hypothesis certainly do not err on the side ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... reality. This is in the vague world of modern psychical imagination. Nevertheless it has its own beauty, and it enlarges Browning's picture of the character ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... Progress, is a hypothesis which may or may not be true. And if it is true, there remains the further hypothesis of man's moral and social "perfectibility," which rests on much less impressive evidence. There is nothing to show that he may not reach, in his psychical and social development, a stage at which the conditions of his life will be still far from satisfactory, and beyond which he will find it impossible to progress. This is a question of fact which no willing ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... to an opposite conclusion, while a similar negative result was reached in the investigations of several committees of scientists. The latest and most persistent attempt to search into the reality of phenomena of this character has been that made by the London Society for Psychical Research, whose investigations have extended over years and have yielded numerous striking and suggestive results. The most important conclusion at which the members of this society have so far arrived is the hypothesis of Telepathy, or the seeming ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... believe, that, on reaching home, he sat for a long time occupied with the thought of it, to the exclusion of his own anxieties. What! this woman had made of him an ideal such as he himself sought among the most exquisite of her sex? How was that possible? What quality of his, personal, psychical, had such magnetic force? What sort of being was he in Marcella's eyes? Reflective men must often enough marvel at the success of whiskered and trousered mortals in wooing the women of their desire, for only by a specific imagination can a person of one sex assume the emotions ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... reply at once, as my attention has already been called to the question you ask; and it is that I do not see my way to leaving London for Oxford. My reasons for arriving at this conclusion are various. I am getting old, and you should have a man in full vigour. I doubt whether the psychical atmosphere of Oxford would suit me, and still more, whether I should suit it after a life spent in the absolute freedom of London. And last, but by no means least, for a man with five children to launch into the world, the change would involve a most serious loss of income. No ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... W. F. BARRETT, F.R.S., Professor of Physics, Royal College of Science, Dublin, 1873-1910. "As a former President of the Psychical Research Society, he is familiar with all the developments of this most fascinating branch of science, and thus what he has to say on thought-reading, hypnotism, telepathy, crystal-vision, spiritualism, divinings, and so on, will ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... The subject of psychical research is one upon which I have thought more and about which I have been slower to form my opinion, than upon any other subject whatever. Every now and then as one jogs along through life some small incident happens which very forcibly brings ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... With agonising shriek He turned and fled, the spectral perspiration Dewing his brow and coursing down his cheek; Fled, and was lost to man's investigation (For full discussion of his little tricks See Psychical ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... physiolatry (the religion of the Vedas) and Sabaeism: the deity is the last and highest pinnacle of the spiritual temple, not placed there except by a comparatively civilised race of high development, which leads them to study and speculate upon cosmical and psychical themes. This progression is admirably wrought out in Professor Max Muller's ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... dear fellow's brain giving way before my very eyes. He couldn't have stood the strain of three dreams. It WAS odd, wasn't it? All three of us dreaming the same thing at the same moment. We must never tell dear Seppy. But I shall send an account of it to the Psychical Society, with stars instead of names, ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... certainly shown a wonderful amount of industry in collecting her references and in grouping them. It is not a book to be read through from beginning to end, but it is a delightful book to glance at, and by its means one can raise the ghosts of the dead, at least as well as the Psychical Society can. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... somnambulistic condition proceeds from catalepsy or from lethargy by means of a slight pressure upon the vertex, and is particularly sensitive to every psychical influence. In some subjects the eyes are open, in others closed. Here, also, a slight irritation produces a certain amount of rigor in the muscle that has been touched, but it does not weaken the antagonistic muscle, as in lethargy, nor does it vanish under ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... His face was also marred by the seal of commonness which trade impresses on so many men, the result of the subjection of the intellect to the will, and of the impossibility of grasping things except as they relate to self. In this respect the American cousin was his antipodes. His whole body had a psychical expression—slim, elastic, alert. Over his bright gray eyes the eyelids drew themselves horizontally, showing his dexterity and acuteness of mind; indeed, his whole ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... are to be "psychical," there seems less evidence for "unconscious thought-reading," than for the presence of what are technically styled apports,—things introduced by an agency of supra-normal character, vulgarly ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... of materialization of Astral forms make it possible, under certain conditions, that the Astral Form become so thoroughly materialized that it may not only be seen but actually felt. Even the records of the English Society for Psychical Research prove this fact, leaving out of account the phenomena with which all advanced occultists ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... from ruin and extinction remains to be seen. Meat-eating has grown side by side with disease in England during the past seventy years, but there are now, fortunately, some signs of abatement. The doctors, owing perhaps to some prescience in the air, some psychical foreboding, are recommending that less meat be eaten. But whatever the future has in store, there is nothing more certain than this—that in the adoption of the vegetable regimen is to be found, if not a complete panacea, at least a partial remedy, for the political and ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... fluidic body can, under certain conditions, assume other forms than human, and that such other forms may be determined by the dominating thought and wish of the owner. For this Double, or astral body as you call it, is really the seat of the passions, emotions and desires in the psychical economy. It is the Passion Body; and, in projecting itself, it can often assume a form that gives expression to the overmastering desire that moulds it; for it is composed of such tenuous matter that it lends itself readily to the moulding by ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... much of a place, and that this is a great lark, and that he enjoys being here immensely," translated Mollie. "Some psychical phenomena!" exclaimed Young Outram, prancing ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... the problem. Instead of assuming with Hume that because some experiences seemed to attest the presence of distinct objects, all connections were illusory and all experience must ultimately consist of psychical atoms, James had merely to maintain that this separation was secondary and artificial, and that experience was initially a continuum. Once this is pointed out, the fact is obvious. The stream of experience no doubt contains what it is afterwards possible to single ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... traditions of the Far East, that mysterious thing, will prevent the other—we have been told all this, I repeat, and told it ad nauseam. Japan as it is to-day refutes these prophecies, these dogmatic pronouncements, psychical and ethnological. The Japanese race, when regarded from what I deem to be the only correct standpoint for forming a sound judgment as to the position it holds among the races of the world, namely, in respect of the size and convolution of the brain, occupies in my opinion a high, a very ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... very happy as long as he was only second mechanic at the garage of Messrs. Smith Brothers, of High Street, Puddlesby. It was when he became a member of the Puddlesby Psychical Society that his troubles began. Up till then he had been as sober and hard-working a little man as ever stood four foot ten in his shoes and weighed in at seven stone four. But above all he was an expert in rubber tyres; he knew them, I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 18th, 1920 • Various
... of the soul." And even this is not sufficient; "for the gymnast, the ultimate aim of whose art is the beau ideal of humanity, must know what effects applied movements produce upon the corporeal and psychical condition of man; a knowledge which can be obtained only from the most careful and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... you had a ghost, Sir Walter. I'm tremendously interested in psychical research and so on. If it's not bothering ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... the Cardinal, with the patient air of one talking to a child, "there are hundreds of those; and they are very real indeed; but they are almost entirely mental—or psychical, as some call them. And there are specialists on all of these. Bad habits of thought, for example, always set up some kind of disease; and there are hospitals for these; and ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... impermanency. The builders of the first Buddhist temples in Japan—architects of another race—built well: witness the Chinese structures at Kamakura that have survived so many centuries, while of the great city which once surrounded them not a trace remains. But the psychical influence of Buddhism could in no land impel minds to the love of material stability. The teaching that the universe is an illusion; that life is but one momentary halt upon an infinite journey; that all attachment to persons, to places, or to things must be fraught ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... for, when Prince Siddhartha became Buddha, the full sequence of his previous births was seen by him. If their several incidents had left no trace behind, this could not have been so, as there would have been nothing for him to see. And any one who attains to the fourth state of Dhyana (psychical insight) can thus retrospectively trace ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... neither to be discarded because they resemble some familiar to their European conquerors, nor does that similarity mean that they are historically derived, the one from the other. Each is an independent growth, but as each is the reflex in a common psychical nature of the same phenomena, the same forms of expression were adopted ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... view—which, be it observed, is not the doctor's point of view sympathetically transferred (as it might have been) since she sees his back without recognizing him. The story is to be found in the Proceedings of the Psychical Research Society ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... Analysis of (Bellamy)* Perception, Illusions of (Arps)* Personality, Delusions of (Southard)* Phipps Psychiatric clinic Possession (Fraser) Post-traumatic Nervous and Mental Disorders (Benon) Primitive Races, Sex Worship and Symbolism in (Brown)* Primitive Tribes, Psychoneuroses among (Coriat)* Psychical, Adventurings in (Bruce) Psychobiology, (Dunlap) Psychology, Educational (Thorndike) Psychology, General and Applied (Munsterberg) Psychoneuroses, Treatment of * Sexual Tendencies in Monkeys, etc (Hamilton) Sleep and Sleeplessness (Bruce) ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... unflinching recognition of physical and psychical facts which the average woman blinks over, Mary deceived herself as to the date of that final triumph which permitted her to observe Rhoda Nunn with perfect equanimity. Her outbreak of angry feeling on the occasion ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... supernatural was neither a theatrical pose nor a passing folly excited by the fashionable craze for psychical research, but a genuine and enduring interest, inherited, it may be, from his ancestor, the learned, eccentric savant, Dr. Bulwer, who studied the Black Art and dabbled in astrology and palmistry. He was a member of the society of Rosicrucians, and, to quote the words of his grandson, "he ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... of asking oneself, in question small and great,—Would I consent to be treated as I have just treated my child? If it were only remembered that the child generally suffers double as much as the adult, parents would perhaps learn physical and psychical tenderness without which a child's life is ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... Research, are the cloud no bigger than a man's hand that is forcing the facts of Magic again on the attention of both the theological and scientific world. Hypnotism and Psychical Research are already becoming respectable and attracting the attention of the generality of men of science and of our clergy. Spiritualism and Mesmerism are still tabooed, but wait their turn for popular recognition, having already been recognized by pioneers distinguished ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... the—shall I speak it?—the Clothes fly-off the whole dramatic corps; and Dukes, Grandees, Bishops, Generals, Anointed Presence itself, every mother's son of them, stand straddling there, not a shirt on them; and I know not whether to laugh or weep. This physical or psychical infirmity, in which perhaps I am not singular, I have, after hesitation, thought right to publish, for the solace of those ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... introduced me to the bee. I mean, in the psychical and in the poetical way. I had had a business introduction earlier. It was when I was a boy. It is strange that I should remember a formality like that so long; it must be ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Hamlet says, real mysteries in this dull, prosaic life of ours. One or two true tales may not come amiss. I am quite ready to give any member of the Psychical Society chapter and verse and authorities, and every available data, ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... I mistrust thee, minstrel! that thou hast not yet been impregnated by the arcane mysteries; that thou dost not sufficiently ponder on the Adyta, the Monads, and the Hyparxes; the Dianoias, the Unical Hypostases, the Gnostic powers of the Psychical Essence, and the Supermundane and Pleromatic Triads; to say nothing of ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... plane of her busy sub-consciousness. I mean, simply, that instead of materialising as a story, her preoccupation induced a set of actual and surprising circumstances. Why couldn't it? Let Sir Oliver Lodge or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Society for Psychical Research, anybody who knows about that sort of ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... into societies—the protozoon, in other words, evolves into the animal, the animal into what some have called the 'hyper-zoon,' or super-organism. Well, now, to this physical evolution corresponds a psychical one. What kind of consciousness an animal may have, we can indeed only conjecture; and we cannot even go so far as conjecture in the case of the cell; but we may reasonably assume that important psychical changes of the original elements are accompaniments ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... of temperament, to leave him with nothing but his strength, his courage, his quickness, and his magnificent geniality, and to try to express these in terms of the culture of a raw tarpaulin. Such psychical surgery is, I think, a common way of "making character"; perhaps it is, indeed, the only way. We can put in the quaint figure that spoke a hundred words with us yesterday by the wayside; but do we know him? Our friend with his infinite variety and flexibility, we know—but can we put him in? ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that this crowd was as no other that he had ever seen. To his psychical sense it seemed to him that it possessed a unity unlike any other. There was magnetism in the air. There was a sensation as if a creative act were in process, whereby thousands of individual cells were being welded more and more perfectly every instant into one huge sentient being ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... will say. Sir Tiglath Butt, the great astronomer, Correspondent of the Institute of France, Member of the Royal College of Science, Demonstrator of Astronomical Physics, author of the pamphlet, "Star-Gazers," and the brochure, "An investigation into the psychical condition of those who see stars," C.B.F.R.S. and popular member of the Colley ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... appearance, or apparition, at Blocksby's, when I and Tarras, Wentworth and the attendant recognised him, and Miss Breton did not, is thus part of the History of the Unexplained. Allen might have appealed to precedents in the annals of the Psychical Society, where they exist in scores, and are technically styled "collective hallucinations." But neither a jury, nor a judge, perhaps, would accept the testimony of experts in Psychical Research if offered in a criminal trial, nor acquit ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... much of the man is there underneath that strong frame of yours? Are you going to take just the things that are given you in life, and make no return? For the moment, you see, I am forgetting that you are my friend and that I like you. I am thinking of you from the point of view of an actress—as a psychical problem. Philip, you idiot!" she broke off, suddenly stamping her foot, "don't sit there looking at me with your great eyes. Tell me you are glad I've come back. Tell me you feel ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Chance! dear reader, is there such a thing as chance? Do you believe in chance? Do you attach any precise meaning to the word? Do you employ it at haphazard, allowing it to mean what it may? Chance! What a field for psychical investigation is at once opened up; how we may tear to shreds our past lives in search of—what? Of the Chance that made us. I think, reader, I can throw some light on the general question, by replying to your taunt: Chance, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... only thing that a brave man who believes there are mysterious forces in nature that we do not yet fully comprehend could have done in the circumstances. I backed down the steps to the sidewalk and then hurried away frontward, fully understanding how incidents like that must bother the psychical research people ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... concerns. It would be pleasant to think that he had something to do with (for instance) the retreat of the ice-cap in the northern hemisphere; but we are not encouraged to indulge in any such speculation. It would appear that the activity of God is purely psychical and moral—that he has no interest in biology, except as it influences, and is influenced by, sociology. In short, from all that one can make out, this God is strictly correlative to Man; and that is a significant fact which we shall do ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... the first to give the word its unique value. For him it named a new order of life and a new level of being. In his thought, a deep cleavage runs through the human race and divides it into two sharply-sundered classes, "psychical men" and "pneumatical men"—men who live according to nature, and men who live by the life of the Spirit. The former class, that is psychical men, are of the earth earthy; they are, as we should say to-day, empirical, parts of a vast nature-system, doomed, ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... gay or thoughtful or poetic, it was in his way and not in hers. He took the lead masterfully, and perhaps the more effectually in that it was done unconsciously. And in a way which every reader will understand, but which genius alone could put into words, this mutual psychical dependence made them feel the need of each other more strongly than any merely physical ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... a good Christian, on psychical problems, on "Oldtown Folks," her despondency in "writing life" and longing for sympathy, on power of fine books, on religion, desires to keep an open mind on all subjects, on impostures of spiritualism, lack of "jollitude" in "Middlemarch," invited to visit America, sympathy with ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... enlightenment of young persons renders indispensable the possession of precise knowledge of the sexuality of the child; and such knowledge is no less necessary to all instructors of youth, especially to those to whom the psychical life of children is a matter of concern. Judges and magistrates also, as we shall see in the seventh chapter, are very greatly interested in this matter: it is, in fact, hardly open to question that erroneous legal decisions and the unjust condemnation of reputed criminals ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... the whole trend of his thought in his recent work connected with psychical research, in Myth, Ritual, and Religion, in Cock-Lane and Common-Sense, Mr. Lang begins by entering a protest against the attitude observed towards the subject by contemporary science, especially by anthropology, which, as having ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... function differently under the same objective conditions. But if, on the contrary, it should turn out that the illusions are not reversed for the two senses, then the theory of the ultimate uniformity of the psychical laws will ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... "The ribbon of light." Still to be seen (and heard) spinning from one marae to another on Tahiti; or so I have it upon evidence that would rejoice the Psychical Society. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Constantine that they are extravagant, or against some of his notions that they are fantastic, I answer that this book attempts to describe a man and not one of these calculable little super men who, of late, have been taking up so much more of your attention than they deserve. Students who engage in psychical research, as it is called, often confess themselves puzzled by the behaviour of ghosts, it appears to them wayward and trivial. How much more likely are ghosts to be puzzled by the actions of real men? And we are surely ghosts ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... each intent upon some point in the future that kept them from pleasure in the present. The little Canuck was the only one who suffered himself a contemporaneous consolation. His early faith had so far lapsed from him that he could hospitably entertain the wild psychical conjectures of Whitwell without an accusing sense of heresy, and he found the winter of northern New England so mild after that of Lower Canada that he experienced a high degree of animal comfort in it, and looked forward to nothing better. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... immortality of the soul; and it has an especial interest for English readers owing to the fact that much in it that seems to be pure fantasy is based on researches undertaken by the British Society for Psychical Research. The plot and the characters are of secondary importance; they are only used for the purpose ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... against compulsory barrenness. In this two classes of women are concerned: those who, though they have no desire for the presence or care of children, nevertheless feel that motherhood is an experience necessary to their complete psychical development and understanding of themselves and others, and those who, though unable to find or unwilling to entertain a husband, would like to occupy themselves with the rearing of children. My own experience of ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... immateriate[obs3]; incorporeal, incorporal[obs3]; incorporate, unfleshly[obs3]; supersensible[obs3]; asomatous[obs3], unextended[obs3]; unembodied[obs3], disembodied; extramundane, unearthly; pneumatoscopic[obs3]; spiritual &c. (psychical) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... action of the one of which may be counteracted and annulled in effect by the action of the other. This applies not merely to such physical processes as heart-beats and arterial contraction and relaxing, but to the most intricate functionings which have their counterpart in psychical processes as well. Thus the observation of the inhibition of the heart's action by a nervous impulse furnished the point of departure for studies that led to a better understanding of the modus operandi of the mind's activities than had ever previously ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... influences as man, while their embryos are vastly more so than the parents. If then we recognize the spiritual being in man, and the same spiritual being disembodied as a potential existence,—if, moreover, we recognize the illimitable and incomprehensible psychical power behind the universe, of which man is one expression, we cannot fail to see that the embryonic development of animals from a lower to a higher form is entirely possible and probable; and in the absence of any other practicable method of evolution to higher types ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... committee of investigation on thought-transference fell through. So strong was the feeling against the paper in official scientific circles at the time, that even an abstract was refused publication in the Report of the British Association, and it was not until the Society for Psychical Research was founded that the paper was published, in the first volume of its Proceedings. It was the need of a scientific society to collect, sift and discuss and publish the evidence on behalf of such supernormal phenomena as Prof. Barrett described at the British ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... read reports of psychical societies, signed by men with any number of capital letters after their names: cool-headed scientists, university professors, psychologists, grave students all, who were constantly finding new and wonderful mediums, and achieving communication with ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... on the development of a science of soul culture is intended primarily for young people. The expansion of the spiritual nature is shown to be the supreme thing in life. In clear, brief, logical, sane manner Dr. Adam describes man's psychical nature and methods of its development in terms of ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... have gone through or not? I am convinced that I should not have the slightest sympathy from him. He would look upon me as an interesting case, and read a paper about me at the next meeting of the Psychical Society, in which he would gravely discuss the possibility of my being a deliberate liar, and weigh it against the chances of my being in an early stage of lunacy. No, I shall get no comfort out ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... modern, in his daring use of sibylline prophecy. He makes Giovanni's blind foster-mother, Angela, foretell the tragedy in almost every detail, save that, in her vision, she cannot see the face of Francesca's lover. Mr. Phillips, I take it, is here reinforcing ancient tradition by a reference to modern "psychical research." He trusts to our conceiving such clairvoyance to be not wholly impossible, and giving it what may be called provisional credence. Whether the device be artistic or not we need not here consider. I merely point to ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... climb the stairs From vaults below the church; And hark! the Pirate's spectre swears! O Psychical Research, Canst THOU not hear what meets my ear, The viewless wheels that come? The wild Banshie that wails to thee? The Drummer ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... and Crime; Morphiomania in France; Montana Bachelors; Relief for Children; The Land and the People; Christianity in Japan; The Hell Fire Business; Sam Jones and Boston Theology; Psychometry; The American Psychical Society; Progress of Spiritualism; The Folly of Competition; Insanities of War; The Sinaloa Colony; Medical Despotism; Mind in Nature Physiological Discoveries in the College of Therapeutics ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... with surprise. Was this the trivial Harry talking? Fact is, the pair we were talking about had by some psychical magic rarified the atmosphere for all of us until half our notes ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable |
