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Psychical   Listen
adjective
Psychical, Psychic  adj.  
1.
Of or pertaining to the human soul, or to the living principle in man. Note: This term was formerly used to express the same idea as psychological. Recent metaphysicians, however, have employed it to mark the difference between psychh the living principle in man, and pneyma the rational or spiritual part of his nature. In this use, the word describes the human soul in its relation to sense, appetite, and the outer visible world, as distinguished from spiritual or rational faculties, which have to do with the supersensible world.
2.
Of or pertaining to the mind, or its functions and diseases; mental; contrasted with physical.
Psychical blindness, Psychical deafness (Med.), forms of nervous disease in which, while the senses of sight and hearing remain unimpaired, the mind fails to appreciate the significance of the sounds heard or the images seen.
Psychical contagion, the transference of disease, especially of a functional nervous disease, by mere force of example.
Psychical medicine, that department of medicine which treats of mental diseases.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Psychical" Quotes from Famous Books



... death, she offered her sufferings of mind and body as an expiation for the sins around her. By word of mouth and by letters of heartbroken intensity she summoned all dear to her to join in this holy offering. Catherine's faith is alien to these latter days. Yet the psychical unity of the race is becoming matter not only of emotional intuition, but established scientific fact: and no modern sociologist, no psychologist who realizes how unknown in origin and how intimate in interpenetration are the forces that control ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa

... alone the physical odor, which must be very slight as you will see upon a moment's consideration. It is really the presence of the particles of the prana-aura which enables the dog to distinguish the traces of one person among that of thousands of others, and the feat is as much psychical as physical. ...
— The Human Aura - Astral Colors and Thought Forms • Swami Panchadasi

... a while she had gone down to the country with Mrs. More and her daughters; and now she was back once more, in a kind of psychical convalescence, at her aunt's new house on the river-bank ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson

... use of sibylline prophecy. He makes Giovanni's blind foster-mother, Angela, foretell the tragedy in almost every detail, save that, in her vision, she cannot see the face of Francesca's lover. Mr. Phillips, I take it, is here reinforcing ancient tradition by a reference to modern "psychical research." He trusts to our conceiving such clairvoyance to be not wholly impossible, and giving it what may be called provisional credence. Whether the device be artistic or not we need not here consider. I merely ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... minister, and that his home was in Rhode Island. His friends were sent for and recognized him, and he returned to his home after an absence of two years of absolutely foreign existence. A most careful investigation of the case was made on behalf of the London Society for Psychical Research. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... and one of the ships, after being driven for many days before the tempest, was wrecked upon one of an archipelago of uninhabited islands far to the south, where the survivors settled. Naturally, the posterity of the parents possessed of such peculiar gifts had developed extraordinary psychical powers. ...
— To Whom This May Come - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... the higher sensitiveness of the lower class of animals. Nor need we hesitate to recognize the fine gradations from simple sensitiveness and volition to the higher instinctive and to the other psychical manifestations of the higher brute animals. The gradation is undoubted, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... one pianist who is very widely known and highly lauded, but who is very slightly removed from the class of Blind Tom. A trained alienist, one acquainted with the difference between the eccentricities which frequently accompany greatness and the unconscious physical and psychical evidences of idiocy which so clearly agree with the antics of the chimpanzee or the droll Capuchin monkeys, might find in the performer to whom I refer a subject for some very interesting, not to say startling reflections. Few have ever been successful in inducing this pianist to talk upon any other ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke

... these in turn generate more fear, until both the moods of anger and fear and a perpetual state of animosity and warfare are induced among contending groups. Thus out of primitive motives of combat the feud as a more generalized and psychical antagonism is produced, and these states are possible because of the powers of generalization in man which extend to the emotions and make possible the formation of ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge

... charlatanry and mere juggling tricks, with some elementary knowledge of the beliefs and practices of the true Indian Yogi, who seeks to attain supernatural powers by rigid asceticism, and who has really some insight into secret mental phenomena, being in this line of discovery the forerunner of the English Psychical Society. ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... certain, from the steps taken by the government, about which there is no doubt, that it is in the main a true account. The storm and stress of the long war with Hannibal would be enough to account for the phenomena, even if they were not in keeping with well-known psychical facts. ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler

... works such as his "Popular Astronomy" (1877); of his text-books on astronomy, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus; of his books on political economy, which science he was accustomed to call his "recreation"; and of magazine articles on all sorts of subjects not omitting "psychical research," which was one of the numerous by-paths into which he strayed. He held at one time the presidency of the American ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick

... bridge whether a woman, a child, and a dog had passed that way, but he had seen nothing. The apparition had disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. Mr. Stead's article ends here. Of course, one can only surmise as to the nature of the phenomena. No member of the Psychical Research Society could do more—and in the absence of any authentic history of the spot where the manifestations occurred, such a surmise can be of little value. Since the phenomena were seen by three ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell

... her kind, to this day, use the number four in contempt, rather than three or five, is a mystery of what one might call the psychical side of the Italian language. ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford

... importance attached to a possible future state: he looks upon this as a psychical stimulant, a day dream, whose revulsion and reaction disorder waking life. The condition may appear humble and prosaic to those exalted by the fumes of Fancy, by a spiritual dram-drinking, which, like the physical, is the pursuit of an ideal happiness. But he is too wise to affirm or to deny the ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton

... game of chess. I asked him, but he didn't understand the question. I puzzled over it a good deal, for it seemed to me that if Hollond felt lonely, there must be more in this world of his than we imagined. I began to wonder if there was any truth in fads like psychical research. Also, I was not so sure that he was as normal as I had thought: it looked as if his nerves ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan

... purely sentimental one - not a belief founded simply on emotion. There is a physical world - the world as known to our senses, and there is a psychical world - the world of feeling, consciousness, ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke

... materialization of Astral forms make it possible, under certain conditions, that the Astral Form become so thoroughly materialized that it may not only be seen but actually felt. Even the records of the English Society for Psychical Research prove this fact, leaving out of account the phenomena with which all advanced ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka

... existed from the earliest ages and has the unqualified condemnation of Scripture; yet in the last half-century it has taken new interest and dignity to itself under the modern title of "Psychical Research." With boldest assumption it claims to be the only safe exponent of truth, and to be working in the interests of science; changing science being accepted as more trustworthy than revelation. It offers as final evidence for its assumptions, ...
— Satan • Lewis Sperry Chafer

... to admit (for the benefit of the Society for Psychical Research) that Stephen still dreamed of her. He would go about his work absently all the morning with the dream still in his head, and the girl so vividly near him that he could not believe her to be travelling in England, as Miss Russell said. Puss and Anne were careful to keep him ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... then added, "Say a prayer." She immediately began to repeat a short prayer, and before she had reached the end of it he was dead. There is a strange incident connected with his death, which may be worth something to those who take an interest in what is now called "Psychical Research." At the same hour his married daughter was sitting in a room forty miles away with her little boy, a child just old enough to talk, and the child stared with intense interest at an empty chair. His mother asked what attracted his ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... has ever set humming the looms of our dreams. Wagner and Chopin have a motor element in their music that is fiercer, intenser and more fugacious than that of all other composers. For them is not the Buddhistic void, in which shapes slowly form and fade; their psychical tempo is devouring. They voiced their age, they moulded their age and we listen eagerly to them, to these vibrile prophetic voices, so sweetly corrosive, bardic and appealing. Chopin being nearer the soil ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... intentional, and therefore whether the animal itself could or could not have behaved otherwise; whether, given the impossibility of the animal behaving differently, we should say that this impossibility was absolute or only happened to occur on this occasion; whether perchance the action of some psychical factor unknown to Neumann between the animal and himself may not have been omitted; and whether such factor was not in operation when the animal was working with its late mistress, etc., etc. In this connexion I feel it incumbent upon me to recall that I ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann

... right of maintenance in general. As to the provision for women in particular, it was considered that woman was unfitted by her physical and psychical characteristics for an active struggle for existence; but was destined, on the one hand, to the function of propagating the human race, and, on the other hand, to that of beautifying and refining life. So long as we all, or at least the immense majority of us, ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... he had received at home. He applied himself to the assiduous study of Kant's disciples, but the master satisfied him best. Nevertheless, Coleridge was not mentally adapted to the Kantian system. He had a psychical affinity for Schelling. He loved him as a brother. He was charmed with his vivid imagination, warm admiration of all natural forms, and ardent, impulsive temperament. Schelling's philosophy was Spinozism in poetry, and there can ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... considered as the passive object, is here therefore in a high degree in its proper place; and there can the less be any doubt of its occurring here in this sense, that it occurs twice more in vers. 11 and 12, of the natural psychical life of the Servant of God, which was given up to suffering and death. But, on the other hand, if the soul be considered as the active object, it stands here at all events rather idle,—a circumstance which is sufficiently ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg

... dear reader, is there such a thing as chance? Do you believe in chance? Do you attach any precise meaning to the word? Do you employ it at haphazard, allowing it to mean what it may? Chance! What a field for psychical investigation is at once opened up; how we may tear to shreds our past lives in search of—what? Of the Chance that made us. I think, reader, I can throw some light on the general question, by replying ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... dramatic corps; and Dukes, Grandees, Bishops, Generals, Anointed Presence itself, every mother's son of them, stand straddling there, not a shirt on them; and I know not whether to laugh or weep. This physical or psychical infirmity, in which perhaps I am not singular, I have, after hesitation, thought right to publish, for the solace of those ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle

... fellow's brain giving way before my very eyes. He couldn't have stood the strain of three dreams. It WAS odd, wasn't it? All three of us dreaming the same thing at the same moment. We must never tell dear Seppy. But I shall send an account of it to the Psychical Society, with stars ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit

... observed, is not the doctor's point of view sympathetically transferred (as it might have been) since she sees his back without recognizing him. The story is to be found in the Proceedings of the Psychical Research Society (vol. ii., ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater

... surroundings, and still more of inborn hereditary influences, over both mind and body? the bias to good or evil, and the possession or otherwise of gifts and talents, due very much (under Providence) to one's ancient ancestors and one's modern teachers? We are each of us morally and bodily the psychical and physical composite of a thousand generations. Albeit every individual possesses as his birthright a freewill to turn either to the right or to the left, and is liable to a due responsibility for his words and actions, still the Just Judge alone can ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... days in it, for the soldier had now fought many fights and was hardened by many wounds. And so it came to pass that I went again to Lansdowne Road to ask about the Theosophical Society. H.P. Blavatsky looked at me piercingly for a moment. "Have you read the report about me of the Society for Psychical Research?" "No; I never heard of it, so far as I know." "Go and read it, and if, after reading it, you come back—well." And nothing more would she say on the subject, but branched off to her experiences ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant

... disease of the most highly differentiated parts of the nervous system, in which the psychical functions, as thought, feeling, and volition, are seriously impaired, revealing itself in a series of mental phenomena. Institutions for the insane were at first founded for public relief, and not to benefit the insane; but this ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 520, December 19, 1885 • Various

... Barrett, one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, more than forty years ago tried some experiments which led him to believe that something then new to science, which he provisionally called "thought transference" and which is now ...
— Telepathy - Genuine and Fraudulent • W. W. Baggally

... apparition, at Blocksby's, when I and Tarras, Wentworth and the attendant recognised him, and Miss Breton did not, is thus part of the History of the Unexplained. Allen might have appealed to precedents in the annals of the Psychical Society, where they exist in scores, and are technically styled "collective hallucinations." But neither a jury, nor a judge, perhaps, would accept the testimony of experts in Psychical Research if offered in a criminal trial, nor acquit ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang

... step. But Gratton was stirring restlessly; he would put out his hand again to help her. She shuddered and moved quickly. Now she stood on the same level as Gratton and the others; the physical fact was sinister as though symbolical of the psychical. ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory

... as Hamlet says, real mysteries in this dull, prosaic life of ours. One or two true tales may not come amiss. I am quite ready to give any member of the Psychical Society chapter and verse and authorities, and every available data, ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various

... of the early eighties are with us yet. Ireland is still a bone of contention between political parties: the Channel tunnel is no nearer completion: and then as now, when other topics are exhausted, the "Spectator" can fill up its columns with Thought Transference and Psychical Research. ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease

... human nature as such and therefore to all normal human beings. In their developed form they are known as virtues (the Greek means simply "goodnesses," "perfections," "excellences," or "fitnesses"), some of them are physical, but others are psychical, and among the latter some, and these distinctively or peculiarly human, are "rational," i e, presuppose the possession and exercise of mind or intelligence. These last fall into two groups, which Aristotle distinguishes ...
— Ethics • Aristotle

... the further they recede from our view, appear as a mere outline through a veil of blue haze. There is a kind of psychical blue haze that enfolds those who are removed from us. Death itself is a removal, but the chasm is so wide that the beloved ones who have crossed it disappear within the haze and become as beloved shadows. The Greek genius understood ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... whole trend of his thought in his recent work connected with psychical research, in Myth, Ritual, and Religion, in Cock-Lane and Common-Sense, Mr. Lang begins by entering a protest against the attitude observed towards the subject by contemporary science, especially by anthropology, which, as having been so lately "in the same condemnation," might be expected ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... opposed to treatment of physical disease has in recent years become especially interesting. It is clear that Tuke and Pinel foresaw that psychotherapeutic treatment is necessary, and their efforts were directed towards providing effective "sublimation" of misdirected psychical energy. ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various

... centres superior, the action of the one of which may be counteracted and annulled in effect by the action of the other. This applies not merely to such physical processes as heart-beats and arterial contraction and relaxing, but to the most intricate functionings which have their counterpart in psychical processes as well. Thus the observation of the inhibition of the heart's action by a nervous impulse furnished the point of departure for studies that led to a better understanding of the modus operandi of the mind's activities than had ever previously ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... Psychical Research, are the cloud no bigger than a man's hand that is forcing the facts of Magic again on the attention of both the theological and scientific world. Hypnotism and Psychical Research are already becoming respectable and attracting the attention of the generality ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead

... notes of my own case have been declined on various pretexts by every medical journal to which I have offered them. There was, perhaps, some reason in this, because many of the medical facts which they record are not altogether new, and because the psychical deductions to which they have led me are not in themselves of medical interest. I ought to add, that a good deal of what is here related is not of any scientific value whatsoever; but as one or two people on whose judgment I rely have advised me ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various

... that this book attempts to describe a man and not one of these calculable little super men who, of late, have been taking up so much more of your attention than they deserve. Students who engage in psychical research, as it is called, often confess themselves puzzled by the behaviour of ghosts, it appears to them wayward and trivial. How much more likely are ghosts to be puzzled by the actions of real men? And we are surely ghosts if we keep nothing ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine

... than one, in every human being subordinate to that of which he is conscious, which is himself. Submerged beneath the full stream of his conscious existence, with all its phases of physical and psychical activity, this other existence goes on. In most people it is either so deeply submerged or so closely bound up in their conscious existence that they never know anything about it. Sometimes they catch dim glimpses ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly

... an answer: it is an answer to say that the energy is truly from outside the world; that it is psychic, or at least one of the results of a real psychical disturbance. The highest gratitude and respect are due to the great human civilizations such as the old Egyptian or the existing Chinese. Nevertheless it is no injustice for them to say that only modern Europe has exhibited incessantly a power of self-renewal recurring ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... have been more than seventeen thousand other cases which the London Society of Psychical ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco

... us more, perhaps, by their outward and physical, than by their inward and psychical life. On a first interview with them, especially, we receive an impression of clothes, good or otherwise, of beauty or plainness or ugliness of feature, and of correctness or uncouthness of manner. These are the common people, whether ladies and gentlemen, or simple men and women. There ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various

... raps on the headboards of their beds; and girls who could not spell were occupied in delivering messages from Socrates, Ben Franklin and Shakespeare. Besides the physical demonstrations, there were all sorts of psychical intimations from the world which ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells

... fully possessed by one type of civilization reject it, and adopt one radically different? Do races have "souls" which are fixed and incapable of radical transformations? What has taken place in Japan, a profound, or only a superficial change in psychical character? Are the destinies of the Oriental races ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... man, Adam, was made a living soul" (which is a quotation from Genesis 2:7—"and man became a living soul"), "but the last Adam," says Paul (meaning Christ), "became a life-making spirit." But, continues Paul, the soul-man (psychical man) comes first; the spiritual-man afterwards, according to a regular order. "The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second is the Lord from heaven." And then he adds,—and this is the key to the whole passage,—"As we have borne the image of the ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... these wonder-working words. St. Paul, in Christian circles, was the first to give the word its unique value. For him it named a new order of life and a new level of being. In his thought, a deep cleavage runs through the human race and divides it into two sharply-sundered classes, "psychical men" and "pneumatical men"—men who live according to nature, and men who live by the life of the Spirit. The former class, that is psychical men, are of the earth earthy; they are, as we should say to-day, empirical, ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... learned she was going anywhere, I discovered in a flash that I happened to be going there too. I commend this strange case of parallel thought and action to the consideration of the Society for Psychical Research. ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen

... spiritually. They were much more attractive to me than those of many a splendidly beautiful girl, the immense superiority of whose beauty nobody knew better than I. Why should this have been so? That is one of the mysteries to the solution of which no moral or physical or psychical research has ever brought us an ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... her unflinching recognition of physical and psychical facts which the average woman blinks over, Mary deceived herself as to the date of that final triumph which permitted her to observe Rhoda Nunn with perfect equanimity. Her outbreak of angry feeling on the occasion of Bella Royston's death meant something more than she would acknowledge before ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing

... papa about them, I don't understand business; but I want to tell you about Sir Rupert. The Society for Psychical Research sent down a Committee to inquire into the credibility of the ghost, and recorded four authentic apparitions in the spare bedroom; and on family evidence accepted at least three events in the Long Gallery. ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross

... brightly to her husband, "Well, dear, I think per-HAPS it's about time for us to be saying good-night." For once Babbitt did not break out in blustering efforts to keep the party going. He had—there was something he wished to think out—But the psychical research had started them off again. ("Why didn't they go home! Why didn't they go home!") Though he was impressed by the profundity of the statement, he was only half-enthusiastic when Howard Littlefield lectured, ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis

... senses function differently under the same objective conditions. But if, on the contrary, it should turn out that the illusions are not reversed for the two senses, then the theory of the ultimate uniformity of the psychical laws will have received an ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various

... lecture I shall be concerned to refute a theory which is widely held, and which I formerly held myself: the theory that the essence of everything mental is a certain quite peculiar something called "consciousness," conceived either as a relation to objects, or as a pervading quality of psychical phenomena. ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell

... One; psychism is the manifestation of the powers of consciousness through organised matter. Each word of that definition has its own value. We are far too apt, in our ordinary thought and talking, to limit the words "psychical," "psychic," or "psychism" in a quite illegitimate way, and the popular use of the term is illegitimate. It is generally used amongst us to mean unusual manifestations of the powers of consciousness, whereas, properly ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant

... says: "Body is identical with mind; appearance and reality are one and the same thing." Bergson denies the identification of mind and body, saying:[FN181] "It (experience) shows us the interdependence of the mental and the physical, the necessity of a certain cerebral substratum for the psychical state-nothing more. From the fact that two things are mutually dependent, it does not follow that they are equivalent. Because a certain screw is necessary for a certain machine, because the machine works when the ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya

... illustration both raises the question, Which of these is the "community?" and also points the way to the answer. None of the groupings mentioned can be considered "the community." Yet each is "a community." A "community" is a psychical and not a physical thing. It can only approximately be bounded by physical lines. In the last analysis the true "community" is nothing more nor less than that group of two or more individuals who are bound together by a single ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt

... impresses on so many men, the result of the subjection of the intellect to the will, and of the impossibility of grasping things except as they relate to self. In this respect the American cousin was his antipodes. His whole body had a psychical expression—slim, elastic, alert. Over his bright gray eyes the eyelids drew themselves horizontally, showing his dexterity and acuteness of mind; indeed, ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr

... I, of all people in the world—I, Peter Ibbetson, architect and surveyor, Wharton Street, Pentonville—most futile, desultory, and uneducated dreamer of dreams—destined to make some great psychical discovery? ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al

... F. BARRETT, F.R.S., Professor of Physics, Royal College of Science, Dublin, 1873-1910. "As a former President of the Psychical Research Society, he is familiar with all the developments of this most fascinating branch of science, and thus what he has to say on thought-reading, hypnotism, telepathy, crystal-vision, spiritualism, divinings, and so on, will be read ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield

... of Leland Stanford University, California, and Jesus College, Oxford, has received an honorary degree from the latter university for his thesis, "The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries: Its Psychical Origin and Nature", a most laborious as well as ingenious work, whose object is to prove "that the origin of the fairy faith is psychical, and that fairyland, being thought of as an invisible world within which the visible world is immersed as an island in an unexplored ocean, actually exists, ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox

... were so numerous that I found myself at a loss as to his meaning at times. His treatment of the subject was quite different; for whereas (he explained) speech was a physical attribute and destined to give place to some other method of affinity, love was psychical in its essence, and hence immortal. But he maintained that moderation should control spirit no less than matter, and that either undue exaltation or a lack of sentiment were inconsistent with the noblest ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant

... As concerns the belief in the existence of what may be called (although the term is not a very happy one) "discarnate spirits," however, the matter, in view of the modern investigation of spiritistic and other abnormal psychical phenomena, stands in a different position. There can, indeed, be little doubt that very many of the phenomena observed at spiritistic seances come under the category of deliberate fraud, and an even larger number, perhaps, can be explained on the theory of the subconscious self. ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove

... that there is a psychical body within the physical body of a living being, correspondent with it in attributes, and that when the connection between them is dissolved by death the former lives on in a ghostly form; in other words, a belief of a ghost-soul ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... person who has offered himself to a master as a pupil to learn practically the "hidden mysteries of Nature and the psychical powers latent in man." The master who accepts him is called in India a Guru; and the real Guru is always an adept in the Occult Science. A man of profound knowledge, exoteric and esoteric, especially the latter; and one ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... Our psychical research people give us conclusive proof of mental telepathy or telegraphy between finite minds. Thus communications or impressions are conveyed many miles from one mind to another. This phenomenon is easier when one or both of the subjects are in a ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller

... what follows to a Priest, and might have done so had not the Man of the World in me whispered that from professional Believers I should get little sympathy, and probably less credence still. For to have my experience disbelieved, or attributed to hallucination, would be intolerable to me. Psychical investigators, I am told, prefer a Medium who takes no cash recompense for his performance, a Healer who gives of his strange powers without reward. There are, however, natural-born priests who yet wear no uniform other than upon their face and heart, but since I know ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood

... as it were, a sort of induced current of physical unrest; a beneficent arrangement, by which a dangerous excess of emotional excitement may be transformed into motor energy, and so safely got rid of. The motor apparatus acts as a safety-valve to the psychical; and if the engine races for a while, with the onset of bodily fatigue the emotional pressure-gauge returns to ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman

... as flowing out of the physical, just as the psychical flows out of the vital, and just as the higher forms of animal life flow out of the lower. It is a far cry from man to the dumb brutes, and from the brutes to the vegetable world, and from the vegetable ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... the present Sir Robert Wadham and his people nearly out of their wits. And that's the way with almost all of us: there is literally no connection (as a rule) between our expressions and the things we intend to express. You know how the Psychical Society make quite a study of rappings, and try to interpret them by the alphabet? Well, these, as I told you, are merely a nervous symptom; annoying, no doubt, but not dangerous. The only spectres, almost, that manage to hint what they really mean ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang

... between his mother and father which gave him a horror of human love was now renewed. It was renewed, moreover, with the light of a miracle to throw it into high relief. And this miracle could not be explained away as a coincidence, but was an old-fashioned miracle that required no psychical buttressing, a hard and fast miracle able to withstand any criticism. It was a pity that out of regard for Esther he could not publish it for the encouragement of the faithful and ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie

... the possibility of spontaneous generation. By the combination of psychical powers and of strange essences, they claim to have created forms in which life became manifest. Of these, the most marvellous were those strange beings, male and female, which were called homunculi. The old philosophers ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham

... object generate consciousness—Materialists cannot demonstrate how molecular vibrations can be transformed into objects—Parallelism avoids issue by declaring mind to be function of brain—Parallelists declare physical and psychical life to be two parallel currents—Bain's support of this—Objections to: most important that it postulates consciousness as a ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet

... Sibylline Books, werewolves, dyeing one's hair, coffin-ships, standing armies, the mediaeval monasteries, Church Brotherhoods, state insurance of the poor, promiscuous almsgiving, the rights of animals, the C. D. Acts, the Kernoozer Club, emigration, book-plates, the Psychical Society, Kindergarten, Henry George, Positivism, Chevalier's Coster, colour-blindness, Total Abstinence, Arbitration, the best hundred books, Local Option, Women's Rights, the Wandering Jew, the Flying Dutchman, the Neanderthal skull, the Early Closing ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... insists to the people: 'Whosoever shall be ashamed of Me in this generation, of him also shall the Son of Man be ashamed, when He cometh in the glory of the Father' (Mark viii. 38). The most numerous cures, physical, psychical, moral, certainly performed by Him, appear as the spontaneous effect of a unique degree and kind of spiritual authority; and the sinlessness attributed to Him throughout by the apostolic community (2 Cor. v. 21; Heb. ...
— Progress and History • Various

... you at the right time, in the right way, and that you will recognize it when it comes. Hold to this thought, never allow it to weaken, hold to it, and continually water it with firm expectation. You in this way put your advertisement into a psychical, a spiritual newspaper, a paper that has not a limited circulation, but one that will make its way not only to the utmost bounds of the earth, but of the very universe itself. It is an advertisement, moreover, which ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine

... affairs find relaxation in the mystery of the detective story. Real life often furnishes events sufficiently mysterious to make a special feature story that rivals fiction. Unexplained crimes and accidents; strange psychical phenomena, such as ghosts, presentiments, spiritism, and telepathy; baffling problems of the scientist and the inventor—all have elements of mystery that fascinate the ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

... other side, by the Nazarene physician, whose inspired secret of summoning out of the believing soul of man the power to control his body—so baffled and fascinated Karshish, drawing his attention in Lazarus to just that connection of the known physical with the unknown psychical nature which is still mystically ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning

... treatise on the development of a science of soul culture is intended primarily for young people. The expansion of the spiritual nature is shown to be the supreme thing in life. In clear, brief, logical, sane manner Dr. Adam describes man's psychical nature and methods of its development in terms ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett

... some instances believe in ghosts, and is inclined to the practice of what in former ages was called necromancy—the attempt to establish an illicit connexion with the spirits of the departed—under the modern name of psychical research. There are, no doubt, some forms of psychical research which are genuinely scientific and legitimate. It is probable enough that there exists a considerable area of what may be called borderland phenomena to which scientific methods of ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson

... "authors'"[86] idea; and so, on the largest scale, the death or final loss of energy by the whole visible universe has its counterpart in the acquirement of a maximum of life, the correlative unseen world. According to this theory, therefore, as the psychical or spiritual phenomena of the visible world only begins to be manifested with some complex aggregate of material phenomena, therefore it is necessary for the continuance of mind in a future state to have some sort of material vehicle also, which ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott

... These institutions, in other words, with the exception of the penitentiaries and other institutions for segregation, should aim at overcoming defective character in individuals. Their work is mainly, therefore, a work of remedying psychical defects in the individual which prevent his proper adjustment to society. In the case of penitentiaries, however, the work is one mainly of segregation, of providing humane care under such conditions as least to burden society, ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood

... Henry, I believe, who spoke of restaurants as "literary landmarks." They are really much more than that—they are signposts, psychical rather than physical, which show the trend of the times—or of the neighbourhood. I suppose nothing in Greenwich Village could be more significantly illuminating than its eating places. There are, ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin

... The question, indeed, poseth most of us, but we cannot leave the inquiry alone. M. Larigot, realising this preoccupation, has in the course of his investigations, during many years, arrived at the conclusion that there is an Art of the Supernatural, apart from the difficult science of psychical research, worth cultivating for its own sake. So he has gone to Glanvil and Arise Evans and the credulous old books—to Edgar Poe and Lord Lytton and the modern writers who tell supernatural tales. He gives us their material without positing its unquestionable effect as police-court evidence, ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various

... of patriotism has seemed to many to mark an arrest of development in the psychical expansion of the individual, a half-way house between mere self-centredness and full human sympathy. Some moralists have condemned it as pure egoism, magnified and disguised. 'Patriotism,' says Ruskin, 'is an absurd prejudice ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... the organic scaffolding is dominated from on high by the aptitudes of the animal, especially that superior characteristic, the psychical aptitudes. That the Chimpanzee and the hideous Gorilla possess close resemblances of structure to our own is obvious. But let us for a moment consider their aptitudes. What differences, what a dividing ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre

... his daughter had left him after saying "good-night." He was not a man to be easily astonished. Not only was he one of the best-read amateur Egyptologists in Europe, but he was also an ex-President of the Royal Society, a Member of the Psychical Research Society, and, moreover, Chairman of a recently appointed Commission on Comparative Insanity, the object of whose labours was to determine, if possible, what proportion of people outside asylums were mad or sane according to a standard which, somehow, no one had thought of inventing before—the ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith

... with an armful of the publications of "The Society for Psychical Research" before him, was busied with the arguments of the spiritists and their ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland

... has been incited to its publication by the commendations of three of the most eminent critics and editors of magazines in the United States, to whom it was submitted in manuscript. In this essay, he discusses his subject from a physio-psychical standpoint, and believes that he has kept intact the canons of scientific ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir

... Manifestations of every kind. Their letters dropped from the ceiling—unstamped—and Spirits used to squatter up and down their staircases all night; but they had never come into contact with kittens. Lone Sahib wrote out the facts, noting the hour and the minute, as every Psychical Observer is bound to do, and appending the Englishman's letter because it was the most mysterious document and might have had a bearing upon anything in this world or the next. An outsider would have translated all ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling

... because he will live in his own century? Our dreamer will have none of the Mediaeval, is enamoured of the Modern; has lurking admiration of the "over-man" of Nietzsche, even to be overpassed by the coming Jerusalem Jew; the psychical Eurasian, the link and interpreter between East and West—nay, between antiquity and the modern spirit; the synthesis of mankind, saturated with the culture of the nations, and now at last turning home again, laden with the spiritual ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... kinds of food may be gradually accepted and even become popular. Man has in this, as in so many other things, a large range of possible accommodation, but he has at the same time habits the continuance of which are necessary for the healthy working of the nervous system. The psychical element in the matter of food-habit is important in all higher animals, but most of all in man. The digestive organs are controlled by the nervous system, and the brain acts upon the latter in such a way as to favour or to restrain ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... opposite and not less important revolt of women: that is, the revolt against compulsory barrenness. In this two classes of women are concerned: those who, though they have no desire for the presence or care of children, nevertheless feel that motherhood is an experience necessary to their complete psychical development and understanding of themselves and others, and those who, though unable to find or unwilling to entertain a husband, would like to occupy themselves with the rearing of children. My own experience ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw

... however, to the animal world—which is parasitic, indeed, upon the vegetable world—we find that in what we may call the main line of ascent there has been, along with increasing anatomical complexity, the far greater emergence of mind. In its earliest manifestations, sentience, consciousness, the psychical in general, and the capacity for it, must be regarded merely as phenomena of the physical organism; the capacity to feel, as no more than a property of the living body; and such mind as there is exists for the body. But, as we may see it, there has been a gradual but infinitely ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby

... called to the definition of "education" on the twentieth page. It is there stated, that, throughout this essay, education is not used in the limited sense of mental or intellectual training alone, but as comprehending the whole manner of life, physical and psychical, during the educational period; that is, following Worcester's comprehensive definition, as comprehending instruction, discipline, manners, and habits. This, of course, includes home-life and social life, as well as school-life; ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke

... Research, are the cloud no bigger than a man's hand that is forcing the facts of Magic again on the attention of both the theological and scientific world. Hypnotism and Psychical Research are already becoming respectable and attracting the attention of the generality of men of science and of our clergy. Spiritualism and Mesmerism are still tabooed, but wait their turn for popular recognition, having already been recognized by pioneers distinguished ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead

... corrective for the trainer of children than the habit of asking oneself, in question small and great,—Would I consent to be treated as I have just treated my child? If it were only remembered that the child generally suffers double as much as the adult, parents would perhaps learn physical and psychical tenderness without which a child's ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key

... Instinct cannot learn from experience, or improve by practice; but it seems to be the prophetic germ of a higher intelligence. It is nearly as difficult to draw the dividing line between instinct and a low grade of intelligence, as it is to distinguish between the psychical and ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... the dogs, of course there were many, and during their lives they were intimate and valued family friends, and their deaths were household tragedies. One of them, a large yellow animal of several good breeds and valuable rather because of psychical than physical traits, was named "Susan" by his small owners, in commemoration of another retainer, a white cow; the fact that the cow and the dog were not of the same sex being treated with indifference. Much the most individual of the dogs and the one with the strongest ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... Cardinal, with the patient air of one talking to a child, "there are hundreds of those; and they are very real indeed; but they are almost entirely mental—or psychical, as some call them. And there are specialists on all of these. Bad habits of thought, for example, always set up some kind of disease; and there are hospitals for these; and even ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson

... these physical conditions, coupled with the subtler differences in the psychical elements of the personality, account for that distinctive physiognomy of the voice called timbre, which is only another name for individuality as exhibited in each person. The same general elements enter into the composition ...
— Resonance in Singing and Speaking • Thomas Fillebrown

... minute I had before me the date of your arrival in New York, your present address, and"—he looked up quizzically at Harren—"and several items of general information, such as your peculiar use of your camera, and the list of books on Psychical Phenomena and Cryptograms which you ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers

... Club have been until now a matter only of private record. But it seems to me, as an active participant in the investigations, that they should be given to the public; not so much for what they will add to the existing data on psychical research, for from that angle they were not unusual, but as yet another exploration into that still uncharted territory, ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... are not lacking. The study of the physical antedates the study of the mental always. In the history of the individual as well as of nations, knowledge of the psychical has dragged far behind mastery of tangible objects. We come in contact with our physical environment and adjust ourselves to it long before we begin to study the *acts by which we have been able to control objects ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott

... misery and strife, has at last reached the point where, emerging from the control of the blind forces of an inexorable environment, it is about to take its destiny into its own control and actually shape its future. From now on, evolution is to be a psychical rather than a physical process. The world is on the threshold of a new era. We see the first faint dawn of universal peace and of ...
— Commercialism and Journalism • Hamilton Holt

... is sacrificed thereby and a point of contact with the masses can thus be established, so that the truth symbolized by the rite of baptism can be shown forth through the action of those formative, purifying, spiritual forces that sustain to the psychical realm the same relation that water bears ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various

... Ethnology. This is, in its methods, historic and analytic. It contemplates man as a social creature. It is more concerned with the mental, the psychical part of man, than with his physical nature, and seeks to trace the intellectual development of communities by studying the growth of government, laws, arts, languages, ...
— Anthropology - As a Science and as a Branch of University Education in the United States • Daniel Garrison Brinton



Words linked to "Psychical" :   psychic, mental, paranormal, psychical communication



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