"Perceptive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... into another land (without any jarring of railway or steamship!) to realize the locale in which rearing masses of grey cumuli suggest elephants rushing into combat! And the husband's picture of his wife in his absence is as noble, as sympathetic, and as perceptive as anything of the kind I ever read. So full of human feeling and so refined. I enjoyed it very much. It reminded me, oddly enough, more than once of Young's Night Thoughts. I think perhaps (if the charm of another tongue, and the wonder of its antiquity did not lead ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... into each other's eyes. Dominey watched them, fascinated. Neither betrayed himself by even the fall of an eyelid. Yet Dominey, his perceptive powers at their very keenest in this moment which instinct told him was one of crisis, felt the unspoken, unbetokened recognition which passed between them. Some commonplace remark was uttered and responded to. ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... The perceptive critical taste is, so to speak, the female analogue to the male quality of productive talent or genius. Not capable of begetting great work itself, it consists in a capacity of reception, that is to say, of recognizing as such what is right, fit, beautiful, or the reverse; in other words, ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... the girl, throwing off the great-coat and pressing her hands upon her bosom to indicate herself. Then Dic, in a flood of perceptive light and returning consciousness, caught the priceless Christmas gift to his heart ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... years. Kenyon's cares, and whatever gloomy ideas before possessed him, seemed to be left at Monte Beni, and were scarcely remembered by the time that its gray tower grew undistinguishable on the brown hillside. His perceptive faculties, which had found little exercise of late, amid so thoughtful a way of life, became keen, and kept his eyes busy with ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... twenty-six skulls six were from Grand Canary. All were markedly of the type called Caucasian, and some belonged to exceptionally tall men. The shape was dolichocephalic, with sides rather flat than rounded; the perceptive region was well developed, and the reflective, as usual amongst savages and barbarians, was comparatively poor. The facial ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... forehead—vara gude indeed. Causative organs large, perceptive ditto. Imagination superabundant—mun be heeded. Benevolence, conscientiousness, ditto, ditto. Caution—no that large—might be developed," with a quiet chuckle, "under a gude Scot's education. Just turn your head into profile, laddie. ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... (3) Thinking. Dialectically, they pass over into each other; not that Perception rises into Conception, and Conception into Thinking, but that Thinking goes back into Conception, and this again into Perception. In the development of the young, the Perceptive faculty is most active in the infant, the Conceptive in the child, and the Thinking in the youth; and thus we may distinguish an intuitive, an imaginative, and a ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... it. In places it was totally obliterated by the passage of many beasts, and where the way was rocky, even Tarzan of the Apes was almost baffled; but there was still the faint effluvium which clung to the human spoor, appreciable only to such highly trained perceptive powers ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... so intimately as has happened splendidly between Picasso and Braque, which is in the nature of professional dignity among artists, there is bound to be more or less confusion even to the highly perceptive artist and this must therefore confuse the casual observer and layman. So it is, or was at that time with the painting of Robert Delaunay and Mme. Delaunay Terck; what you learned in this instance was that the ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... eyes fell upon Mistress Winthrop, and his glance was oddly perceptive. He observed those matters of which Mr. Craske had seemed to make sardonic comment: the erect stiffness of her carriage, the eyes that looked neither to right nor left, and the pallor of her face. He observed, too, the complacent air with which her ladyship advanced beside ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... in the middle of her room, Marguerite listened with that feverish anxiety that excites the perceptive faculties to the utmost degree. An inward voice, stronger than reason, told her that this letter threatened her happiness, her future, perhaps her life! But how could she convince herself of the truth of this presentiment? If ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... arise on this desert earth, if, two or three being saved, it were slowly re-peopled.—We talked of what was beyond the tomb; and, man in his human shape being nearly extinct, we felt with certainty of faith, that other spirits, other minds, other perceptive beings, sightless to us, must people with thought and love this beauteous and ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... conceive himself standing at any point in a river basin, preferably beyond the realms of the torrents, he may with the guidance of the facts previously noted, with a little use of the imagination, behold the vast perceptive which the history of the river valley may unfold to him. He stands on the surface of the soil, that debris of the rocks which is just entering on its way to the ocean. In the same region ten thousand years ago he would have stood upon ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... which we have here to consider is the part which heredity has played in forming the perceptive faculty of the individual prior to its own experience. We have already seen that heredity plays an important part in forming memory of ancestral experiences, and thus it is that many animals come into the world with their power of perception already largely developed. The wealth ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... of the sensibilities and perceptive faculties becoming blunted by exposure to and familiarity with offensive effluvia. "The General repeatedly called the attention of the officers at Fort George to the filthy state and foul effluvia of their camp, but they perceived no offensive ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... hold only to the egotistic interests of their own individuality. This dark saying means (if it mean anything), that the so-called moral faculties of man, fancy and ideality, must lord it over the perceptive and reflective powers,a simple absurdity! It produced a Turricremata, alias Torquemada, who, shedding floods of honest tears, caused his victims to be burnt alive; and an Anchieta, the Thaumaturgist of Brazil, who beheaded a converted ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... from one place to another, I have always made it a point, if possible, to be accompanied by one or more natives, and I have often found great advantage from it. Attached to an exploring party they are frequently invaluable, as their perceptive powers are very great, and enable them both to see and hear anything at a much greater distance than a European. In tracking stray animals, and keeping on indistinct paths, they display a degree of perseverance and skill that is really wonderful. They ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... Barristers and solicitors would be more useful for that purpose. Thus hardly anything is left which physical science can investigate, except the conduct and utterances of the hysterical, the epileptic, the hypnotised and other subjects who are occasionally said to display an abnormal extension of the perceptive faculties, for example, by way of clairvoyance. To the unscientific intelligence it seems conceivable that if Home, for example, could have been kept in some such establishment as the Salpetriere for a year, and could have ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... warm, poetic imagination, Nature had given him quick perceptive powers, and the faculty of expressing his thoughts without apparent effort, in simple, strong language, as well defined, and sharply cut as a cameo. Beyond this, and better than all, was a tender, sympathetic sensibility; which, if it sometimes ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... relief. His grey hair and black clothes would melt into the decoration of his room, were the figure not rescued from such oblivion by the British white glaze of his shirt front and—to a sympathetic eye—by the loveable perceptive face of the man. Sometimes he looks at the sofa in front of him, on which sits WEDGECROFT, still in the frock coat of a busy day, depressed and irritable. With his back to them, on a sofa with its ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... was indicated there; an indomitable will that would bend the most adverse conditions to serve its own masterful purpose and make of obstacles the paving-stones to success; a mind gifted with keen perceptive faculties, but which hitherto had dealt mostly with externals and knew little of itself or of its own powers. Young, with splendid health and superabundant vitality, there had been little opportunity for introspection or for the play of the finer, subtler faculties; and of ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... is found that all these, and the many other artificial breeds or races of animals and plants, have been produced by one method. The breeder—and a skilful one must be a person of much sagacity and natural or acquired perceptive faculty—notes some slight difference, arising he knows not how, in some individuals of his stock. If he wish to perpetuate the difference, to form a breed with the peculiarity in question strongly marked, he selects such male and female individuals as ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... demand what at present we must consider as a too early initiation into the ancient languages, no longer the exclusive keys to knowledge. But Milton realized that there was a natural development to the imitative and perceptive powers of man, and he knew that a mere tasking of the verbal memory blighted the diviner faculties of comparison and judgment. We hold that the ideal system of education, to which through coming centuries men can only approximate, must present to the child the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... the sweet-potatoes and pea-nuts which were roasting in the ashes, listened with reverence to the wiles of the ancient Ulysses, and meditated the same. It is Nature's compensation; oppression simply crushes the upper faculties of the head, and crowds everything into the perceptive organs. Cato, thou reasonest well! When I get into any serious scrape, in an enemy's country, may I be lucky enough to have you at my elbow, to pull ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... drink, Mr. President! You're going to have to make a speech pretty soon; you'll need a bracer!" He handed the second one to the physician. "Here you go, Doc! Congratulations! It isn't everyone who's got a President in the family!" Then his perceptive brain noticed something in the doctor's expression. "Hey," he said, more softly, "what's the trouble? You look as though you expected sickness in ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... observed, first of all, that the Deity does not, like other objects, come within the direct cognizance of our perceptive faculties. We have an organization, by means of which we are enabled to perceive various objects around us; and, by travelling to other lands, we can obtain a knowledge of many things of which we had before been ignorant. We perceive also what is going on within us. The telescope and the microscope ...
— Thoughts on a Revelation • Samuel John Jerram
... man determines to succeed and has a perceptive mind to see opportunities, if he relies on no one but himself, and follows this up by hard, persistent work, he will succeed. If he does not he is lacking in some other vital point, but we have never yet read the life ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... afterwards with greater or less difficulty removed—always with a shock to the moral sentiment when the child discovers it has been deceived—but also a knowledge of the infant mind, a perception of the thoughts and fancies which chase one another through the infant brain, a knowledge and perceptive power which only a watchful and loving experience can acquire. An industry and a patience far beyond any needed by the teacher of more advanced pupils are also required by the highly-cultivated men and women, to whom alone the training of infant minds should be intrusted. ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands
... perceptive faculty of undergraduates, it ought to be said that the classmates and contemporaries of Richard Harding Davis knew perfectly well, while he and they were young together, that in him Lehigh had a son so marked in his individuality, ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... charm lay not in beauty only, but in a certain rare, sweet girlishness, which seemed to form a nimbus round her. Yet was her beauty worth remarking, too; and I have loved to think that, while others saw that only, I, looking with more perceptive eyes, saw more truly to her heart. I did not reason all this out at the first; I only stood and stared at her amazed, until some one knocking against me brought me to my senses. There were a dozen men about her, and one of these I saw with delight was Dr. Price, ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... arising, whether sentiments or quasi-cognitions, are invalid. Much less can psychology dispute the validity of a percept if it cannot be sure that the mind adds nothing to sensation and its grouping; that in the genesis of the perceptive state, with its intuition of something external and now present as object, nothing like a form of intelligence is superimposed on the elements of sensation, giving to the result of their coalescence the particular unity which we find. Whether psychology as a positive science can ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... was a childish laugh. His limbs were regaining the strength of adolescence, but more perceptive sensations remained unroused. He spent whole afternoons in gazing out on the Paradou, pouting like a child that sees nought but whiteness and hears but the vibration of sounds. He still retained the ignorance of urchinhood—his sense of touch as yet so innocent ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... tender and modest. And I am not sure that he is not a very great man; but I have not quite decided upon my own opinion. I should say, I am not quite sure that I do not think him a very great man; for my opinion is, of course, as far as possible from settling the matter. He has very keen perceptive power; but what astonishes me is, that his eyes are not large and deep. He seems to see everything very accurately; and how he can do so with his small eyes, I cannot tell. They are not keen eyes, either, but quite undistinguished in any way. His nose is straight and rather handsome, his mouth ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... population, numbers of small vessels, and especially fishing boats, how much life and property is risked unnecessarily by every unforeseen storm? Even animals, birds, and insects have a presaging instinct, perhaps a bodily feeling, that warns them; but man often neglects his perceptive and reasoning powers; neither himself observes, nor attends to the observations of others, unless special inclination or circumstances stimulate attention to the subject. Agriculturists, it is true, use weather-glasses: the sportsman knows ...
— Barometer and Weather Guide • Robert Fitzroy
... recommended, still less engaged, as tutor to a sensitive youth; or, being so engaged, tolerated for two days. He certainly could not hold down his job long enough to corrupt his pupil, Anthony Clayton, by exchanging souls with him under the nose of mad but perceptive Mrs. Clayton and sane sister Diana. This conspicuously chaste Diana is an attractive person, and so is the recklessly charitable Dr. McCabe, her appropriate mate, who first had to fly the country through ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various
... frontal sinus, and is sometimes half an inch wide. As there is no positive method of determining its dimensions in the living head, there must ever be some doubt concerning the development of the perceptive organs which it covers. The superciliary ridge at the external angle of the brow extends really as much as three-quarters of an inch from the brain. From this angle a ridge of bone (the temporal arch) extends ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... these erudite, mildly drawn caricatures, and is not predisposed toward the homes or characters of those "cousins" across the Atlantic. A few that he had met in England strengthened this prejudice. Shallow attempts to ape everything English had disgusted this frank, open-hearted, perceptive Briton, with his innate abhorrence ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... an instrument, according to Kant, is the human mind. Space and Time and the Perceptive Faculties are the parts of the instrument. Everything that reaches the senses must submit to the laws of Space and Time, that is, to the Laws of Mathematics, because Space and Time are forms of the mind itself, and, like the kaleidoscope, ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... they do from the nasal side, of necessity make the vessels that pass to the temporal part of the retina longest and of less caliber. These vessels and their terminals are first to suffer marked diminution in size; death of the perceptive elements supplied with nutrition by these vessels follows. For this reason the nasal part of the field of vision is more often the first to disappear. In congestive (inflammatory) glaucoma, the typical field of vision shows most marked ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... example, if I read, "on the one hand ... on the other hand," I have a feeling of balanced tensions precisely analogous to what I experience when I look at a vase. Structure is not a purely intellectual or perceptive affair; it is also motor and organic, and that means emotional. It is felt with the body as well as understood by the mind. I have used the case of symmetry to bring out this truth, but I might have used other types of unification, each of which has its unique feeling ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... shop-door. It did not yield to her hand; and the white curtain, drawn across the window which formed the upper section of the door, struck her quick perceptive faculty as something unusual. Without making another effort to enter here, she betook herself to the great portal, under the arched window. Finding it fastened, she knocked. A reverberation came from the emptiness within. She knocked again, ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... great, clear, infallible argument—demonstration itself. Jocelyn is full of heavenly-mindedness, and feels and speaks and acts with a zeal according to knowledge. Follen is chaste, profound, and elaborately polished. Goodell is perceptive, analytical, expert, and solid. Child (David L.) is generously indignant, courageous, and demonstrative; his lady combines strength with beauty, argumentation with persuasiveness, greatness with humility. Birney is collected, courteous, dispassionate—his ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... consciousness- -if it were not able to reproduce them the more quickly and easily in proportion to the frequency of the repetitions—if, in fact, there was no power of recollecting earlier performances? Our perceptive faculties must have remained always at their lowest stage if we had been compelled to build up consciously every process from the details of the sensation-causing materials tendered to us by our senses; nor could our voluntary movements ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... see what light we can get concerning the intellect. What are its functions and limitations? Is it safe as a guide? According to the phrenological classification, the intellectual faculties are divided into three classes; viz.: the perceptive, literary and reasoning faculties. The perceptive faculties bring us into relationship with the external world, and through them we learn about the color, size, form, weight, etc., of material objects. If the phrenologists are right, ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... we were linked together by a vice. We both smoked opium. We knew each other's secret, and respected it. We enjoyed together that wonderful expansion of thought, that marvelous intensifying of the perceptive faculties, that boundless feeling of existence when we seem to have points of contact with the whole universe,—in short, that unimaginable spiritual bliss, which I would not surrender for a throne, and which I hope ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... But then, again, how was his soul to pass,—to get out, in the first place, of his body? Easily enough. The concentrated effort of will, which could give shape to a fancy, and place it outside the eye, could, by sustained action, separate all the perceptive powers from the senses,—in short, the spirit from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... nature from acquiring the high intelligence of the Caucasian. His sensibilities are extremely dull, his perceptive faculties dim, and the entire organization of his brain forbids and rejects the cultivation necessary to the elimination of mind. With a feeble moral organization, and entirely devoid of the higher attributes of mind and soul so prominent in the instincts of the Caucasian, his position was never, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... stratagem perpetrated by a creature so low in the scale of animal life, and living amid surroundings so free from ordinary dangers, that, at first, I was loath to credit the evidence of my own perceptive powers; and it was only after long-continued observation that I was finally convinced that it was ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... circuitous action had been preserved, and withal the revenge was attained only in the general catastrophe, by that daimonic "fortune" on which Montaigne so often enlarges. For Shakspere, then, with his mind newly at work in reverie and judgment, where before it had been but perceptive and reproductive, the theme was one of human impotence, failure of will, weariness of spirit in presence of over-mastering fate, recoil from the immeasurable evil of the world. Hamlet becomes the mouthpiece of the all-sympathetic spirit which has put itself in his ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... ended; and she walked off in the direction towards which she had already turned her steps. She seemed scarcely satisfied, however: as I observed that she looked repeatedly back. What thought was prompting her to this? Women have keen perceptions—in intuition almost equalling instinct in its perceptive power. Could she have a suspicion? No, no: the thing ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... of the dog's perceptive faculties has been exemplified in a remarkable manner by his acquired knowledge of musical sounds. On some dogs fine music produces an apparently painful effect, causing them gradually to become restless, to moan piteously, and, finally, to fly from the spot with every sign of ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... All day, he hears of worldly things; but with Rosa he hears of heavenly things. Her heart feeds upon his thoughts, and assimilates them into new and graceful forms of feminine beauty, and Paul sits and listens, full of love and wonder, to his own thoughts, reproduced by the vivid perceptive powers of his wife. For instance, this morning Paul was reading in the Bible, as he always does to Rosa, before he leaves for his business, and he paused on the words, "then Abraham gave up the ghost, and died in a good old age, and full of years, and was gathered to his people;" and he remarked ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... sufferers at Pesth, and for the poor of his native town, and the concert tour by which he made Beethoven's monument possible at Bonn. Add to this the other sums he scattered to poor artists like Wagner from his meagre purse, and you will see one reason why women, who are more susceptible and perceptive of such qualities of character, were almost as helpless to resist Liszt's personality as he theirs. Even when he was "la petit Litz," he was found holding a street-cleaner's broom while he went to change a gold piece. And in his later years, his servant always filled two of his pockets with coin, ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... in a quick sympathy. She saw that his poetic susceptibility, the romantic and dramatic elements in him were all alive to his sister's case. How critically, sharply perceptive he was—or could be—with regard apparently to everybody in the world—save one! Often—as they talked—her heart stirred in this way, far out of sight, like a ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... final analysis, as I said before, it gets down to ether, to speed and vibration—and still at last to the perceptive limitations of our own earthly five senses. Just stop and consider how limited we are! Only five senses—why, even insects have six. Then consider that all matter, when we get to the bottom of it, is differentiated and condensed ether, focused into various ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... Captain's steps, coming up the stairs. Perceptive of her impatience, he had left her to herself, till he could bring word. Now she stood, listening to the nearing jingle that accompanied his footsteps, her hands clasped involuntarily against her breast in rigid tension. And when she saw his face through ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... imagine, but he certainly had retained a quickness of apprehension which made him half-unconsciously adapt himself to Aunt Emmy and her little habits in a way that astonished me. It was she who showed herself less perceptive as regarded him. But this she never divined. She had got it rooted into her small, graceful head that he would naturally wish to converse principally about his farm. And, in spite of scant encouragement, she continually "showed an interest," as she herself expressed it, in sheep, and water creeks, ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... again, her own face, as she lifted it, would have struck a perceptive onlooker as being, as it were, the face of another girl. It was tear-stained and wild, but this was not the cause of its change. The soft, bird eyes were different—suddenly, amazingly older than they had been when ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... what they can't do! I don't deny that you may be correct in the broad, vulgar sense, but that is not enough for me. I expect you to grasp the inner meaning. Now the real answer to this question is that there can be no answer! To a perceptive mind it would be impossible to reply without further information. It entirely depends on how the paper is cut out, and the amount of waste incurred ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... small and unpretentious cottage, and were obviously not well off as regards material goods? Copplestone had the faculty of seeing things at a glance, and refined and cultivated as the atmosphere of Mrs. Greyle's parlour was, it had taken no more than a glance from his perceptive eyes to see that he was there confronted with what folk call genteel poverty. Mrs. Greyle's almost nun-like attire of black had done duty for a long time; the carpet was threadbare; there was an absence of those little touches of comfort with which refined women of even modest ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... since it hath not a natural tendency to annihilation, nor a power to annihilate itself, nor can be annihilated by any being finitely powerful only, without an immediate act of the omnipotent Creator to annihilate it, it must endlessly abide an active perceptive substance, without either fear or hopes of dying through all eternity, which is, in other words, to be immortal as to the agency of all natural or second ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... put it, all this has been but a prelude to the play. Were it not so I should not now stand in such pressing want of the services of a confidential agent,—that is, of an experienced man of the world, who has been endowed by nature with phenomenal perceptive faculties, and in whose capacity and honour I ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... pair in their Belfast home. In the beginning of the year 1869 Mrs. Borrow died, aged seventy-three. There are few records of the tragedy that are worth perpetuating.[236] Borrow consumed his own smoke. With his wife's death his life was indeed a wreck. No wonder he was so 'rude' to that least perceptive of women, Miss Cobbe. Some four or five years more Borrow lingered on in London, cheered at times by walks and talks with Gordon Hake and Watts-Dunton, and he then returned to Oulton—a most ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... of the Jest, Beyond Life, and Figures of Earth before him, it is not easy for the perceptive critic to doubt this permanence. One might as sensibly deny a future to Ecclesiastes, The Golden Ass, Gulliver's Travels, and the works of Rabelais as to predict oblivion for such a thesaurus of ironic wit and fine fantasy, mellow ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... was one of the strange contradictions of Billy Byrne's personality that he could hold his eyes quite steady and level, meeting the gaze of another unwaveringly—and in that moment something happened to Billy Byrne's perceptive faculties. It was as though scales which had dimmed his mental vision had partially dropped away, for suddenly he saw what he had not before seen—a very beautiful girl, brave and unflinching before the brutal menace ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... hands. The more wheels there are in a watch or a brain, the more trouble they are to take care of. The movements of exaltation which belong to genius are egotistic by their very nature. A calm, clear mind, not subject to the spasms and crises which are so often met with in creative or intensely perceptive natures, is the best basis for love or friendship.—Observe, I am talking about MINDS. I won't say, the more intellect, the less capacity for loving; for that would do wrong to the understanding and reason;—but, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... revelations proceed. Of what nature these revelations are will appear in the following pages. The passive type of seer, on the contrary, remains in statu quo, open to impressions coming inwards towards the perceptive faculty, but making no effort towards either outward or inward searching. The success of each depends upon the observance of that method which is agreeable ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... for discourse in Buckingham Crescent—so happy an exercise for the votaries of that temple of analysis that he repeatedly spoke of their experience of it as crying aloud for Mrs. Brook. The questions it set in motion for the perceptive mind were exactly those that, as he said, most made them feel themselves. Vanderbank's plea for his morning had been a pile of letters to work off, and Mitchy—then coming down, as he announced from the first, ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... of the body which either keep him from or draw him near to the surrounding bodies. The first of these movements are the reflex movements, then are developed those combinations of movements which we called perceptive or suspensive actions in keeping with perceptions. Later came the social acts, the elementary intellectual acts which gave birth to language, the primitive voluntary acts, the immediate beliefs, then the reflected acts, the rational acts, experimental, ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... the spirits and harmonizes the mind, dispels lassitude and relieves fatigue, awakens thought and prevents drowsiness, lightens or refreshes the body, and clears the perceptive faculties.—CONFUCIUS. ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... perceptive of "atmosphere" there is a subtle difference in silence. There is the silence of woods, the silence of plains, the silence of death, the silence of sleep, and the silence of wakefulness. This silence was the last named. It was a silence alert, ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... all alone in the heart of the country, she did not permit such a thought to trouble her peace. The grave tranquillity of the old house was already beginning to exert its influence on her always quick and perceptive mind,—the dear remembrance of her father whom she had idolised, and whose sudden death had been the one awful shock of her life, came back to her now with a fresh and tender pathos. Little incidents of her childhood and of its affection, such as she thought she had forgotten, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... the: signification of signs. 3. The perception of the connexion or repugnancy, agreement or disagreement, that there is between any of our ideas. All these are attributed to the understanding, or perceptive power, though it be the two latter only that use allows us ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... taught him that he can concentrate his attention more perfectly; therefore his memory or understanding of the subject read or thought of will be increased. Very many people think and commit to memory by this method of concentrating attention; they probably do not belong to the quick, perceptive, imaginative class, but rather to those who have power of application and who have educated their minds by close voluntary attention. Galton found a large proportion of the Fellows of the Royal Society were of this motor type. But the fact that certain individuals make use ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... things. But just so far as relations can be traced between this object and all other objects, so much the more rational does the knowledge of the watch become. Rationality is the comprehending of anything in its relations. The perceptive, isolated ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... male and female. Many sentimental stories were current, especially among the old writers, concerning the conjugal affection and unselfish devotion of the swordfish, but they seem to have originated in the imaginative brain of the naturalist rather than in his perceptive faculties. It is said that when the female fish is taken the male seems devoid of fear, approaches the boat, and allows himself easily to be taken, but if this be true, it appears to be the case only in the ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... the matter of our knowledge and its form. The matter is what is given by the perceptive faculties taken in the elementary state. The form is the totality of the relations set up between these materials in order to constitute a systematic knowledge. Can the form, without matter, be an object of knowledge? Yes, without doubt, provided that this knowledge is not like a thing we possess ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... sexual selection seems to have done nothing; such animals are often affixed for life to the same spot, or have the sexes combined in the same individual, or, what is still more important, their perceptive and intellectual faculties are not sufficiently advanced to allow of the feelings of love and jealousy, or of the exertion of choice. When, however, we come to the Arthropoda and Vertebrata, even to the lowest classes in these two great sub-kingdoms, sexual ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... world," as it appeared to immigrants from the "old land" of Prussia, Hoffmann spent in familiarising himself with the novelty and strangeness of the place, in wondering at and admiring the motley scenes which daily met his view; and doubtless his acute perceptive faculties gleaned a valuable harvest of notes for use on future occasions, both for his pencil and his pen. About the end of June he formed the acquaintance of J. E. Hitzig, who came down to Warsaw with the rank ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... singularly striking and attractive in person, tall, erect, and graceful in figure, with regular features and wavy hair slightly tinged with gray. His sloping forehead, full at the eyebrows, indicated keen perceptive powers. He was suave in address, so suave, indeed, that his enemies often charged him with insincerity and even duplicity, but his gracious manner, exhibited to the plainest woman and most trifling man, won the hearts of the people as quickly as his political favours ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... individual may try to paint a picture and get the colors all right, but if form is deficient his figures will be grotesque in their absurdity; or he may have good sense as to form and color, and get the sizes of his objects all wrong. Mechanical skill depends in a great measure upon these "Perceptive Faculties," as they are called: that is, those portions of the brain that comprehend and give the ideas pertaining to the properties of material objects, such as individuality, form, size, weight, color, etc. The trained eye and hand of the blacksmith ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... young French aviator (this is a pre-War story), guest at Hatchways, analyses and discusses situations and characters from his coign of privilege—a device adroitly handled by the discreet author, who adds two charming girls, coquette Lise, Iveagh's first love, and wise, loyal, perceptive Bess, whom he found at last. To those who appreciate subtle portraiture let me commend this study.... I feel just as if I had been for a long week-end at Hatchways, anxiously wondering, as I write my "roofer," if I shall be so lucky as to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... Theodore Parker, for instance, was a man of spare body and large brain. He was surrounded by intellectual people, and his disciples were quite sui generis. On the other hand, Spurgeon was a man of strong animal and perceptive powers, and so able to send the Walworth shopkeepers into ecstasies. His ganglions were big, as was the case in all great preachers. Emotion, he said, was more a matter of bowels than of brain. The ganglionic ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... airs, and bent before them like one accustomed to subjection. On the poor woman's rounded brow and delicately timid cheek and in her slow and gentle glance, were the traces of deep reflection, of those perceptive thoughts which women who are accustomed to suffer bury ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... propelled a people onward in their progressive career, have proceeded from a few gifted souls. Sometimes these have been "self-made" men, so-called, whose best powers were evoked by rare opportunities. Oftener, they have been men of thoroughly disciplined minds, of sharpened perceptive faculties, trained to analyze and to generalize; men of well-balanced judgments and power of clear and ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 6, June 1896 • Various
... verbal memory, quick, undiscriminating, impulsive, unreasonable kind-heartedness, and an insensibility, even an instinctive opposition, to the approvings or disapprovings of others. Or the child might be stated thus: Nervous and sensitive organization, intellect predominant; in the intellect the perceptive faculties most active, and of these chiefly that which notices and compares exteriors; beside the intellect, a kind-heartedness without balance, and therefore too great; too little caution, and too little love of approbation. Around these features others ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... compositions of Beethoven, Schumann, and Mendelssohn, or an extended commentary, as in the symphonic poems of Liszt and the symphonies of Berlioz and Raff, the programme has a distinct value to the composer as well as the hearer. It can make the perceptive sense more impressible to the influence of the music; it can quicken the fancy, and fire the imagination; it can prevent a gross misconception of the intentions of a composer and the character of his composition. Nevertheless, in determining the artistic value of the work, the question ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... have me there," said Father Payne. "But I don't despair of our ultimately finding that out. At present, the worst of men of genius is that they are not always the most brisk and efficient boys. A genius is apt to be perceptive and sensitive. His perceptiveness makes him seem bewildered, because he is vaguely interested in everything that he sees; his sensitiveness makes him hold his tongue, because he gets snubbed if he asks too many questions. Men of genius are not as a rule very precocious—they are often shy, ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the most unaffected grace in the world, congratulated them, and was glad to see them. Yet her engaging face, being an open as well as a perceptive one, was not without her husband's ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... to desire, as if anger were nothing but a desire and passion for revenge. However, he always considered the emotional and unreasoning part of the soul as distinct from the reasoning, not that it is altogether unreasoning as the perceptive, or nutritive, or vegetative portions of the soul, for these are always deaf and disobedient to reason, and in a certain sense are off-shoots from the flesh, and altogether attached to the body; but the emotional, though it is destitute of any reason of its own, yet is naturally inclined to listen ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... upon the more nimble and lively existences, more particularly on living creatures. For every body was continually sending forth emanations or images resembling itself sufficiently in form and structure to affect perceptive bodies with an apprehension of that form and structure. These images travelled by a process of successive transmission, similar to that by which wave-motions are propagated in water. They were, in other words, not movements of ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... to. It is moreover his sign, as it is that of the poetic turn of mind in general that we seem to catch him alike in anticipations or divinations, and in lapses and freshnesses, of experience that surprise us. He makes various reflections, some of them all perceptive and ingenious—as about the faces, the men's in particular, seen in the streets, the public conveyances and elsewhere; though falling a little short, in his friendly wondering way, of that bewildered apprehension of monotony ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... insanity. Delirium is always temporary, and is specifically the insanity of disease, as in acute fevers. Dementia is a general weakening of the mental powers: the word is specifically applied to senile insanity, dotage. Aberration is eccentricity of mental action due to an abnormal state of the perceptive faculties, and is manifested by error in perceptions and rambling thought. Hallucination is the apparent perception of that which does not exist or is not present to the senses, as the seeing of specters ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... way he was not wholly unsuccessful, since by dint of steady gazing he heightened his perceptive powers, whether it were for Notre Dame, the Sistine Madonna, or the Alps, each of which he took with the same seriousness. What eluded him was precisely that human element which was the primary object of his quest. He learned ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... man with wings? Yet we know that there is a higher being, higher life with more exalted beauties; but clear reflection must also teach us that its form remains imperceptible and unimaginable as long as our perceptive faculty and our knowledge have not, in a manner at present quite inconceivable, increased in a higher sphere, and that therefore all their awarded shapes, though formed by Dantesque phantasy, ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... previously to the origin of the world?—Name and form, we reply, which can be defined neither as being identical with Brahman nor as different from it, unevolved but about to be evolved. For if, as the adherents of the Yoga-/s/astra assume, the Yogins have a perceptive knowledge of the past and the future through the favour of the Lord; in what terms shall we have to speak of the eternal cognition of the ever pure Lord himself, whose objects are the creation, subsistence, and dissolution of the world! The objection that Brahman, previously ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... the event as effect, its cause is the antecedent process; or, taking it as a cause, its effect is the consequent process. This follows from the conception of causation as essentially motion; for that motion takes time is (from the way our perceptive powers grow) an ultimate intuition. But, for the same reason, there is no interval of time between cause and effect; since all the time is ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... to be conscious of the tragedy beside her. It had passed for the second time into the grasp of an illusion which possessed itself of the whole being and all its perceptive powers. Before her wide, terror-stricken gaze there rose once more the same piteous vision which had tortured her in the crisis of her love for Warkworth. Against the eternal snows which close in the lake the phantom hovered in a ghastly relief—emaciated, ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... worded as to induce her to comport herself like a Scriptural woman, humbly wakeful to the surpassing splendour of the high fortune which had befallen her in being so selected, and obedient at a sign. But she was, it appeared that she was, a maid of scaly vision, not perceptive of the blessedness of her lot. She could have been very little perceptive, for she did not understand his casual allusion to Beauchamp's readiness to overcome 'a natural repugnance,' for the purpose of making ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... As his world is conditioned and limited by his particular network of wires, so ours is conditioned by our nervous system, by our organs of sense. Their peculiarities determine what is the nature of the outside world which we construct. It is the similarity in the organs of sense and in the perceptive faculty of all normal human beings which makes the outside world the same, or practically the same, for them all. To return to the old analogy, it is as if two telephone exchanges had very nearly identical groups of subscribers. In this case ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... religious teachers of the newly freed blacks are sadly at fault in repeating so much the kind of preaching to which the negroes were accustomed under the old system, and in neglecting to pour into their perceptive souls both the light and warmth of the Gospel. As an officer remarked who had stood at our side listening to the service: 'These people had enough of the Old Testament thrown at their heads under slavery. Now give them the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... How little it avails to know the theory of wisdom and folly, right and wrong, etc., just so as to occupy only the perceptive and reasoning faculties! What we want, what the world wants, I think, is the Christian version of the present so fashionable idea of earnestness, or, as I have thought it may imply, consistency of character. We get ideas and opinions in ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... it. One reads with the poetic prestige of the knowledge that every scene is trans-terrestrial; and, at the same time, every scene is presented with a physical realism, a visual and audible vividness, which captivates and holds the perceptive faculty; so that the reader finds himself grasped, as it were, in a vice, whose double handle is mortised on one side in the senses, and on the other in the ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert |
