"Prescience" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... way he's going to look as he gets older," thought Annie with a touch of prescience. "He's going to change into somebody else—little by little. This is the worst spell he's ever had. And all this mean blood's going to live again in my child. It goes on ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... was not ashamed to doubt, And, lacking prescience, went without: Often appeared to halt, And was, ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... steps of the landing-stage. While I made the seats ready for the voyagers and handed them in, Yeo took two reefs in the lug-sail (an act which seemed, I must say, with what wind we felt there, to be carrying his prescience to bold lengths) and hauled the sail to its place. I went forward to lower the centre keel as he came aft with the sheet in his hand. The Mona sidled away, stood out, and then reached for the distant sandhills. The village diminished and concentrated ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... catastrophe: it must be: our unconsciousness sees it; for it knows neither time nor space, and the disaster is therefore happening as actually before its eyes as before the eyes of the eternal powers. The mode of prescience matters but little. Out of the fifty travellers who have been warned, two or three will have had a real presentiment of the danger; these will be the ones in whom unconsciousness is free and untrammelled, and therefore more readily able to attain the ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... summer sunshine, and the western breeze that tasted of ocean, heightened his natural cheeriness. Dr. Madden fell into a familiar strain of prescience. ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... Newfoundland, and Canada—while still farther north and west an unexplored continent in itself, stretching to the Pacific Ocean, was either held in the tight grip of the Hudson's Bay Company or was shortly to be won by its intrepid rival, the North-West Company of Montreal. There were not lacking men of prescience and courage who looked beyond the misfortunes of the hour, and who saw in the dominions still vested in the crown an opportunity to repair the shattered empire and restore it to a modified splendour. A general union of the colonies had been mooted before the Revolution. ...
— The Fathers of Confederation - A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion • A. H. U. Colquhoun
... and as she looked a great, nameless dread took possession of her, and she experienced exactly the same peculiar sensation she had felt in the train coming down, a feeling of prescience and foreboding, of brooding evil. It gripped her heart with cold hands and she changed her intention of going to Nyoda's room and asking what was the matter with Veronica. Suddenly she felt that Nyoda would not know. All her ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... and John Adams, Otis, Josiah Quincy, Jr., and John Hancock, she did her full share toward making such a commemoration possible. [Applause.] As in 1776, so in 1876, we have sent John Adams to represent us at Philadelphia, and, perhaps with some prescience of what the next century is to effect, we have sent with him Madame Boylston as his colleague [applause]; and it may be that Alma Mater in this has possibly shown a little feminine malice, for it is to a silent congress ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... father will ever know what I have done for him, and if he will appreciate it when he does. Well, it is not a bad price—thirty thousand pounds—a good figure for any woman in the present state of the market." And with a hard and bitter laugh, and a prescience of sorrow to come lying at the heart, she threw down the remains of the Scarlet Turk and ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... was of a pale hazel colour and fell in straight masses nearly to her feet. Her eyes were of a deep grey fringed with dark lashes; they had a mysterious and pathetic look—a look caused by longing after something indefinite and yet desired, or by a prescience perhaps of ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... she'll often do the same in her white wrapper now, at dead of dark in any stormy night: she could not find sufficient air to breathe, and something set her heart on fire, some influence oppressed her with unrest and longing, some instinct, some unconscious prescience, made her all astir. I passed her and went down, and I hid myself in the arbor, quite overgrown with wild, rank vines of late summer, and listened to a little night-bird ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... great experience,—and on a fine morning away tutor and pupil went. A great reason urged against Barbara accompanying her youthful husband was that his attentions to her would naturally be such as to prevent his zealously applying every hour of his time to learning and seeing—an argument of wise prescience, and unanswerable. Regular days for letter-writing were fixed, Barbara and her Edmond exchanged their last kisses at the door, and the chaise swept under ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... he was afraid—filled with a kind of nameless dread—a horrible prescience of some villainy about to happen. There was a motive in this programme of changing scents, a deeper significance than the mere will to annoy. He knew without even asking himself how he knew that the smell of pineapple would be next. But why he should fear pineapple ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... desperation. All this was sharpened by the certainty that the mineral was only valueless pyrites, and the prescience of Nate's anger when this fact should come to his knowledge, and prudence no longer restrain him. His rage would vent itself on his luckless victim for every cent, every mill, that the discovery of the "fools' gold" had ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... oracles, and the priests, no doubt, intimately acquainted with all the affairs of the states around, and viewing the living contests of action with the coolness of spectators, were often enabled to give shrewd and sensible admonitions,—so that the forethought of wisdom passed for the prescience of divinity. Hence the greater part of their predictions were eminently successful; and when the reverse occurred, the fault was laid on the blind misconstruction of the human applicant. Thus no great design ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... apparently human footprint discovered in the chalk deposit thrown up in course of the erection of a public lamp, in the vicinity of the Assembly Room. As the heavy rains of the last few days have unfortunately obliterated this interesting impression, the society is to be congratulated on the prescience of the member who was energetic enough to ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... This whole volume is but their masterful development. They prove that together with audacious sincerity in the coordination of facts and an infallible judgment, Ardant du Picq possessed prescience in the highest degree. His prophetic eye distinguished sixty years ago the constituent principles of a good army. These are the principles which lead to victory. They are radically opposed to those which enchant our parliamentarians or military politicians, which ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... Krishna performs many exploits. He accomplishes the destruction of the demon Kesi, one of those infernal beings who in vain attempted to kill the divine child, instigated by their prescience of their fate when he should ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... pupils flocked from far and near to buy it, in the hopes of selling it later on, and were struck purblind as a punishment for the sin of those who sent them. Before long a second iconoclastic fury would infallibly have followed, but for the prescience of a statesman who succeeded in passing an Act to the effect that no statue of any public man or woman should be allowed to remain unbroken for more than fifty years, unless at the end of that time a jury of twenty-four men taken at random from the street pronounced ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... had taken. He may have had a prescience of what he was yet to take. He could afford ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... insulated farms and small towns. The Havaneros or natives of the Havannah were the first among the rich inhabitants of the Spanish colonies who visited Spain, France and Italy; and at the Havannah the people were always well informed of the politics of Europe. This knowledge of events, this prescience of future chances, have powerfully aided the inhabitants of Cuba to free themselves from some of the burthens which check the development of colonial prosperity. In the interval between the peace of Versailles and the beginning of the revolution ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... sun shone on, the silent woman slept, and in silence the watcher gazed. And as he looked a great fear, a prescience of evil that should come, entered into Geoffrey and took possession of him. A cloud without crossed the ray of sunlight and turned it. It wavered, for a second it rested on his breast, flashed back to hers, then went out; and as it flashed and died, he seemed to know that henceforth, ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... man were gifted with prescience Dr. Dohl would have stared out of countenance the tall young man who sat on a bench in the outer office of the state's overlord and nursed a ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... secret conviction that you were living, Rule, and always secretly hoped to meet you again, 'somehow, somewhere;' and now my prescience is justified ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... further that it was draining the productive parts of the country, especially the South and West, for the profit of a lucky financial group in the Eastern States. He knew also that such financial groups are never national: he knew that the Bank had foreign backers, and he showed an almost startling prescience as to the evils that were to follow in the train of cosmopolitan finance, "more formidable and more dangerous than the naval and military power of an enemy." But above all he knew that the Bank was odious to the ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... angrily at his smiling ones. The unabashed impudence, the unfluttered aplomb, but above all the uncanny prescience of this youth disturbed him because he could not understand them. Moreover, it happened that his suspicious mind had lingered on the chance of a betrayal at the hands of his chief. For which very reason he ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... not a fop," says Monica, indignantly, and then she catches sight of her lover's face, and something in it awakes within her a prescience ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... rely on this prescience, and in reference to public men and public affairs, when they interested me, have satisfied my curiosity by the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... not rebuilt; the Jews scattered, but not destroyed; the conversion of the nations to Christianity; the many anti-christian corruptions of the Gospel; the idolatry, tyranny and persecution of the Roman hierarchy, etc. What prescience does all this imply—prescience no where to be found but in God! "Let now the infidel or the skeptical reader meditate thoroughly and soberly on these predictions. The priority of the records to the events admits of no question. The completion is obvious to every ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... but he communed with his own heart. Joan had not seen Roland and Denas as he had seen them; no one had troubled Joan as he had been troubled. For something often gives to a loving heart a kind of prescience, when it may be used for wise and saving ends; and John Penelles divined the angry trend of Roland's thoughts, though it was impossible for him to anticipate the special form that trend ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... Shall they not hear "O son"? And bowing thy face to theirs made pale for thee, Shall the shut eyes not see? Yea, through the hollow-hearted world of death, As light, as blood, as breath, Shall there not flash and flow the fiery sense, The pulse of prescience? Shall not these know as in times overpast Thee loftiest to the last? For times and wars shall change, kingdoms and creeds, And dreams of men, and deeds; Earth shall grow grey with all her golden things, Pale peoples and hoar kings; But though her thrones and towers of nations fall, Death has ...
— Two Nations • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... over the exchange of prisoners, recognizing, with the prescience of a statesman, that General Gage had conceded a point of importance as to the status of his opponents. "He may call us rebels now, if he will," he said to his son, "but why then doesn't he hang his prisoners instead of exchanging them? By this act he has virtually placed us on an equality, ...
— "Old Put" The Patriot • Frederick A. Ober
... hushed yet mighty wind, it breathed a power of valiant endurance, and promised before nightfall the respite of a twilight hour. For stoicism has qualities which seem foreordained for the bracing of shy souls, as if the men who framed its austere laws had prescience of our frailty and consciously legislated to its intention. It is the philosophy of the individual standing by himself, as the shy must always stand, over against a world which he likes not but may not altogether shun. And in ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... Hojo Tokimasa, his son Yoshitoki excelled him in both of those attributes as well as in prescience. It was to the mansion of Yoshitoki that Sanetomo was carried for safety when his life was menaced by the wiles of Tokimasa. Yet in thus espousing the cause of his sister, Masa, and his nephew, Sanetomo, against ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... followed the servant into the house there came a swift remembrance of those lamentable presentiments. Was there, after all, something in the blood akin to the prescience through which birds and wild things scent the coming storms?—some atavism outgrown by the people of intellectual advancement, but yet a power to the children of ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... him that he would undergo martyrdom by fire. But what more natural than this presentiment, when persecution was raging around him and fire was a common instrument of death? I need not stop here to discuss how far a prescience may be vouchsafed to God's saints. Even 'old experience' is found to be gifted with 'something like prophetic strain.' It is sufficient to say here again that it would be difficult to point to a single authentic biography of any Christian hero—certainly of any Christian hero of the early centuries—of ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... up her monograph on Mickiewicz with an admirable companion study of Zygmunt Krasinski, the 'Unknown' or 'Anonymous' Poet of Poland, second only to Mickiewicz in genius, and, in virtue of his personality, his strange gift of prescience, and the romantic and tragic conditions of his life, appealing to a wider audience than his great contemporary. He came on his father's side of an ancient, noble, and wealthy Polish family, related to the House of Savoy; his mother ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... forty-eighth Psalm they are mentioned AFTER the heavenly bodies and the "heaven of heavens," but BEFORE the terrestrial elements. As to their purpose, he hesitates between those who held that they were stored up there by the prescience of God for the destruction of the world at the Flood, as the words of Scripture that "the windows of heaven were opened" seemed to indicate, and those who held that they were kept there to moderate the heat of the heavenly ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... gone by since the Great War broke out. It needed no prescience, no remarkable statesmanship or gift of forecasting the future, to see that, when such mighty forces were unloosed, and when it had been shown that all treaties and other methods hitherto relied upon for national ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... power threatened the Union. His fears, it is true, were aroused for the balance of power between the old States, rather than by any moral sensitiveness, which would, indeed, have been an anachronism at that time. But the Civil War justified his prescience. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... friend at times displayed a sort of prescience, of which I may have occasion to speak later, but I, together with the rest of pur- blind humanity, am commonly immune from the prophetic instinct. Therefore I chronicle the fact for what it may be worth, ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... before she could seize the meaning. Frightful news concerning Jack! Had he suffered a relapse? Had he been accidentally hurt? No; if it had been news of that sort, Olympia would have come herself. A gleam of prescience shot through her brain. The court—the charges against Jack! That was it. That was the secret of her father's equanimity under her raillery. She turned with a rush into the library. The bad blood of the Boones was all up in her soul now. She walked straight ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... in the little summer settlement on the Down East coast where I have been passing the last three months, and with each loath day the sense of its peculiar charm grows more poignant. A prescience of the homesickness I shall feel for it when I go already begins to torment me, and I find myself wishing to imagine some form of words which shall keep a likeness of it at least through the winter; some shadowy semblance which I may turn to hereafter if any chance or change should ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... A prescience of the soul that has no name; Expectancy that is both wild and tame, As if the Earth, from out its azure ring Of heavens, looked to see, as white as flame,— As Perseus once to chained Andromeda came,— The swift, divine revealment of ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... diuelles foretelling of things to come, it is true that he knowes not all things future, but yet that he knowes parte, the Tragicall event of this historie declares it, (which the wit of woman could never haue fore-spoken) not that he hath any prescience, which is only proper to God: or yet knows anie thing by loking vpon God, as in a mirrour (as the good Angels doe) he being for euer debarred from the fauorable presence & countenance of his creator, but only by one of these two meanes, either as being ...
— Daemonologie. • King James I
... was not alone in such matters as refraining from violent exercise, and the taking of food whether inclined for it or not, that a sort of prescience guided beautiful Tara at this time in her new home beside the Sussex Downs. There came a morning when, as she strolled about the strip of shrubbery and orchard which lay between the stabling and the house, it occurred to her that it would be a good thing to dig a hole somewhere in ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... guardian angels? Is it the faint shadow, the solemn rustle of their hovering wings, as like mother birds they spread protecting plumes between blind fledglings, and descending ruin? Will theosophy ever explain and augment prescience? ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... voice, for he felt anger stirring in him. Perhaps it was excited by that ancient instinct which causes the male animal to resent the spying upon him when he is courting his female as the deadliest of all possible insults, or perhaps by some prescience of affronts which were about to be offered to him and Isobel by these two whom he knew to be bitterly hostile. At least his temper was rising, and like most rather gentle-natured men when really provoked and cornered, he could ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale, continued through day into night, and through night into day, is a thing by no means unprecedented in the South sea fishery. For such is the wonderful skill, prescience of experience, and invincible confidence acquired by some great natural geniuses among the Nantucket commanders; that from the simple observation of a whale when last descried, they will, under certain given circumstances, pretty accurately foretell both the direction in which he will continue ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... Through heaven, and earth, and ocean depth He throws His influence round, and kindles as He goes. Hence flocks, and herds, and men, and beasts, and fowls, With breath are quickened, and attract their souls. Hence take the forms His prescience did ordain, And into Him, at length, resolve again. No room is left for death: they mount the sky, And to their own congenial ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... not precisely the same experience. From the moment that, with the prescience of a woman where feelings are concerned, she saw the end, she avoided Harry Jardine with all her power. Harry's generous determination and daring, his fearlessness, confidence, ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... "having had recourse to the opinion of almost all that went before me concerning this matter, I find all of them holding one and the same opinion, in which they have received the purpose and the predestination of God according to His prescience; that for this cause God made some vessels of honour and other vessels of dishonour, because He foresaw the end of every man, and knew before how he would will and act" (Whitby's Pos., p. 449). This was a frank acknowledgment on the part of ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... honour me with his correspondence and an invitation to join the true believers, i.e., the Mahdists. I have no doubt he meant well, but the land and the dervishes were alike abhorrent to me. Osman had quietly come to the wise conclusion that Mahdism was near its end. With his usual prescience he made his own arrangements without consulting the Khalifa. Early in the year he had all his women and children and such wealth as he could smuggle out of the country sent over to Jeddah. There his family are now living under the protection of some of his old ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... reproduction of Beauty, gain their power over the soul of man by reminding him of the Divine Attributes. His thirst for the beautiful belongs to his immortality, for it never rests in the appreciation of mere finite beauty, but struggles wildly to obtain the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of time, to attain a portion of that loveliness whose elements pertain to Eternity alone; and thus, when by poetry or music, the most entrancing of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... firmly than they really had done? This at least would be in accordance with the natural promptings of human instinct: we are all of us apt to be wise after the event, and are far more prone to dwell upon things which seem to give some colour to a pretence of prescience, than upon those which force from us a confession of our own stupidity. It might seem a damaging thing that the Apostles should have doubted as much as long as they clearly did; would then the Evangelists ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... joined my hands as in my younger days, I felt too wretched, too forsaken, I had too keen a need of a superhuman help, of a divine power which should think and determine for me, which should lull me and carry me on with its eternal prescience. How great at first was the confusion, the aberration of my poor brain, under the frightful, heavy blow which fell upon it! I spent a score of nights without being able to sleep, thinking that I should surely go mad. All sorts of ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... and hastened forth, intent upon immediate prevention, if possible, of any further ordeals undertaken in behalf of herself. She was thoroughly frightened. A prescience of something ominous impending seemed to grip her very heart. She glanced about, helplessly, unfamiliar with the place. Van was nowhere in sight. She started to run around the cabin when ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... against Hubert, or even Julia. Their personalities had somehow dropped out of her mind, and merely represented forces against which she found herself unable any longer to contend. Nor was she surprised at what had happened. There had always been in her some prescience of her fate. She and unhappiness had always seemed so inseparable, that she had never found it difficult to believe that this last misfortune would befall her. She had thought it over, and had decided that it would be ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... anecdote by the face of the Duchesse d'Angouleme; for though I do not pretend to a prescience as to her future fate, I cannot help arguing from it that, even should a peaceful reign await her, the fearful trials of her youth have destroyed in her the power of enjoyment; and that on a throne she can never forget the father and mother she saw hurried from it, to meet ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... often of aristocratic anarchy in England, but sometimes of rudimentary freedom. Had the whole island fallen under one victorious sceptre, the next wielder of that sceptre, under the name of the great Edward's wittold son, would have been Piers Gaveston. But what no prescience on the part of any one in the time of Edward I. could possibly have foreseen was the inestimable benefit which disunion and even anarchy indirectly conferred on the whole island in the shape of a separate Scotch Reformation. Divines, when they have exhausted ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... that further explanations are beyond them just as present; and as for Barbara, she is quite determined that no one but she shall let Freddy into the all-important secret. She is now fully convinced in her own mind that she had always had special prescience of this affair, and the devouring desire we all have to say "I told you how 'twould be" to our unfortunate fellow-travellers through this vale of tears, whether the cause for the hateful reminder be for weal or woe, is strong upon ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... of their 'future' as something fixed, and of themselves as 'free.' The Witches nowadays take a room in Bond Street and charge a guinea; and when the victim enters they hail him the possessor of L1000 a year, or prophesy to him of journeys, wives, and children. But though he is struck dumb by their prescience, it does not even cross his mind that he is going to lose his glorious 'freedom'—not though journeys and marriages imply much more agency on his part than anything foretold to Macbeth. This whole difficulty is undramatic; and I may add that Shakespeare nowhere shows, like Chaucer, any ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... reflect on the infinite prescience that dictated the prophecies of the Bible—no tongue could speak more plainly to us than the scene around us did, the fulfilment of the denunciations that these cities of Moab and Ammon should remain as cities "without inhabitants"—"not a man to dwell therein"—and "driven out every man, right ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... assured treasure of religious knowledge in the reason, and the abandonment of him, on the other, to the juggling of cunning priests and despots. Thus the deists had no sense either for the peculiarities of an inward religious feeling, which, in happy prescience, rises above the earthly circle of moral duties to the world beyond, or for the involuntary, historically necessary origin and growth of the particular forms of religion. Here, again, we find that ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... insight, prudence, depth, judgment, reason, discernment, judiciousness, reasonableness, discretion, knowledge, sagacity, enlightenment, learning, sense, erudition, prescience, skill, foresight, profundity, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... to Mr. Schnadhorst, there can be no question as to Mr. Chamberlain's prescience in judging of the capabilities of men, and his quick appreciation of Mr. Schnadhorst's attributes is a case in point. The pre-eminence this latter-named gentleman attained in the political world was somewhat of a surprise to many ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... brevity therefore with which Carter published the most important information ever needed and yearned for in Jordantown, was significant. Even the weekly local column was exceedingly reserved, as if some prescience of the future had rendered every man and woman cautious of performing a single act worthy of interest. Nothing was said of the last meeting of the Ladies' Civic League and Cemetery Association. There was no flamboyant boasting concerning ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... Second Avenue and Seventeenth Street, stopped for a traffic light. Malone felt an itch in the back of his mind, as if his prescience were trying to warn him of something; he'd felt it for a little while, he realized, but only now could he pay ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... exiguity of the resources at command,—if we remember that out of the small Kingdom of Sardinia grew united Italy, we must come to the conclusion that Count Cavour was undoubtedly a statesman of marvellous skill and prescience. Abraham Lincoln, unknown to fame when he was elected to the presidency, exhibited a power for the government of men which has scarcely been surpassed in any age. He saved the American Union, he enfranchised the black race, and for the task he had to perform he was ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... omniscience and prescience of God do not deprive men of free will. Maimonides explains this in the last chapter of the Shemonah Perakim (ed. Gorfinkle, p. ...
— Pirke Avot - Sayings of the Jewish Fathers • Traditional Text
... frightened her in the lane, and burst into loud screams in the middle of the service, I could not sufficiently admire the readiness with which Peter Dearlove produced a packet of brandy-balls from his tail-pocket to comfort her, or the prescience which led him to bring such ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the first fathers of the Christian church could no otherwise account for a reputation thus universally received, than by supposing that the devils were permitted by God Almighty to inform the oracles with a more than human prescience, that all the world might be concluded in idolatry and unbelief, [3] and the necessity of a Saviour be made more apparent. The gullibility of man is one of the most prominent features of our nature. Various periods and times, when whole nations have as it were ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... ask a man to put his whole strength into drawing a cork, but unless you are a fool you do not, while the operation is going forward, keep nagging at him because the cork is too firmly jammed, nor do you jeer at him for his lack of prescience in not having selected a bottle with a wider neck. You do not ask him strings of useless questions as to why he doesn't grip the bottle between his feet or get a purchase on it with his teeth. Above all you do not keep handing him tools, such as a pair of scissors or a button-hook or a crowbar. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... may have been prescience, it may have been merely the deplorable state of his nerves, but, as he continued to look out upon that unfamiliar landscape, the beauty of it, in growing on him, became almost intolerable. It affected him with an indescribable uneasiness, a yearning, a foreboding, a terror. He gave ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... Washington's prescience is remarkable. Recognizing, in October, 1789, that France had "gone triumphantly through the first paroxysm," he felt that she must encounter others, that more blood must be shed, that she might run from one extreme to another, and that ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... porters, of the young person at the buffet. But of course I did not let the holiday-mood master me. I realised the seriousness of my mission. I must concentrate myself on the matter in hand: Miss Dobson's visit. What was going to happen? Prescience was no part of my outfit. From what I knew about Miss Dobson, I deduced that she would be a great success. That was all. Had I had the instinct that was given to those Emperors in stone, and even to the dog Corker, I should have begged Clio to send in my ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... indeed unchanged. Even his voice had in an hour curiously lost that hurting strangeness. As she listened she became absent, almost drowsy with memories of that far night when his voice was quite the same and their hands had trembled together—with such prescience that through all the years her hand was to feel ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... at the time passed over these papers without the careful attention which they deserved. Others, who perused them more thoroughly, were struck with the remarkable prescience which the great writer's thoughts exhibited on topics which the events now passing before us lend a tremendous interest. Cooper, it must be remembered, uttered his views on 'Secession,' 'State Rights,' etc., upward ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... of debates, the former made a jest counting upon his being President some day. He said that his father was a cooper, yet, with prescience, had not taught him the paternal craft, but made him a cabinet-maker. His adherents who counted on office if he won loudly applauded. Douglas was a thick-set, rotund man, whose florid gills revealed that he was a host for boon companions. Lincoln was his ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... daisies and the poppies that overgrow the tomb, I remembered how the dead poet had once told his friend that he thought the 'intensest pleasure he had received in life was in watching the growth of flowers,' and how another time, after lying a while quite still, he murmured in some strange prescience of early death, 'I feel the flowers growing ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... of one most intimately connected therewith. Thus, in the case of the stag-beetle, the purpose consists in the leaving space for the growth of the horns; the means, in the digging the hole of a sufficient size; and the unconscious knowledge, in prescience concerning the ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... their women than themselves; so that those states who have been obliged to give among their hostages the daughters of noble families, are the most effectually bound to fidelity. [56] They even suppose somewhat of sanctity and prescience to be inherent in the female sex; and therefore neither despise their counsels, [57] nor disregard their responses. [58] We have beheld, in the reign of Vespasian, Veleda, [59] long reverenced by many as a deity. Aurima, moreover, and several others, [60] were formerly held ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... standing in an old neglected summer-house, her back to the door. As he stopped behind her and laid the soft wrap over her firm white shoulders, she turned her head with a startled prescience of his personality, and met his eyes full. He looked straight into those soft gray depths, and as he looked, searching for something there, he knew not what, troubled strangely by her nearness and the helpless surrender of her fastened gaze, a great ...
— The Courting Of Lady Jane • Josephine Daskam
... note of prescience in her voice. It was so pronounced that the sense of foreboding communicated ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... earlier views had been in not sufficiently recognizing the worth and power of liberty, and the tendency which things have to work out for good when left to themselves. The application of this principle gave room for many developments, and many developments there were. He may have wanted that prescience which is, after integrity, the highest gift of a statesman, but which is almost impossible to a man so pressed by the constant and engrossing occupations of an English minister that he cannot find time for the patient study and thought from which ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... not think The inner prescience never stirred or spoke: Veiled though it be from consciousness so strangely, And its fine voice unheard amid the din Of outward things, the quest of earthly passion, There is an under-sense, a faculty All independent of our mortal organs, And circumscribed by neither space ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... of Congress, with a wise prescience of the jealousies and bickerings always arising between Regulars and Volunteers, provides that Regulars shall be tried by Regular, and Volunteers by Volunteer Officers. In practice, the spirit of the law ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... ample lands to be had for the taking guaranteed independence to all at the price of labor. With this resource no man needed to call another master. This may be considered the idyllic period of the republic, the time when De Tocqueville saw and admired it, though not without prescience of the doom that awaited it. The seed of death was in the state in the principle of private capitalism, and was sure in time to grow and ripen, but as yet the conditions were not favorable to its development. All seemed to go well, and it is not strange that the American people indulged ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... in charge of the bridge, he came down the stairs and aft on the run. Not a word was spoken by either; but, with the prescience that men feel at the coming of a fight, the two cooks left their dishes and the engineers their engines to crowd their heads into the hatches. Riley showed his disfigured face over the heads of the ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... the book, nor is it thick: but I have printed you a book, and it is thin. And I take the occasion to note that old Geoffry Chaucer, our father poet, must have had you in his mind's eye, by prescience or precognition, or he could hardly else have written two poems, one on the daisy and one on the rose. They are poems too long for modern days, nor are we equal in patience to our fore-fathers, who read 'The ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... responsibility in assuming the position of President, were the subjects of his thoughts. These were discussed with a breadth and anxiety full of that pathos peculiar to Mr. Lincoln in his thoughtful moods. He seemed to have a thorough prescience of the dangers through which his administration was to pass. No President, he said, had ever had before him such vast and far-reaching responsibilities. He regarded war—long, bitter, and dreadful—as almost sure to come. He distinctly and reverently placed his hopes ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... cotemporaries of Hampden and Falkland—of Milton and Clarendon—in an age which roused into action so many and such mighty energies—gravely engaged in ascertaining the causes of a great national calamity, from the prescience of a knavish fortuneteller, and puzzling their wisdoms to interpret the symbolical flames, which blazed in the mis-shapen wood-cuts of his ...
— William Lilly's History of His Life and Times - From the Year 1602 to 1681 • William Lilly
... of Mr. Landale's weighted brow she propped up her own long sallow face, upon its aching side, with a trembling hand, and, full of agonised prescience, ventured to ask if ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... hesitation in her manner, and the man was quick to make the most of it. She wanted to stay, wanted to skip a train and let this competent guide show her Chicago. But somewhere, deep in her consciousness, a bell of warning was beginning to ring. Some uneasy prescience of trouble was sifting into her light heart. She was not so sure of her fairy tale, a good deal ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... in this book go back first to a still earlier stage, a stage of pre-history, to a time when no one, not gifted with superhuman insight and prescience, could have foreseen the course which human civilization would pursue. All over the world, for tens of thousands of years, a culture persisted, associated with stone implements, and marked by a similarity which is often extremely striking, in races and tribes widely severed by distance and climatic ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... showed how he trusted to British faith not to betray him. It was not alone the incalculable mischief such a man might do by change of allegiance, but the whole fabric on which Lord Danesbury's reputation rested was in this man's keeping; and of all that wondrous prescience on which he used to pride himself before the world, all the skill with which he baffled an adversary, and all the tact with which he overwhelmed a colleague, this same 'Speridionides' could give the secret ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... attest, to the latest moment of his life, with what a sacred intensity and unflinching sincerity he clung to his original sentiments touching the French Revolution. Nor let the present writer shrink from adding, they constitute but one of the many specimens of that instinctive prescience, whereby this profoundest of philosophical statesmen was enabled to herald from afar the final triumphs of courage, patriotism, and truth. The passage occurs towards the conclusion of his "Letters on a Regicide Peace," ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... her. He was too inexorably gay and loving. Not for her—to whom every word and every kiss had uncannily the desperate value of a last word and kiss—not for her to deprive herself of these by any sign or gesture which might betray her prescience. Poor soul—she took all, and would have taken more, a hundredfold. She did not want to drink the wine he kept tilting into her glass, but, with the acceptance learned by women who have lived her life, she did not refuse. She had never ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... The sensitive prescience we have of a critical distaste of our proceedings is, the world is aware, keener than our intuition of contrary opinions; and for the sake of preserving the sweet outward forms of friendliness, Beauchamp was anxious not to speak of the business in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... courses. The impulses of my heart, joined to some prescience of trouble, bade me to follow Elisabeth. My duty ordered me to hasten to Mr. Calhoun. My interest demanded that I should tarry, for I was sure that the Baroness von Ritz would make no merely idle request in these circumstances. Hesitating thus, I lost sight of her in ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... of self-assertion, his instinctive appreciation of the meaning and bearing of facts, his capacity to recognize the precise time until which action should be postponed and then to know that action must be taken, suggesting the idea of prescience, his long-suffering and tolerance towards impolitic, obstructive, or over-rash individuals, his marvelous gift of keeping in touch with the people, form a group of qualities which, united in the President of the United States at that mortal juncture, are as strong ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... orphans took one another by the hand, while they pressed close together, and looked around with involuntary fear. The sensation they felt was in fact deep, strange, inexplicable, and yet lowering—one of those dark presentiments which come over us, in spite of ourselves—those fatal gleams of prescience, which throw a lurid light on the mysterious ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... malice of his enemies, who had left him happiness, since they had left him virtue. From the earth, Boethius ascended to heaven in search of the Supreme Good; explored the metaphysical labyrinth of chance and destiny, of prescience and free will, of time and eternity; and generously attempted to reconcile the perfect attributes of the Deity with the apparent disorders of his moral and physical government. Such topics of consolation so obvious, so ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... her subjects with foul insurrection Have batter'd down her consecrated wall, And by their mortal fault brought in subjection Her immortality, and made her thrall To living death and pain perpetual: Which in her prescience she controlled still, But her foresight could not forestall ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... than inspired and guided. To be far-seeing and daring is a disadvantage; the most approved leader is the man who can harmonise discordant sections, and steer round obvious and pressing difficulties. Geniality and bonhomie are more valuable qualities than prescience or nobility of aim. The more representative that government becomes, the more does originality give place to malleability. The more fluid that the conceptions of a statesman are, the greater that his adaptability is, the more acceptable he becomes. Since Lord Beaconsfield, with all his trenchant ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... illustrated in Tancred—the conception of the Anglican Church reviving its political ascendancy and developing "the most efficient means of the renovation of the national spirit"—has not proved quite abortive. It shows astonishing prescience to have seen fifty years ago that the Church of England might yet become a considerable political power, and could be converted, by a revival of Mediaeval traditions, into a potent instrument of the New Tory Democracy. Whatever we may think about the strengthening of the Established ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... to prosperous times, when the remembrance of past misfortunes should correct national manners, and produce a general improvement in the minds and feelings of men. Neville was always sanguine; and Dr. Beaumont confessed that all things seemed to tend to the restoration of monarchy; yet, with the prescience of a man long accustomed to calamity, he doubted whether even that desired event would speedily repair the deep wound ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... Prussia. Her course was clear. She became an ardent champion of the Prussian point of view. It was a legacy from the Prince, she said. She did not realise that the Prussia of the Prince's day was dead, and that a new Prussia, the Prussia of Bismarck, was born. Perhaps Palmerston, with his queer prescience, instinctively apprehended the new danger; at any rate, he and Lord John were agreed upon the necessity of supporting Denmark against Prussia's claims. But opinion was sharply divided, not only in the country but in the Cabinet. For eighteen ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... insurmountable. He had, however, resolved and planned not only upon taking Detroit, but, if need be, the pursuit and capture of Hull's entire army, compelling him to either stand and fight or surrender. With habitual prescience he had weighed well the issues and chosen the lesser alternative. His own defeat and possibly his death, on the one hand, against the probable salvation of half a continent on the other. What true ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... of the veldt towards them, seemingly blown along without a wind. Now, too, a ghastly-looking ringed moon arose throwing an unholy and distorted light upon the blackness that seemed to shudder in her rays as though with a prescience of the advancing terror. On crept the mud-coloured columns, and on above them, and resting on them, came the muttering storm. The cart was quite close to the river now, and they could distinguish the murmur of its waters. To their left ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... children before this; and that was the parental way of arranging such matters. When the probable amount of worldly gear that he could give his child had been named by each father, the young folk, as they said, might take their own time in coming to the point which the old men, with the prescience of experience, saw they were drifting to; no need to hurry them, for they were both young, and Michael, though active enough, was too thoughtless, old Daniel said, to be trusted with the entire management of a farm. Meanwhile, his father would look about him, and see after all the farms that ...
— Half a Life-Time Ago • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the castle; when he had learned enough English to express himself, he offered several excellent reasons for remaining. In the first place, he said that Don Hernan had confided his wife to his charge, as with a prescience of what was to occur, just before the shipwreck; and that at that awful moment he had vowed to devote himself to her interests as long as his life should last. He also frankly confessed that he had no means of returning ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... the robbers,—perhaps the one who accompanied Mrs. Barker to San Jose. But it was plain that the young girl had no complicity with the actions of the gang, whatever might have been her companion's confederation. In the prescience of a true lover, he knew that she must have been deceived and kept in utter ignorance of it. There was no look of it in her lovely, guileless eyes; her very impulsiveness and ingenuousness would have long since betrayed ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... while he walked up and down, feverish and anxious (he was at the time in poor health), and then he would fling himself on a sofa, still and ever indulging in his surmises. With that kind of prescience which he had so frequently displayed in the Dreyfus affair, he felt certain that something very important had occurred, for otherwise such a mysterious telegram would never have been sent him. This lasted ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... two parties seemed to have become fused in a remarkable intimacy. This was clearly due to the presence of the young people, and Thorpe congratulated himself many times each day upon the striking prescience he had ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... became tired of it—well, he would then find means of escape. The work was not over hard, since there were many hands to lighten it; he was brought into contact with a magnificence of which he had never dreamed. As always, he kept his eyes and ears open; with his strange, sure prescience that all he could see and hear and know would be useful to him, somehow, somewhen, he set out to learn all he could of the life of the great mansion and of those who ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... Amy had never held him so. She had never loved him like that in all her poor little life. And so his very tenderness for Kitty had terror in it, lest he should fail her, lest he should in any way justify her prescience of disaster. ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... by intemperance of knowledge the old age of the world drew on. This the mass of mankind saw not, or, living lustily although unhappily, affected not to see. But, for myself, the Earth's records had taught me to look for widest ruin as the price of highest civilization. I had imbibed a prescience of our Fate from comparison of China the simple and enduring, with Assyria the architect, with Egypt the astrologer, with Nubia, more crafty than either, the turbulent mother of all Arts. In history {*2} of these ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... extracts from that diary still preserved in his own hand which give the intimation of a prescience that should in itself hold for him a grateful place in the memory of the west and of a concern about little things that should bring him a bit nearer to our ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... room which Barbara had once called the Condemned Cell. The ghastly truth of her prescience shook me, and I began to shudder with the horror of it, and with the hitherto unnoticed cold. I was chilled to the bone. Jaffery put his arm round my ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... against the wall near which she had seated herself. The young man bent forward, taking both her hands quietly in his own now, and gazing steadily into her eyes. There was no triumph in his gaze. Perhaps John Law had prescience of the future. ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... spirits, if really assumed to be the efficient agency behind the Oracles, be figured as holding any relation at all to moral good or moral evil? Why not allow of demoniac powers, excelling man in beauty, power, prescience, but otherwise neutral as to all purposes of man's moral nature? Or, if revolting angels were assumed, why degrade their agency in so vulgar and unnecessary a way, by adopting the vilest relation ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Chia'gnosi! I have been anticipating this moment with much curiosity, and also with a little trepidation, for my prescience tells me that you are destined to exercise a great, indeed a vital, influence upon my future; and I have wondered whether that influence will be for ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... girl, who also heard, "we are taking you for granted, aren't we?" Steering only smiled at her again. He had fallen into the habit of smiling at her, and some prescience seemed to urge him to exercise ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... good and hard, and several of the others look sick, especially Lennie. Lennie has his eyes fixed on the colonel; it is not prescience, but a slight sideways movement of the colonel's eye causes him to blurt out, "What ...
— The Lost Kafoozalum • Pauline Ashwell
... and love so precious to us is the play they give to the Imagination; indeed, the better part of them both is compounded of Imagination. The horizons recede from their gaze because the second sight of Imagination is theirs—that prescience which pierces the mists which enfold us, and discerns the vaster world through which we move for the most part with halting feet and blinded eyes. Youth knows that it was born to life and power and exhaustless resources; love knows that it has found and shall ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... a woman, known as the Queen of Hearts, who had attained the age of one hundred years, and who had been known for three quarters of a century as a fortune-teller, died in Vienna. Apparently gifted with the faculty of prescience, intimately acquainted with the shuffling of cards, deeply learned in the lore of the prophetic lines traced by the graver of Fate upon human hands and feet, this lady devoted her days to the unravelling of the tangled secrets of the future, charging those whose curiosity ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... be a medium through which he must necessarily pass, that would with any likelihood investigate the forma informans of Vegetables: for as I think that he shall find it a very difficult task, who undertakes to discover the form of Saline crystallizations, without the consideration and prescience of the nature and reason of a Globular form, and as difficult to explicate this configuration of Mushroms, without the previous consideration of the form of Salts; so will the enquiry into the forms of ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... "Just was the prescience of the eternal goalThat gleamed, 'mid Cyprian shades, on Zeno's soul, Or shone to Plato in the lonely cave, God in all space, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... further down the dim past did she lead Each yielding remembrance, far, far off, to feed 'Mid the pastures of youth, in the twilight of hope, And the valleys of boyhood, the fresh-flower'd slope Of life's dawning land! 'Tis the heart of a boy, With its indistinct, passionate prescience of joy! The unproved desire—the unaim'd aspiration— The deep conscious life that forestalls consummation With ever a flitting delight—one arm's length In advance of the august inward impulse. The strength ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... from a sentiment of profound gloom, as I listened to these sombre predictions. It seemed incredible that they could be well founded, but I had more than once had an opportunity to remark the extraordinary prescience of the remarkable man with whom ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... it that he has often been amused, and that he may easily be amused again. Spenser's is of sharper and keener feature, disdainful, and breathing that severity which appertains to so many of the Elizabethan men. A fourteenth-century child, with delicate prescience, would have asked Chaucer to assist her in a strait, and would not have been disappointed. A sixteenth-century child in like circumstances would have shrunk from drawing on herself the regards of the sterner-looking man. We can trace the descent ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... borrowed a dollar and a half on it. I did not like that; it seemed to me that he was taking unfair advantage of me, and I said, 'Oh, I think you can get along without your overcoat.' I'm glad to think now that it hadn't begun to snow yet, and that I had no prescience of the blizzard—what the papers fondly called the Baby Blizzard (such a pretty fancy of theirs!)—which was to begin the next afternoon, wasn't making the faintest threat from the moonlit sky then. He said, 'It's ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... local rancher there (see file on First Ambassador, Colonel Andrew Jackson Hickock) and is still active in politics on that planet, often in opposition to Solar League policies, which he seems to anticipate with an almost uncanny prescience. ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... in Italy, having even there, in that land of artifice, rendered myself the superior of all competitors, I used to glory in the havoc I should make on my return to England. But this the will of fate opposes, at least for the present: and of what duration my honeymoon is to be is more than any prescience ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... To-day the new feudalism has more than half entangled society in its meshes, and its complete establishment stares us in the face. What perspicuity to have foreseen so clearly what is now being realized! If prescience is a test of science—if the foretelling of future events is a test of the laws that govern them and from which they are deducible, then Fourier must have discovered at least some of the laws which govern ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... of the first, founded on one side upon the ignorance and weakness of man in the affairs of life, and on the other upon the prescience of the Divinity and his almighty providence, was true; but the consequence deduced from it in favour of auguries, false and absurd. They ought to have proved that it was certain, that the Divinity himself had established these ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... noble broken feather. "We're going to bait a bear below the fort!" he called. "Sorry you'll miss the sport! There will be all the world—and my Lord Carnal." He whistled himself away, and presently there came along Master Edward Sharpless. He stopped and stared at the rogue in the pillory,—with no prescience, I suppose, of a day when he was to stand there himself; then looked up at me with as much malevolence as his small soul could write upon his mean features, and passed on. He had a jaded look; moreover, his clothes were swamp-stained and his cloak had been torn by briers. "What did ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... waited in terrible anxiety. No one had told him what had taken place at Escorval, but he divined it by the aid of that strange prescience which so often illuminates the mind when ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... foundation. Whoever will examine without prejudice these oracles pretended to be divine will find only an ambiguous, unintelligible, absurd, and unconnected jargon, entirely unworthy of a God who intended to display his prescience, and to instruct his people with regard to future events. There does not exist in the Holy Scriptures a single prophecy sufficiently precise to be literally applied to Jesus Christ. To convince yourself of this truth, ask the most learned of our doctors which are the formal ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... man is a quaintly builded tale, in which the right and proper ending comes first. Thereafter time runs forward, not as schoolmen fable in a straight line, but in a vast closed curve, returning to the place of its starting. And it is by a dim foreknowledge of this, by some faint prescience of justice and reparation being given them by and by, that men have heart to live. For I know now that I have always known this thing. What else was living good for unless it brought me back ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... to have the knowledge of things to come; for if he had prescience of his prosperity, he would be careless; and, understanding of his adversity, he ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... his comrades and in another he was glad. Alone he would travel faster, and in the wilderness he never feared the loneliness and the silence. A sense, dead or atrophied in the ordinary human being, came out more strongly in him. It seemed to be a sort of divination or prescience, as if messages reached him through the air, ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... that by contrast ordinary persons seem to be without character; such men are therefore called, distinctively, 'characters'; and it is a matter of common experience that, whether through the unconscious prescience of parents or through that felicitous sense of propriety which often guides the hazards of destiny, they usually bear names to match their qualities. Meshach Myatt! Meshach Myatt! What piquant curious syllables to roll glibly off the tongue, and to repeat for the ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... Cain for whom there was still hope,—one who seemed as though he were seeking absolution from the ends of the earth. Minna suspected the galley-slave of glory in the man; Seraphita recognized him. Both admired and both pitied him. Whence came their prescience? Nothing could be more simple nor yet more extraordinary. As soon as we seek to penetrate the secrets of Nature, where nothing is secret, and where it is only necessary to have the eyes to see, we perceive that the simple ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... man's moments of prescience and a woman's, is that the man puts them out of his consciousness as quickly as he can, while a woman clings to them fearfully and goes her way a little more carefully for the momentary flash of foresight. ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... I will war, at least in words (and—should My chance so happen—deeds), with all who war With Thought;—and of Thought's foes by far most rude, Tyrants and sycophants have been and are. I know not who may conquer: if I could Have such a prescience, it should be no bar To this my plain, sworn, downright detestation Of every despotism ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... therefore it is one of thought. She sees clearly the facts of her experience and condition, and she knows exactly how those facts look in the eyes of others. She is one of those persons who possess a keen and just prescience of events, who can look far into the future and discern those resultant consequences of the present which, under the operation of inexorable moral law, must inevitably ensue. Self-poised in the right and free from the disturbing force of impulse ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... supposed bird's first attempt to scramble over a short space of deep water, would at once declare that the bird was trying to swim—if not actually swimming. Provided then that there is a very little perception of, and prescience concerning, the means whereby the next desired end may be attained, it matters not how little in advance that end may be of present desires or faculties; it is still reached through purpose, and must be called purposive. Again, no matter how many of these small ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... Woman's prescience of danger for those she loves is wonderful. Without being able to assign any definite reason, Marguerite felt that the man's presence boded her no good; and it was therefore with a troubled spirit that she heard the Count, after looking several times at his watch, suggest that he wished ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... times when he wished that some prescience of danger had made him throttle her then and there, so she could not have raised her shrill, alarming voice! But he had no warning. All he saw was a woman in a washed-out blue calico dress and a fresh white apron, raising ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... rather than by my poor knowledge; and therefore in the year 1300, when I returned from Rome, I began to compile this book, to the reverence of God and Saint John and the praise of this our city Florence.' The key-note is struck in these passages. Admiration for the past mingles with prescience of the future. The artist and the patriot awake together in Villani at the sight of Rome and the thought ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... army and the quartermasters ought to have inquired at the head-quarters of the defenses of Washington, if the roads are safe. But of course it was not done, as the big men here possess all the prescience, and need no valuable information. All of them appear to me as ostriches, who hide their heads and eyes, not ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... conversations with landlords, tailors, ticket-sellers, and casual acquaintance or agreeable strangers. Yet I returned once more to America with my desire, which was turning into a duty, unfulfilled; and when once more I sailed for Europe in 1911 it was more with foreboding of another failure than a prescience of fruition in my inveterate longing. Even after that boldly decisive week of the professor in London I had my doubts and my self-doubts. There were delays at London, delays at Paris, delays at Tours; and when at last we crossed ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... another, laid his plans without reference to Him who sat above the water-floods. Roger Holland had an unction from the Holy One, and his prescience was true. The commandment was gone forth from the presence of the King—"Hitherto shalt thou come, and no further." After that once, by Bonner, and in Smithfield, there was never another "trial of fire ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... oath, sworn by every god who had an altar in Rome, with the divinities of the Jews and the Christians thrown in, that in a day to come he would avenge Domitian's rods with daggers. Had the prince been able to do so, there might have risen in his mind some prescience of a certain scene, in which he must play a part on a far-off but destined night. He might have beheld a vision of himself, bald, corpulent and thin-legged, but wearing the imperial robes of Caesar, rolling ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... of the Seers is not always prescience; they are impressed with images, of which the event only shews them the meaning. They tell what they have seen to others, who are at that time not more knowing than themselves, but may become at last very adequate ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... you know?" cried Anne, too aghast at this instance of Miss Cornelia's uncanny prescience to ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... merciful!' What strange ironic prescience had led Prince Albert, in the simplicity of his heart, to choose that motto for the Crimean brooch? The words hold a double lesson; and, alas! when she brought herself to realise at length what was indeed the fact and what there was no helping, it was not in mercy that ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... anxiously to sea and sky that night in Avonlea. Damaris Garland listened to the smothered roar of the Atlantic in the murky northeast with a prescience of coming disaster. Friendly longshoremen shook their heads and said that Ches and Joe would better have kept to ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... small, sallow Pole, with high cheek-bones; a blond Hungarian, with a flaxen moustache; a brown, hatchet-faced Roumanian; a fresh-colored Frenchman, with eye-glasses; a dark, Marrano-descended Dutchman; a chubby German; a fiery-eyed Russian, tugging at his own hair with excitement, perhaps in prescience of the prison awaiting his return; a dusky Egyptian, with the close-cropped, curly black hair, and all but the nose of a negro; a yellow-bearded Swede; a courtly Viennese lawyer; a German student, with proud duel-slashes across his cheek; a Viennese student, first fighter in the University, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the purely literary movement. I have tried to show that neither in philosophy, theology, nor political and social strata, was there any belief in the necessity of radical changes, or prescience of a coming alteration of the intellectual atmosphere. Speculation, like politics, could advance quietly along the old paths without fearing that they might lead to a precipice; and society, in spite of very vigorous and ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... he had a sharp prescience of the unwisdom of his rejection. A cold calculator of chance and probabilities would have reckoned that a half hour of assuagement here would have been a wiser investment of his mortal moments than any virtuous plunge into ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley |
