"Disembodied" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... possible for the spirit to quit the body and roam at will in different shapes about the world, returning to the body as to its natural home; that in the spirit's absence the body sleeps, and that it dies if the spirit return not; further, that the universe swarms with spirits embodied and disembodied, because everything in the world has a spirit, and all these spirits are analogues of the human spirit, having the same will and acting from the same motives; and that if by chance any of these spirits be ejected ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... with us, and I heard her last evening for the second time. She is master of the English language, and whether or not one can believe she sees and hears from the world of the disembodied what she feels she does, one can not but realize that she is a great woman and has a wonderful theory of how human souls return to earth. But I tell her that it seems to me repellent that we have to come back here through Dame Nature's processes, after a period of such great ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... Todd imports from the States is, he's afraid of snakes. Rattlesnakes is his abhorrence, an' if each is a disembodied sperit he can't want 'em further off. He's allers alarmed that mebby, somehow, a rattlesnake will come pokin' in onder his blankets nights, an' camp with him while he's asleep. An' this yere wretched Jaybird fosters ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis
... with his hair cut short or in an Ascot tie, any more than you can envisage him in riding breeches or wearing lilacs? No! There is but one Mr. Tutt, and these are his only garments. He who steals my hat may steal trash, but without it I should be like a disembodied spirit unable to ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... I know thee in the sphere which keeps The disembodied spirits of the dead, When all of thee that time could wither sleeps And perishes among the ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... on his head. 'Pon my heart it's too bad of him to carry off the most precious freight of the ballroom; thereby causing two forlorn individuals, whom he has defrauded of their rights, to wonder about like disembodied spirits with distended eyes, and white of visage. I can assure you, Mlle. Vernon, Everly, in our search for your fair person, peered into passages where the darkness might be felt, it was in this way. Passing one of the salons I saw a group ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... only if we have made up our minds to believe in the ghosts; otherwise their introduction would not be a square deal. It would not be fair, in other words, to propose a conundrum on a basis of ostensible materialism, and then, when no other key would fit, to palm off a disembodied spirit on us. Tell me beforehand that your scenario is to include both worlds, and I have no objection to make; I simply attune my mind to the more extensive scope. But I rebel at an unheralded ghostland, and declare frankly that your tale is ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... heretics; and every one of its declarations met with a head-on collision some claim of Gnosticism. Then, too, the early Christians drew up rituals; they had to. We cannot keep any spiritual thing in human life, even the spirit of courtesy, as a disembodied wraith. We ritualize it—we bow, we take off our hats, we shake hands, we rise when a lady enters. We have innumerable ways of expressing politeness in a ritual. Neither could they have kept so deep and beautiful a thing as the Christian ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... a suddenness that was absolutely painful all these pleasant fancies passed away, and I imagined myself to be a disembodied spirit floating helplessly in the midst of immeasurable space, enveloped in murky clouds and thick darkness, and whirled hither and thither at the mercy of a ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... sort—but I'll wear no wings. We are accustomed to think of seraphs flying from heaven to earth, flitting from star to star—irrespective of the fact that feathers are useless where there's no atmosphere. An angel working his wings to propel himself through a vacuum were as ridiculous as a disembodied spirit riding a bike down ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... sometimes entered into human bodies, we can well understand how the individuals thus possessed have obtained credit for divination. In this way the damsel mentioned by the evangelist may have acquired her celebrity. We cannot explain how disembodied spirits maintain intercourse; but it is certain that they possess means of mutual recognition, and that they can be impressed by the presence of higher and holier intelligences. And as the approach of a mighty conqueror spreads dismay throughout ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... his face and eyes—those far-seeing, light blue eyes. They were darker than usual now, eyes like the sea, I thought. His hair, long and disordered, tumbled over his forehead. He was pale, and at the same time flushed. It was almost a disembodied spirit that I saw. ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... mercy. He longed to interrupt the priest and beg him to leave off. But for some reason he could not. He could not even turn his head and look at the man. The priest was but a clammy grip that held him and a disembodied voice that spoke of hell and murder. Had he done murder? And was there a hell? He had long ceased to believe in hell, but hell had been real to him as a child. His mother and his nurse had filled him with the fear of hell. He had been bred in the fear of hell. It ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... hanging thus between earth and sky: to feel that the only thing between life and death was about three feet of roadbed, and four "non- skid" tires. It was wonderful to drink in the beauty of it all. I felt like a disembodied spirit, traveling back:.... back over centuries into forgotten ages, trying to realize what this wonderful country must have been like when it was still hidden by the foaming waters of a ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... a happy faith, that the disembodied spirits of those whom we have loved and respected here are still, though invisible, watching over us with tender solicitude. Such a realization must be chastening in its influence, for who would do an unworthy deed, believing his every act visible to those eyes ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray
... veteran warriors who were uselessly wearing out their lives in Korea. In his last moments he opened his eyes and exclaimed earnestly: "Let not the spirits of the hundred thousand troops I have sent to Korea become disembodied in a foreign land."(186) Ieyasu, on whom devolved the military responsibility after the Taiko's death, and who had never sympathized with his wishes and aims regarding Korea, did not delay the complete withdrawal of the troops which ...
— Japan • David Murray
... transformation from a civility in which the people lived upon each other to one in which they lived for each other. There is a famous passage in the inaugural message of our first Altrurian president which compares the new civic consciousness with that of a disembodied spirit released to the life beyond this and freed from all the selfish cares and greeds of the flesh. But perhaps I shall give a sufficiently clear notion of the triumph of the change among us when I say that within half a decade after the fall of the old ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... over, intent. They startled as some one drew a strained breath. In the dusty light from the hall they looked unreal, they felt disembodied. Mrs. Gunch squeaked, and they jumped with unnatural jocularity, but at Frink's hiss they sank into subdued awe. Suddenly, incredibly, they heard a knocking. They stared at Frink's half-revealed hands and found them lying still. They wriggled, and pretended ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... We all remember the cartoon entitled "The Dispersion of Races," and all Paris has admired, in Goupil's window that poetic "Defeat of the Huns," where the strife begun between the living warriors is carried on amidst the disembodied souls that hover above that battlefield strewn with the dead. "The Destruction of Jerusalem" is a fine composition, tho somewhat too theatrical. It resembles a "close of the fifth act" much more than beseems the serious character of fresco painting. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... the piano, her adorer stands there, one moment an exanimate statue, the next a disembodied spirit,—while the listening zephyrs murmur more softly in reverence. In a 'Reproach to Laura' she is taxed with being the ruin of her lover's ambition. Because of her the 'giant has shriveled to a dwarf'. She has ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... this is all gone to coloured cobweb, we regret to say!"—and retire into the fields to cultivate onion-beds, and live frugally on vegetables. It is very notable. Old godlike Calvinism declares that its old body is now fallen to tatters, and done; and its mournful ghost, disembodied, seeking new embodiment, pipes again in the winds;—a ghost and spirit as yet, but heralding new Spirit-worlds, and better ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... forcibly expresses the thought in these words: "Man is not, and was not meant to be, pure disembodied intellect. True philosophy, as well as common sense, teaches that the heart and the will have their rightful domain in every man's life. If the understanding becomes arrogant and spurns the aid of the other powers of the mind, not only does the man become an incomplete man, but his intellect ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... which a woman did not quail. Twice and thrice, however, they were both driven back again round some comparatively sheltered corner by the mere fury of the wind, which battled with them as stubbornly as though it were the disembodied spirits, of the ancient defenders of the place; and when, mechanically, and almost of necessity, Richard's arm sought the young girl's waist, whose garments made it more difficult for her to advance than for him, she did not reject its ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... off. Now I've as good a right as any one!" she added with artless elation. Isabel was duly diverted, but there was a certain melancholy in her view. Henrietta, after all, had confessed herself human and feminine, Henrietta whom she had hitherto regarded as a light keen flame, a disembodied voice. It was a disappointment to find she had personal susceptibilities, that she was subject to common passions, and that her intimacy with Mr. Bantling had not been completely original. There was a want of originality in her marrying ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... pleasures and pains that remain out of connection with that interrelated stream of experience to which we usually limit the term "consciousness." On the other hand, MAY it not be that God, and angels, or other disembodied beings, have consciousness, and intrinsic goodness, without having organisms? Of course, for all we know, the world about us may be chock full of pleasures and pains. But for practical purposes, and so far as our morality ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... past: convert hatred into regard—vengeance into gratitude; preserve one who shall never be thy rival. These are acts suited to thy original nature, which gives forth sparks of something high and noble. They weigh in the scales of the Kings of Death: they turn the balance on that day when the disembodied soul stands shivering and dismayed between Tartarus and Elysium; they gladden the heart in life, better and longer than the reward of a momentary passion. Oh, Arbaces! hear me, ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... from their pain Chains of disembodied ones, Thou didst lead whom thou didst gather Upward in ascent again, With a great hymn to the Father, Upward to ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... They had a twin birth in song, and although they have grown far apart, they come together again in song. In many ways, music is the standard for verse. Yet, despite these resemblances, the differences between the arts are striking. In place of music's disembodied feelings, poetry offers us concrete intuitions of life,—the rehearsal of emotions attached to real things and clean-cut ideas. Poetry is a music with a definite meaning, and that is no music at all. Much of poetry, gnomic and narrative, probably grew ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... alarm, and to conquer more, should more be created by what he should behold. He opened the door, but did not immediately enter the room: he paused where he stood, for he felt as if he was about to intrude into the retreat of a disembodied spirit, and that that spirit might reappear. He waited a minute, for the effort of opening the door had taken away his breath, and, as he recovered ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... each foot down with the softness of a closing lip—pausing with straining ears on every tread. With up-pressing feet she glided by the door within which Mr. Pyecroft lay in untroubled sleep, then started by the room that homed Jack and Mary, creeping with the footsteps of a disembodied spirit, fearful every second lest some door might spring open and wild ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... his course and went to Germany; and when he came back he was a new man—was, in fact, the Dredge we all know. He seemed to have shed his blundering, encumbering personality, and come to life as a disembodied intelligence. His fidelity to the Lanfears was unchanged; but he showed it negatively, by his discretions and abstentions. I have an idea that Mabel was less disposed to deride him, might even have been induced to softer ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... satisfied with the pursuit of wisdom, not with the fame of it," replied the sage. "In my youth, I greatly preferred wisdom to gold; and as I approach the Stygian shore, gold has less and less value in my eyes. Charon will charge my disembodied spirit but a single obolus for crossing his dark ferry. Living mortals only need a golden bough to enter the regions ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... when we leap the gulf and attribute these peculiar rappings and all this ability of seeing around a corner to disembodied spirits. The people with credulity plus, however, always close our mouths with this, "If it isn't spirits, what in the world is it?" And we, crestfallen and abashed, are forced to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... imitators. But they were nothing more, or at the most it may be said that they developed his idea to the furthest with varying success. It was realism—sometimes a kind of mystic evocation of nature, disembodied and divinely pure, as in Beato Angelico; often exquisitely fresh and youthful, as in his pupil, Benozzo Gozzoli, whose vast series of frescoes half fills the Camposanto of Pisa—sometimes tentative and experimental, or gravely grand, as in Masaccio, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... hands with ghostly kisses. "It seems an eternity that I've been struggling back to you through the outer void and what-not. Sometimes, I confess I all but despaired. Life is not, I assure you, all beer and skittles for the disembodied." ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... at those young figures groping through cloud as at disembodied and blessed spirits. The man's intensest tenderness, restrained by his virginhood and his awe of the supple delicate shape at his side, was put forth only in her service. They walked against bushes. He broke a stick, ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... life. His short, spare person, his vivid, ever-active intellect testified to the paternal impress. This blending of two diverse strains produced in him a singular tenacity of fiber. Man's tenement of clay has rarely lodged a spirit so passionless, so fine, so nearly disembodied. Of extreme physical tenuity, but gifted with inexhaustible mental energy, indefatigable in study, limitless in capacity for acquiring and retaining knowledge, he accentuated the type which nature gave him by the sustained ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... instrument performing actions at which it shudders? If it can only work here through an organism, is its nature changed in its independent life, severed from all with which it was identified? Can it, in its 'disembodied state,' have anything in ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... trust himself to look at her. She was his, all of her and forever. It was marvelous. The secret clasp of her hand was sufficient for the present. He was still doubtful of his fortune and unnerved by his temerity. He felt aloof and disembodied—an uninvolved spectator. And this was love, the journey's end—this smiling stillness, which was so different from anything ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... eyes abstracted and intent, and a mouth whose essential selfishness and cruelty was unconsciously stressed by the compression of her lips: the woman heard him as he might have been a disembodied voice. Now and again, however, she nodded intently and, when he finished, had ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... hand, we can show that the mode of intercourse here needed does already exist, and appears in man's relations with his fellow-men, then the transition to messages from the unseen will be so much the less violent. We shall only be supposing that man can receive from the disembodied a kind of message which he already receives from the embodied, and which has no obvious dependence on a corporeal embodiment. One single proved transmission, direct from mind to mind, of the most trivial fact or percept, will do more to make communion with the unseen scientifically ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... not answer to this, nor did he ask a question then about the return of Ezra. He was satisfied that what he had supposed was the boy's wraith—the disembodied spirit of the lad he had thrown into the Hoghole—was the living Ezra Longman. On his way home from the Skinner hut, Ben had planned a terrible revenge upon the student and Tessibel, but the advent of this unforeseen discovery had placed his enemies beyond his reach. The ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... wasn't, just as he knew that she was a girl of education and refinement. A tantalizing thing to meet a disembodied voice like that, a low laugh, a mystery! The lady might have a face like a dried prune! (Only he knew that she hadn't!) Voices were not to be relied upon. Take that "hello-girl," for instance; she had had the softest lilting voice over the wire, then ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... one look towards her lover: it was the last glimpse of earth. The next moment her gaze was on the brightness of that world whence sorrow and sighing flee away. So sudden was the transition, that the first smile of the disembodied spirit seemed to linger on the abode she had left, like the evening cloud, reflecting the glories of another sky, ere it fades for ever into the darkness and solitude ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... to have seen the moon so large or so bright. Atomized silver poured like tides of light into the surrounding woods; and at the same time heavenly odors of flowers began to move hither and thither, to change places, to return, and pass, like disembodied spirits engaged in some tranquil ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... brought him and the sharpest particles of a birch-broom into close acquaintance in the present imperfect state of existence, could they also suppose a mere poor human being, such as I was, capable by those contemptible means of counteracting and limiting the powers of the disembodied spirits of the dead, or of any spirits?—I say I would become emphatic and cogent, not to say rather complacent, in such an address, when it would all go for nothing by reason of the Odd Girl's suddenly stiffening from the toes upward, and ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... I had proved the balloon answer wrong, I was badly puzzled. The idea of a disembodied light was the hardest thing to swallow that I'd come across ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... twilight the battle. No leisure is here, only quivering, intense, agonized anxiety. The affair transcends the moment. Purposes and necessities of untold ages have concentrated, so that somehow back of your consciousness rest hosts of disembodied hopes, tendencies, evolutionary progressions, all breathless lest you prove unequal to the struggle for which they have ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... setting up the doctrine that an obviously self-possessed and mammalian woman, engaged deliberately in the most important adventure of her life, and with the keenest understanding of its utmost implications, is a naive, tender, moony and almost disembodied creature, enchanted and made perfect by a passion that has stolen upon her unawares, and which she could not acknowledge, even to herself, without blushing to death. By this preposterous doctrine, the defeat and enslavement of the man is made glorious, and even gifted with a touch of ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... my proper welcome on earth as a disembodied conscience by just a hundred years, and my desire for reincarnation has become an imperious ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... that we know ourselves; a soul would very probably mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it not for individual experiences which differ from those of others only in details seemingly trifling. All of us have been thirsty thousands of times, and felt, with Pindar, that water was the best of things. I alone, as I think, of all mankind, remember ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... some people might say that a disembodied spirit had got your uncle to educate and prepare a little body for it. Now it's got into that little body and is ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room. He's like one of those weird chappies in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them. I've got a cousin who's what they call a Theosophist, and he says he's often nearly worked the thing himself, but couldn't quite bring it off, probably owing to having fed in his boyhood on the flesh of animals slain ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... calling to the other for help in piteous tones. The effect was curious, and had a peculiarly melancholy sound; indeed we might easily have supposed them to be the cries of captive slaves, or perhaps a more fanciful person might describe them as disembodied spirits in some haunted island. Meanwhile the night wind, sighing through the lofty trees, came moaning down towards us. At length darkness compelled us to give up our sport, and, with an abundant supply of fish, we pulled slowly ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... herself go, with the recklessness of a woman unaware of her genius for loving, with the superb innocence, too, of all spontaneous forces. Owen's nature had disarmed her of all subterfuges, all ordinary defences of her sex. They were absurd in dealing with a creature so remote and disembodied. ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... Egyptian ceremony of 'the Opening of the Mouth,' suggest a belief in the continued existence of the spirit, either as an object to be propitiated by sacrifice, or as a being which needed to be sustained in its disembodied state by offerings of meat ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... do not accept the belief we call spiritualism. They believe those who have passed the change of death are in so entirely different a plane of consciousness that between the embodied and disembodied there is no ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... not," said the Empress with solemnity "that death entered the Forbidden Precincts but last night. A disembodied spirit has returned to its place and doubtless exists in bliss." "Indeed?" returned the Yellow Emperor with indifference—"yet if the spirit is absorbed into the Source whence it came, and the bones have crumbled into nothingness, where does the Ego exist? The dead are venerable, but no ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... where he was, rooted to the spot, and listened. An awful silence seemed to fall upon the place. Had he hit on the Templeton ghost?—on the disembodied spirit of some luckless martyr to the ferocity of a last century bully? Or, was it an ambuscade prepared for himself? or, was ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... perfecting of the spirit mean the smiting of the spirit into unconsciousness? Surely not, and surely in view of such words as these, we must recognise the fact that, however limited and imperfect may be the present connection of the disembodied dead, who sleep in Christ, with external things, they know themselves, they know their home and their companion, and they know the blessedness in which ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... fascination of the sea, the consummation of such might in such infantine delicacy. You may notice it again in the summer, when our bay is thronged for miles on miles with inch-long jelly-fishes,—lovely creatures, in shape like disembodied gooseberries, and shot through and through in the sunlight with all manner of blue and golden glistenings, and bearing tiny rows of fringing oars that tremble like a baby's eyelids. There is less of gross substance in them than in any other created thing,—mere ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... is the soul, the disembodied spirit of a deceased drunkard? "No drunkard shall inherit the kingdom of God," is the plain declaration of sacred writ; and were there no such scriptural denunciation of the wretched inebriate, the very nature of his case would render his prospect dark ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... recover myself. I tried to bring my sense and reason to bear on the matter. 'This being,' I said to myself, 'whoever and whatever she is, cannot harm me. I am under God's protection as much at this moment as at any moment of my life. All creatures, even disembodied spirits, if there be such, and this among them, if it be one, are under His control. Why should I be afraid? I am being tried; my courage and trust are being tried to the utmost: let me prove them, let me keep my own self-respect, by mastering this cowardly, unreasonable terror.' ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... this picture which, after a half-century, is brilliantly burnt into my memory. His pupils were mere wraiths floating in a misty dream, with malicious white points of light for eyes. And I felt like a disembodied being in ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... Florence, the celestial choir round the tomb in Saint-Sebaldus, at Nuremberg, the Virgins of the Duomo, at Milan, the whole population of a hundred Gothic Cathedrals, all the race of beings who burst their mould to visit you, great imaginative artists—all these angelic and disembodied maidens gathered ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... at a fete in honour of the deceased. Mr. Gill justly calls attention to the beauty of the last stanza but one, where "the spirit of the girl is believed to follow the sun, tripping lightly over the crest of the billows, and sinking with the sun into the underworld (Avaiki), the home of disembodied spirits." ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... exercise they should. Particularly is this true of some conscientious students who feel they must not take any time from their study. But this denotes a false conception of mental action. The human organism needs exercise. Man is not a disembodied spirit; he must pay attention to the claims of the body. Indeed it will be found that time spent in exercise will result in a higher grade of mental work. This is recognized by colleges and universities by the requirement of gymnasium work, and the opportunity should be welcomed ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... accordance with those of Locke, and have met with similar treatment. He is not a Materialist; he admits a real distinction, as well as a close union, between the soul and the body; he speaks even of the possible existence of disembodied souls or pure spirits; he affirms the immateriality of the thinking principle; and expressly assigns his reasons for not being a Materialist.[168] But he appears to have thought, as Locke did, that possibly the power of thinking might be superadded to ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... are more wealthy," answered the Grand Master. "Bear with me, brother, although I should something vaunt myself. Thou knowest the life I have led, keeping each point of my Order, striving with devils embodied and disembodied, striking down the roaring lion, who goeth about seeking whom he may devour, like a good knight and devout priest, wheresoever I met with him—even as blessed Saint Bernard hath prescribed to us in the forty-fifth capital of our rule, 'Ut Leo semper ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... to you, that I am no Spiritualist. I reject not all the evidences of the phenomena upon which it is based, but I utterly deny that such phenomena are the works of disembodied spirits. I myself have seen what utterly confounded me, and while I reject all idea of supernatural agencies, all interposition of departed spirits, yet I have become thoroughly satisfied that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... indicate the approach of a new era in history at first seem to be mere disembodied, impersonal voices somewhere in the air; sweet and plaintive, half-sung and half-cried by some obscure and unknown poet. We know not whence they come, nor whither they tend. It is not a matter of sight or experience. They do not ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... wind-blown ears, Still nearer and nearer, and now touches the strand, and, lo, With the length of her bright hair backward flowing Round her head like an aureole, Like a candle flame in the wind's breath blowing, Stands she fair and still as a disembodied soul, With hands outstretched, and eyes that shine through tears And tremulous smiles When the trumpets, and the guns, and the great drums roll, And the long fiords and the forelands shake with the thunder Of the shout of welcome to the daughter of ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... narrower term. It never expresses, as spirit does, the idea of soul or of animating mood or purpose. With reference to incorporeal beings, it denotes (except in the phrase "the Holy Ghost") the reappearance of the dead in disembodied form. Spirit may denote a variety of incorporeal beings—among them angels, fairies (devoid of moral nature), and personalities returned from the grave and manifested—seldom visibly—through spiritualistic ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... spirits, both embodied and disembodied, incarnate and excarnate, considered as a mass, may act as the terrurgic spiritual body and brain of the planet; subjective and responsive to the inspiration and guidance of the universal cosmic mind, ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... and the answer, "I will not tell thee, friend, I will not tell thee—if I tell thee the law of the land which I saw, . . . sit down, weep." Ultimately, however, the person appealed to—apparently the disembodied Enki-du—reveals something concerning the condition of the souls in the place of his sojourn after ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches
... Mr. Editor. No disembodied spirit has the honor of addressing you. I am flesh and blood, an unfortunate system of bones, muscles, ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... his, gloved or formal, or as it rested on his arm; and yet, as one walking through the dusk and stillness of a summer night feels a flower or falling leaf brush his check, and starts, shivering as from the touch of a disembodied soul, so this slight outward touch thrilled his inmost being; this hand, meeting his for an ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... supernatural," said the now disembodied voice. "What we call spirit, psychic force, hypnosis, spiritualism, the fourth dimension, is really only life on another scale of vibration. If we could see the whole scale, we would recognize it as a vast, coherent, perfectly natural and rational whole, in which we human beings fill ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... afraid, Miss Lippincott?" he remarked, with his gentle, almost caressing inflection of tone. "You do not for a minute believe that a higher power would allow any manifestation on the part of a disembodied spirit—who we trust is in her heavenly home—to ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
... suited to our life here. The second stage begins at death, the name we give to the separation which then takes place between this material fabric of the body and the incorporeal part of us; and then the soul and spirit dwell disembodied for a time. There follows at the Resurrection the third period, when the soul and spirit are reunited with the body, but with the body now so spiritualized and refined as to suit the heavenly existence. The second of these two ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... know that he could bring to birth and keep alive a fine anger when he chose. Rodney provided a good target for that emotion. And yet at the moment, Rodney and Katharine herself seemed disembodied ghosts. He could scarcely remember the look of them. His mind plunged lower and lower. Their marriage seemed of no importance to him. All things had turned to ghosts; the whole mass of the world was insubstantial vapor, surrounding the ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... may again be divided. Some are weak characters, dominated by the will of others in a negative manner, as mediums, who are the prey of disembodied spirits desirous of obtaining a physical body when they have lost ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... assurance That we are not forgotten. Who shall say That from the world of spirits comes no greeting, No message of remembrance? It may be The thoughts that visit us, we know not whence, Sudden as inspiration, are the whispers Of disembodied spirits, speaking to us As friends, who wait outside a prison wall, Through the barred windows speak to those ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... place as the day died, looking at the dull houses opposite, and thinking, if the disembodied spirits of former inhabitants were ever conscious of them, how they must pity themselves for their old places of imprisonment. Sometimes a face would appear behind the dingy glass of a window, and would fade away into the gloom as if it had seen enough of life and had vanished out of it. ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... that any influence so dark and mysterious should thus intrude on our bright life, and from the first I had an impression which I could not entirely shake off, that any such appearance or converse of a disembodied spirit must portend misfortune, if not worse, to him who saw or heard it. It never occurred to me to combat or to doubt the reality of the vision; he believed that he had seen it, and his conviction was enough to convince me. He had meant, he said, ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... belongs to the actual world around it. So, too, the denizens of the world of Astralism. In any of these named worlds there is a material presence—which must be created, if only for a single or periodic purpose. It matters not whether a material presence already created can be receptive of a disembodied soul, or a soul unattached can have a body built up for it or around it; or, again, whether the body of a dead person can be made seeming quick through some diabolic influence manifested in the present, or an inheritance or result of some baleful use of malefic power in the past. The result is the ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... against one of the walls, as if listening to something through it! As he gazed it grew plainer to him, and he saw a face, its eyes staring wide, which yet seemed not to see him. It was the face of the earl. Donal felt as if in the presence of the disembodied; he stood fascinated, nor made attempt to retire or conceal himself. The figure turned its face to the wall, put the palms of its hands against it, and moved them up and down, and this way and that; then looked at them, and began to ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... increasing silence the roar of London sounded more intensely. From the darkness, as if it were the scene of a play, James watched the cabs and 'buses pass rapidly in the light, the endless procession of people like disembodied souls drifting aimlessly before the wind. It was a comfort and a relief to sit there unseen, under cover of the night. He observed the turmoil with a new, disinterested curiosity, feeling strangely as if he were no longer among the living. He found himself surprised that ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... a brief space, clad in ecstasy, Pure, disembodied, I fall to kiss thy feet, And sense thy glory throbbing round about; Whereafter, rising, I hold thee in a sweet And gentle converse that lifts me up to be, When thou art gone, strange to the ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... the omnific word of the Grand Master of the Universe, from time to eternity; from the tomb of corruption to the chambers of hope; from the darkness of death to the celestial beams of life; and that his disembodied spirit shall be conveyed as near to the holy of holies of the divine presence as humanity can ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... men and teachers in her communion, who deny the Incarnation, repudiate vicarious sacrifice, make light of the story of the resurrection, and refine the risen Son of God into nothing more than the spirit and essence of truth; or, at most, the disembodied ghost of a man who called himself a Messiah, mistaken in his claims, but authoritative in his ...
— The Testimony of the Bible Concerning the Assumptions of Destructive Criticism • S. E. Wishard
... talk on the spot, but when he found that poor "Baron Bertram" could neither see him nor hear a word he spoke, he had a fearful sense of being a disembodied spirit. The ghost looked wistfully at him, and said, "God and ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... draw the pattern of each remember feeling a lazy wonder they should always be full, though I did nothing but empty them,—and at last solved the phenomenon by concluding I had become a kind of Danaid, whose punishment, not whose sentence, had been reversed: then suddenly I felt as if I were disembodied,—a distant spectator of my own performances, and of the feast at which my person remained seated. The voices of my host, of the "Rector, of the Chief Justice, became thin and low, as though they reached me through a whispering tube; and when I rose to speak, it was as to ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... state. It was far more probable that it had remained over in my mind, on waking from the swoon, merely because it was the latest of a series of impressions received while outside the body. That these impressions were of a kind most strange and startling, seeing that they were those of a disembodied soul exercising faculties more spiritual than those of the body, I could not doubt. The desire to know what they had been grew upon me, till it became a longing which left me no repose. It seemed intolerable that I should have secrets from myself, that my soul ...
— The Blindman's World - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... permitted to look down on those we have left on the earth, but I can only hope it. Futurity is much veiled from our eyes, and faith and hope are our only guides concerning it. We are not enjoined to believe, that disembodied spirits watch over the friends they have loved, but we may innocently hope it. It is a hope which I will never resign,' continued he, while he wiped the tears from his daughter's eyes, 'it will sweeten the bitter moments of death!' Tears fell slowly on his cheeks; ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... time of the Exodus, it seems clear that, even among a people so far advanced as the Egyptians, all that lay beyond the mountains which bounded their land on the west was believed to belong not to living men, but to disembodied spirits. It was the terrible country through which the souls of the departed made their arduous way to the Hall of Judgment [Footnote: "The Nations Around," pp. 49, 50.] Accordingly, we find that the Egyptians made no attempt to ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... was the sole survivor of a once famous trio. Two out of the three, Doc Dickson and Pap Spooner, had passed to the shades, and the legend ran that when their disembodied spirits reached the banks of Styx, the ruling passion of their lives asserted itself for the last time. They demurred loudly, impatiently, at the exorbitant fee, ten cents, ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... not a man drink rapture of rest, or delight above wonder, Beholding, a soul disembodied, the days and the nights that fled, With splendour and sound of the tempest around and above him and under, ...
— A Century of Roundels • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... fictitious subjects, of course destroyed the honor and value of the same imagination used in the cause of truth. Exactly in the proportion in which Jupiters and Mercuries were embodied and believed, in that proportion Virgins and Angels were disembodied and disbelieved. The images summoned by art began gradually to assume one average value in the spectator's mind; and incidents from the Iliad and from the Exodus to come within the same degrees of credibility. And, farther, while the powers ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... irreverence we might hazard the conjecture,—as a finite creature, having no centre in himself on which to revolve, may it not be that his true correlative will there be revealed (if, indeed, it be not before) to the disembodied man, in the Being that made him? And may it not also follow, that the Principle we speak of will cease to be potential, and flow out, as it were, and harmonize with the eternal form of Hope,—even that Hope whose living end ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... with enjoyment; though more and more, as he advanced in life, he was disposed to question the expediency of stating truth in a disembodied form; he preferred it incarnate, as it appears in life and in story. But he could not talk to Emerson; his pleasure in his society did not express itself in that form. Emerson, on the other hand, assiduously cultivated my ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... which there is so much dancing up and down lofty flights of stairs with terpsichorean energy, and manoeuvring in companies and circles with members of the softer sex. As a philosophical conception of disembodied existence, it is undeniably deficient in repose, though perhaps good enough ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... tree-spirits, river-spirits, and other similar extrahuman beings. It is convenient to employ the term 'spirit' as the designation of the soul in a nonhuman object, isolated and independent, and regarded as a Power to be treated with respect. The term is sometimes used of a disembodied human soul, and sometimes of a deity resident in an object of nature. It is better to distinguish, as far as possible, between these different senses of the word. The functions of a spirit are sometimes practically identical with those of a god. ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... which is alike held out to us by philosophy and by religion. We feel, according to the ardent expression of the poet, that we shall not wholly die; but from hence we vainly and weakly argue, that the same scenes, the same passions, shall delight and actuate the disembodied spirit, which affected it while in its tenement of clay. Hence the popular belief, that the soul haunts the spot where the murdered body is interred; that its appearances are directed to bring down vengeance on ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... well"—well with the living—well with the dead—well with those who, notwithstanding all their bereavements, are under the care of Heaven and enjoy the smiles of God—well with those whose disembodied spirits, escaped from the imprisonment of time, have ascended to the unfettered freedom, the ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... applicant as himself; and he had less than a dollar. He explained something of this over the wire, adding that if Markley would see Flavilla at the end of the day the money would be forthcoming. That, the crisp, disembodied tone replied, was impossible; he must call in the middle of the morning, but no difficulty would be made about his bill; Doret could send the ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... disembodied voice had a ring of triumph. "I'm at the tipmost top. It's rather shaky, ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... enters so largely into my narrative—the conjugality of disembodied spirits—I cannot forbear some further discourse before proceeding historically. The absurd idea is still prevalent that there is no sex in heaven. Those who retain this notion, despite the revelations of science concerning the ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... watch at the wheel calls him, and he "turns out." Nothing can equal the ghastly expression on the faces of men who have been torn from their sleep at an unnaturally premature hour. They move along the iron decks like ghosts, peering into one's face like disembodied spirits seeking their corporeal correlatives, and avoiding stanchions, chains, and other pitfalls in an uncanny fashion. In the meantime, the Second Officer drifts "aft" to his bunk for another four-hour sleep. And so on, day ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... lying on a very thick, soft feather bed. But the quality of utter detachment and independence! I had not reckoned on things like this. I had expected a violent jerk at starting, a giddy sense of speed. Instead I felt—as if I were disembodied. It was not like the beginning of a journey; it was like ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... Hindus often break the skull in order to allow the soul to escape. Often an insect or a stone is thought to harbour the spirit. As shown by Sir E. B. Tylor in Primitive Culture, [123] the breath, the shadow and the pupil of the eye were sometimes held to be or to represent the soul or spirit. Disembodied spirits are imprisoned in a tree or hole by driving nails into the tree or ground to confine them and prevent their exit. When a man died accidentally or a woman in childbirth and fear was felt that their spirits might annoy or injure the living, a stake might be driven through the body ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... "crawled half prostrate" to the barest and highest rocks she could find on the rim, and confessed: "It made a coward of me; I shrank and shut my eyes, and felt crushed and beaten under the intolerable burden of the flesh. For humanity intrudes here; in these warm and glowing purple spaces disembodied spirits must range and soar, souls purged and purified and infinitely daring." Yet here I have heard the wild brayings of hungry mules and the worse ravings of angry men—none of them impressed as was the soul of ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... visible, nor tangible, nor portable, nor transferable. It is not a substance, nor a liquid, nor a vapour. It has neither colour nor form. Imagination can't conceive it. It can't be imitated or forged. It is confined to no clime or country, but is ubiquitous. It is disembodied when completed, but is instantly reproduced, and so is immortal. It is as old as the creation, and yet is as young and fresh as ever. It prexisted, still exists, and always will exist. It pervades all natur. The breeze as it passes kisses the ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... did his unconscious utmost to defeat himself, got his share of the sunset glow upon the house. Fanciful, nervous, weary of it all as she was, she devoted herself to her duties; and then, on this fifth of August, in the afternoon, she had a waking vision, perfectly distinct, and so vivid that, disembodied and apart, she could see herself enacting it. It was followed by a shivering fit and depression; but that must ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... prejudices engendered by education, pleasing. Religion has nothing to do with it, and more than that it ought to influence every act of life. No more has religion anything to do with the intercourse of disembodied spirits with those in the form. That also is wholly controlled by laws inherent in the nature of things, and will, when the ridiculous hue and cry raised by sensualistic minds has somewhat abated, resolve itself into a fixed fact having no more direct bearing upon ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... from the tomb, and sped in dim-gleaming whiteness over the snow, scarce to have been seen against it. The moon was but a shred—a withered autumn leaf low fallen toward the dim plain of the west. As she ran she would have seemed to one of Steenie's angels, out that night on the hill, a newly disembodied ghost fleeing home. Swift and shadowless as the thought of her own brave heart, she ran. Her sense of power and speed was glorious. She felt—not thought—herself a human goddess, the daughter of the Eternal. Up height and down hollow she flew, ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... the performance came back, for he had resolutely kept away from even the dress rehearsal, and the entire creative force of his lines was about to come to him. "In a few moments my characters will step forth from the world of the disembodied into the mellow glow of the foot-lights," he thought, and the anticipated joy of welcoming them warmed his brain and the chill clutch of fear fell away from his throat. The dignity and the glow, the possibilities of the theatre as a ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... as animating an alien body, with which it not only has no essential underlying community of substance, but with which it has no conceivable point in common to render a union between the two possible, or give the one a grip of any kind over the other; in fact, the doctrine of disembodied spirits, so instinctively rejected by all who need be listened to, comes back as it would seem, with a scientific imprimatur; if, on the other hand, we exclude the non-living from the body, then what are we to do with nails that want cutting, dying skin, ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... sit for a half hour or more in the depot waiting-room, and for lack of anything else to do employ the time in watching the people who crowd through the swinging doors. Did you ever read the "Little Pilgrim?" Do you recall the chapter wherein the disembodied spirits are represented as lingering near the gates to watch the coming in of newly liberated souls? Sometimes while sitting in one of the big rocking chairs I imagine to myself that the constantly opening ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... to me to be removed, that although men knew that the bodies of the dead had been burned, yet they conceived such things to be done in the infernal regions as could not be executed or imagined without a body; for they could not conceive how disembodied souls could exist; and, therefore, they looked out for some shape or figure. This was the origin of all that account of the dead in Homer. This was the idea that caused my friend Appius to frame his Necromancy; and this ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... biology; he breaks the continuity of nature; he loses the poetic justification of a metaphysical vitalism; he asks us to believe that life is not a natural expression of material being, but an alien and ghostly madness descending into it—I say a ghostly madness, for why should disembodied life wish that the body should live? This vitalism is not a kind of biology more prudent and literal than the mechanical kind (as a scientific vitalism would be), but far less legitimately speculative. Nor is it a frank and thorough mythology, such as the total spectacle ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... crowded festivities of a ball-room at some lordly mansion in the country, and to have wandered into a churchyard, damp and dreary with a thick London fog. In the light dress of fashion, he throws himself on a tombstone. "Ye dead!" exclaims the hero, "where are ye? Do your disembodied spirits now float around me, and, shrouded in this horrible veil of nature, glare unseen upon vitality? Float ye upon this intolerable mist, in yourselves still more misty and intolerable? Hold ye high jubilee to-night? ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... superintendance of Providence; no distance of time or country, no difference of station or fortune, can hinder the glorified spirits of the faithful from meeting in the same paradise, and hearing the same joyful sentence of eternal beatitude. Whether the disembodied souls left their bodies in the north or in the south, they will all rejoice in the society of each other. The spirits of the patriarchs of old, as well as of those who die to-day in the Lord, will meet in one large community. Console thyself, therefore, with the thought of a future, joyful, ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... the flesh, as the door never opened and the spider's web across it was not broken. So it comes to this: either some part of her is not mad but can still exercise sufficient will to project itself upon your senses, or she is dead and her disembodied spirit did this thing. Now we know that she is not dead, for we have seen her and Harut has confessed as much. Therefore I maintain that, whatever may be her temporary state, she must still be fundamentally of a reasonable mind, as she is of a natural body. ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... in touch rather than in sight amidst the darkness which the disembodied voices broke upon. "Enraghty's house? Then we've got ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... though they had been disembodied spirits— mere voices in empty air; for they looked at each other as if there had been nothing there, or, at most, with as much recognition as one gives to an inanimate object, and no more. But now a silence fell. Heemskirk ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... tree which fell upon the passer-by and crushed him. But often too the murderer was of the unseen world, and so was hidden, his presence being betrayed in his malignant attacks only. He was a god, an evil spirit, a disembodied soul who slily insinuated itself into the living man, or fell upon him with irresistible violence—illness being a struggle between the one possessed and the power which possessed him. As soon as the former succumbed he was carried away from his own people, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... us in a hurry. "A character," he said, "remains just the same character for all that it's been disembodied. That's a thing we too often forget. People with a certain strength or fixity of purpose may have ghosts of a certain strength and fixity of purpose—most haunting ghosts, you know, must be as one-idea'd as monomaniacs and as obstinate as mules to come back ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... daylight the land leaped out of the sea, all clear blues and purples, incomparably fresh and incomparably 111 wistful in that one golden hour of the tropic day before the sun has risen very high—the disembodied spirit of an island. It lay, vague as hope at first, in a jewel-tinted sea; the ship steamed toward it as through the mists of creation's third morning, and all good things seemed possible. Thus had Simpson, reared in ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... said that the proofs given through him of the existence and powers of departed spirits were such as no one could resist. My friend and his family had visited this medium, and had seen things which to them seemed utterly unaccountable, except on the supposition that they were the work of disembodied spirits. ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... two gazed at this almost disembodied brain that held them captive. It continued to come steadily toward them, carried by its two faithful slaves; and the grotesque termite soldiers, that had closed about them in a hollow square, ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... need scarcely tell you," says the disembodied spirit, "that even when you left us, men had agreed to understand those passages in the most holy writings which speak of the final destruction of all things by fire, as having reference to the orb of the earth alone. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... had all the perception of the Celt plus the acquired sapience of the painter's training. If he could have existed in a universe which consisted entirely of sound and color, a universe inhabited only by disembodied spirits, he would have been its ablest citizen; but he was utterly disqualified to live in a human world. He was absolutely incapable of judging people. His tendency was to underestimate men and to overestimate women. His life bore all the scars inevitable to such an instinct. Women, in ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... Coming is forgotten! How few of His people truly wait for Him! How few pray that important and almost forgotten prayer, Even so, Come Lord Jesus! But we must also remember that our Lord is likewise waiting. Innumerable multitudes of disembodied spirits who are saved by Grace are waiting in His own presence for the moment when they will receive their resurrection bodies, which will be when He descends from Heaven and comes into the air. The faithful remnant of His people on earth ...
— The Lord of Glory - Meditations on the person, the work and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ • Arno Gaebelein
... were soon forgotten in the fervour and enthusiasm of the greeting we received, as we marched through the old town and placed our Colours in the Hall. Six weeks later the baggage guard returned, and the Battalion was finally disembodied. ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... in the above description of the phenomena of simple clairvoyance I have made no mention of the sights of the astral plane which often become visible to the clairvoyant, and which have to do with astral bodies, astral shells, the disembodied souls of those who have passed on to other planes of existence, etc. I shall take up these matters in other parts of this course, and shall not dwell upon them in this place. But, I wish you to remember that the same power which enables ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... call into fullest exercise her blessed faculty of sympathy, that pure and tender heart of flesh, which teaches her always to find her highest interest in mankind, simply as mankind; to see the Divine most completely in the human; to prefer the incarnate to the disembodied, the personal to the abstract, the pathetic to the intellectual; to see, and truly, in the most common tale of village love or sorrow, a mystery deeper and more divine than lies in all the theories of politicians or the fixed ideas ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Dense shadows hung all round the room, making the objects in it seem weird and ghost-like in the gloom. Sudden gusts of wind swept angrily round, causing the withered leaves and dying flowers in the vases to murmur with unearthly sounds, as of the sighing of disembodied souls. Only through the aperture above a streak of greyish light struck full upon the Caesar, as, with glowing eyes and cruel grasp, he compelled her to ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... bars and demolished the bridge. He leaped out, knowing now that he had to die, but ready, wishing only to make a worthy fight, and then for the first time in broad day view of all his foes he stood—the shadowy Dog-killer, the disembodied voice of St. Boniface woods, ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Disembodied words are also sinners and the occasions of sin. Who has not broken the Commandments in consequence of the provocation of some miserable little monosyllabic eluding his grasp in the moment of his direst need, or of some ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... whole face, withered and worn as it was, lighted up and glowed, Helen thought, almost like what one could imagine a disembodied soul. ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... materialist as confusedly Calvinist, they are chiefly occupied in educating the child before he exists. The whole movement is full of a singular depression about what one can do with the populace, combined with a strange disembodied gayety about what may be done with posterity. These essential Calvinists have, indeed, abolished some of the more liberal and universal parts of Calvinism, such as the belief in an intellectual design or an everlasting happiness. But though Mr. Shaw and his friends admit it is a superstition ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... yoga exercise for twenty years. His miraculous feats began to attract widespread attention. It seems that he was always accompanied by a disembodied spirit whom he called 'Hazrat.' This invisible entity was able to fulfill the FAKIR'S ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... I not already said That these things are, that they are quick with life,— Such life as disembodied spirits have,— That they are deathless? Thou need'st not inquire Of me whence they are come, for thou hast seen One of their number on its journey hither. The period may not be far remote When thine own planet, starting from its sphere, Shall fright the dwellers of the stars ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... shaking, He first inclined to think he had been mistaken; And then to be ashamed of such mistaking; His own internal ghost began to awaken Within him, and to quell his corporal quaking— Hinting that Soul and Body on the whole Were odds against a disembodied Soul. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... nothing of the good done by people, but to exaggerate the bad; and so, in such cases, if it should be rumored that mine was that living spirit which tormented Lady Aoi, how trying it would be to me! It is no rare occurrence that one's disembodied spirit, after death, should wander about; but even that is not a very agreeable idea. How much more, then, must it be disagreeable to have the repute that one's living spirit was ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... account by the modern critic, he is scarcely more an object of regard to the modern reader; and it must be confessed that after a dozen close-packed pages of subtle metaphysical distinction or solemn didactic declamation, in which the disembodied principles of all arts and sciences float before the imagination in undefined profusion, the eye turns with impatience and indifference to the imperfect embryo specimens of them, and the hopeless attempts to realise this splendid jargon in one poor work by one poor author, which ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... to weariness quotations from a book that is wholly composed of the doings and sayings of the disembodied man, let it suffice to give the final judgment ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... member of my body, I may be morally sure that there is something amiss in the processes of that part or member. As long as the whole economy of the frame goes on well and without interruption, our attention is not called to it. The intellectual man is like a disembodied spirit. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... about Pete. There was no sound, no light, no heat. He had no sense of weight. It was as if, suddenly, his mind had become disembodied. ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... doubtless," replied Master Holdenough; "Beelzebub loves to charge with horse and foot mingled, as was the fashion of the old Scottish general, Davie Leslie. He has his devils in the body as well as his devils disembodied, and uses the one to ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... the place Sung by the ancient masters of the lyre, Where disembodied spirits, ere they left Their earthly mansions, lingered for a time Upon the confines of eternal night, Mourning their doom; and oft the astonished hind, As home he journeyed at the fall of eve, Viewed unknown forms flitting across his path, And in the breeze that waved ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson |
