"Prescience" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... such demands that our chief institutions arise. By precept we may be taught their propriety; by example we may see their advantages. But until the necessity is personally felt they are sure to be neglected; and men wonder at their want of prescience and upbraid their shortsightedness when, with a sudden and sometimes startling success, the proposal they have slighted arises through the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... Destiny Identity Prescience Alec Yeaton's Son Memory Tennyson (1890) Sweetheart, Sigh No More Broken Music Elmwood Sea Longings A Shadow of the Night Outward Bound Reminiscence Pere Antoine's ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... man has no glimmer of prescience. Day by day we rattle the box, throw the dice; but of how these will fall we have no knowledge. We only hope with the gambler's feverishness; and it is this very hazard that keeps us crowding and pushing to hold our place at the tables where fortune ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... above all, the maternal passion—for such it is—gradually softened the hard race of man—tum genus humanum primum mollescere coepit. In his marvellous sketch of the evolution of man, nothing illustrates more forcibly the prescience of Lucretius than the picture of the growth of sympathy: "When with cries and gestures they taught with broken words that 'tis right for all men to have pity on the weak." I heard the well-known medical historian, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... 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, ...
— Two Nations • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... as was 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 his father, Tokimasa, and his brother-in-law, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... as already in the symphony. But in his sonatas he is always rather hampered, and never attains the flow of his slow melodies for the violin. Mozart, also, while a beautiful player upon the pianoforte of his day, did not possess the prescience of Beethoven, who was able to see over the pianoforte of his time and write as if he felt the assurance of the nobler and yet nobler instruments of these later times. Here he stands with Bach, who in his great Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue requires and confidently expects ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... to that uttermost blank beach Whereto the boldest thought may reach That voyages from the vaguest past— (Dim realm and ultimate of space)— Is vexed and troubled, stirs and shakes, In prescience of a god that wakes, Born of man's wish to ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... shocked sense of it by soft shufflings at the door of the parlor, his sanctuary. He felt obscurely that he had become important to them, the chief figure of a little infamous tragedy. He had a moment's intense and painful prescience of the way they would take it; they would treat him with an excruciating respect, an awful deference, as a person visited by God and afflicted with ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... plainly as the waves on the shore. We also have a chemical and electrical sense, showing us what effect different substances will have on one another, and what changes to expect in the weather. The most complex and subtle of our senses, however, is a sort of second sight that we call intuition or prescience, which we are still studying to perfect and understand. With our eyes closed it reveals to us approaching astronomical and other bodies, or what is happening on the other side of the planet, and enables us to view the future as you do the past. The eyes ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... with Radclyffe, but events soon parted them. Parliament was dissolved! What an historical event is recorded in those words! The moment the king consented to that measure, the whole series of subsequent events became, to an ordinary prescience, clear as in a mirror. Parliament dissolved in the heat of the popular enthusiasm, a majority, a great majority of Reformers was sure ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... by the fact that Sister Mary was on duty at breakfast-time, so that I escaped the addition of punishment to hunger), and, as the week wore slowly by, hope rose in my breast once more, and with it a return of what I now regard as the common-sense prescience which made me hesitate to adopt a swagman's life. I could not honestly say that I had any definite ideas as to another and more reputable sort of occupation or career. As yet, I had not. But I did vaguely feel that there would be derogation in becoming ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... in part a summary of that forced from Monsieur de Chessel by his inward vexation. His knowledge of the world enabled him to penetrate several of the mysteries of Clochegourde. But the prescience of love could not be misled by the sublime attitude with which Madame de Mortsauf deceived the world. When alone in my little bedroom, a sense of the full truth made me spring from my bed; I could not bear to stay at Frapesle ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... 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 refused ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... learned to rely on this prescience, and in reference to public men and public affairs, when they interested me, have satisfied my ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... with a philosophic commentary on the folly of "throwing up their hand before the game was played out." But they were furnished with liquor, which in this emergency stood them in place of food, fuel, rest, and prescience. In spite of his remonstrances, it was not long before they were more or less under its influence. Uncle Billy passed rapidly from a bellicose state into one of stupor, the Duchess became maudlin, and Mother Shipton snored. Mr. Oakhurst alone remained ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... 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]
... 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 coming disaster. ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... for the General Staff in its not of its own accord pressing upon the technical people that something of the sort must be produced somehow. Knowledge that a thoroughly practical man possessed of engineering knowledge and distinguished for his prescience like Swinton was convinced that the thing was feasible, was just what was required to set the General ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... people of the moment, which seemed, whenever he cared to exert himself, to flow from his lips without effort, had deserted him. He sat where the rather brilliant light from the high windows fell upon his face, and Francis wondered more than once whether there were not some change there, perhaps some prescience of trouble to come, which had subdued him and made him unusually thoughtful. Another slighter but more amusing feature of the luncheon was the number of people who stopped to shake hands with Sir Timothy and made more or less clumsy ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 of San Domingo, the Havannah ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... prescience, took alarm. Noticing the two maids standing wide-mouthed in the hallway, she summoned her most commandatory tone, stepped into the hall, half closing the door behind her, and cowed the two handmaidens under ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... the first had a prescience of disagreeable things. There was malice in Dredlinton's pallid face, the ugly twist of his lips and the light in his bloodshot eyes. He paused opposite to them, and leaning his hands on the back of the nearest chair, spoke across ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... "But has it occurred to you that these girls have the ears of wild animals? Has it occurred to you that they have all the instincts and cunning of the animal and all the intuition and prescience of the woman? Has it occurred to you that ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... 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 other two; and on the bridge Forsythe watched with ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... oltramisura di esser stato tanto disprezzato dal mondo quanto non e altro scrittore di questo secolo." In another letter, however, after complaining of being "perseguitato da molti piu che non era convenevole," he adds, with a proud prescience of his future fame, "Laonde stimo di poter mene ragionevolmente richiamare ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... 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 ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... Mary, the anxious parents had sought him, only to find him on the threshold of death, with a bullet in his liver. Again and again she beguiled her anguish by chronicles of his miraculous childhood—his precocious intelligence at five, his prescience at six, his unfathomable wisdom at seven. The silent company of wayfarers listened in patience to the twice-told tale. No one could say her nay as she repeated her litany of pain. She was, indeed, the only passenger in ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... the 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 stead some man of ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... 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 broke into ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... 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 rather cold,' but I ignored his position. At the ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... the dossiers, he was sure, there was a clue, the basic clue that would tell him everything he needed to know. His prescience had never been so strong; he knew perfectly well that he was staring at the biggest, most startling and most complete disclosure of all. And he couldn't ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... 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 ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... For God the whole created mass inspires. 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
... 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 the secret. ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... 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 external signs to denote his intentions, ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... act on the minds of men powerful enough to take a bird's-eye view of an empire; men whose actions, criminal in the eyes of the masses, are the outcome of a vast and intelligent thought. There is in these terrible souls some mysterious blending of the force of fate and that of destiny, some prescience which suddenly elevates them above their fellows; the masses seek them for a time in their own ranks, then they raise their eyes and see these ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... Bourbon shall flame their colors from the palaces of France. No, my countryman! he who serves you, who leads your armies to victory, who raises your citizens to distinction, he whose courage is undaunted, he who has the power of prescience—is Napoleon. ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... brings the most difficult, when it is practicable, to a successful result. The flutter of haste is characteristic of a weak mind that has not the command of its thoughts; a strong mind, master of itself, possesses the clearness and prescience of reflection. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... received the medal from the Chevalier, with whom afterwards I had half-an-hour's talk, chiefly about German history, in which by good fortune I was fairly posted, perhaps with a prescience that the ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... 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 ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... (1879) 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 ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... to allow him to deceive himself with the delusions of Anglicanism; and as he saw the inevitable tendency of the Reformation to lead ultimately to a change of doctrine, he attached himself with increasing determination to the cause of the pope and of the old faith. As if with an instinctive prescience of what would follow from it, he had from the first been opposed to the divorce; and he had not concealed his feeling from the king at the time when the latter had pressed the seals on his unwilling acceptance. In consenting ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... 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 ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton
... who only stared dully as they passed. But in a flash the inspiration came to her. Germany! Germany could help her carry out her purpose to warn the Duchess before she reached Sarajevo. She glanced at her companion and found that his brown eyes had turned as though by prescience to hers. ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... never could fall off at any blow Struck by thy possible hand—why, thus I drink Of life's great cup of wonder! Wonderful, Never to feel thee thrill the day or night With personal act or speech, nor ever cull Some prescience of thee with the blossoms white Thou sawest growing! Atheists are as dull, Who cannot guess ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... Jack roused him by trying to push himself farther under the blanket and Chad rose to rebuild the fire. The third time he was awakened by the subtle prescience of dawn and his eyes opened on a flaming radiance in the east. Again from habit he started to spring hurriedly to his feet and, again sharply conscious, he lay down again. There was no wood to cut, no fire to rekindle, no water to carry from ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... the German Headquarters Staff may be admitted to be Napoleonic in their elaborate and far-seeing perfection. Yet time and again, as in the Napoleonic wars, they have gone down before a British General who unites the dash of von Roon with the caution and the prescience ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... with the name of Sydney." and decided that that was there he would "plant." Every writer of mediaeval history who has had occasion to refer to the choice by Constantine the Great of Byzantium, afterwards Constantinople, as his capital, has extolled his judgment and prescience. Constantine was an Emperor, and could do as he would. Arthur Phillip was an official acting under orders. We can never sufficiently admire the wisdom he displayed when, exercising his own discretion, he decided upon Port ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... few 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
... sheathe the surface of the pond with clear, black ice, not melting out till noon; and the bitten leaves, turning from red and gold to brown, fell with ghostly whisperings through the gray branches, the little beaver colony in Boy's Pond grew feverishly active. Some subtle prescience warned them that winter would close in early, and that they must make haste to finish their storing of supplies. The lengthening of their new canal completed, their foraging grew easier. Trees fell every night, and the brush pile reached ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... is that the child is ignorant of so many things. It leaves room for the existence and growth of a mind, of an imagination which, in time, shall lead rather than follow the processes of reason; which shall leap before it looks, conscious of prescience before proof, arriving on wings while the shoestrings are being tied. Blessed are the ignorance, the beliefs and the innocency of the country boy. For if he can maintain a remnant of these into maturity the world will be more beautiful; he will idealize his friends ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... judgment, reason, discernment, judiciousness, reasonableness, discretion, knowledge, sagacity, enlightenment, learning, sense, erudition, prescience, skill, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... scene rose again before their mind's eye, that night of anxious vigil, the agonized suspense, the prescience of the disaster at Froeschwiller hanging in the sultry heavy air, while the Alsatian told his prophetic fears; Germany in readiness, with the best of arms and the best of leaders, rising to a man ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... white city walls, with the gilding of the Temple glittering in the sunshine, burst upon their view, the multitude lifted up their voices in gladness. But Christ sat there, and as He looked across the valley, and beheld, with His divine prescience, the city, now so joyous and full of stir, sitting solitary and desolate, He lifted up His voice in loud wailing. The Christ wept because He must punish, but ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... who lives from the past, yet knows that its honey can but moderately avail him; whose comprehensive eye scans the present, neither infatuated by its golden lures nor chilled by its many ventures; who possesses prescience, as the wise man must, but not so far as to be driven mad to-day by the gift which discerns to-morrow. When there is such a man for America, the thought which urges her on ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... the marble and cut his 'Pieta' he was in deep sympathy with the supreme drama of man's history. He found in the stone, once and for all time, the grief of the human mother for her son, not comforted by foreknowledge of resurrection, nor lightened by prescience of near glory. He discovered in the marble, by one effort, the divinity of death's rest after torture, and taught the eye to see that the dissolution of this dying body is the birth of the soul that cannot die. In the dead ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Thomas the Rhymer, with an account of whose legend I concluded last letter, it would seem that the example which it afforded of obtaining the gift of prescience, and other supernatural powers, by means of the fairy people, became the common apology of those who attempted to cure diseases, to tell fortunes, to revenge injuries, or to engage in traffic with the invisible world, for the purpose of satisfying their own wishes, curiosity, ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 groping ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... with prescience beyond the common run; but for this case, which would have been the first thought for most men, his foresight had failed. During the long six-hour nooning Boland suffered with intermittent cramps in his legs, wakeful ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... them at this time in the career of Mr. Burroughs, I shall quote the following letters received by him from David A. Wasson, a Unitarian clergyman of Massachusetts, and a contributor to the early numbers of the "Atlantic." Their encouragement, their candor, their penetration, and their prescience entitle them to a high place in an attempt to trace the evolution of our author. One readily divines how much such appreciation and criticism meant to the ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... 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
... too, of those hounds for ever at its heels pursuing combines with everything (46) to rob the creature of all prescience; so that for this reason alone it will run its head into a hundred dangers unawares, and fall into the toils. If it held on its course uphill, (47) it would seldom meet with such a fate; but now, through its propensity to circle round and its attachment to the place where it was ...
— The Sportsman - On Hunting, A Sportsman's Manual, Commonly Called Cynegeticus • Xenophon
... event, Kentucky would have glided naturally and certainly into it, and Kentucky politicians who had approved coercion, would have felt uncomfortable as Confederate citizens. The leaders of the Union party were men of fine ability, but they were not endowed with prescience, nor could they in the political chaos then ruling, instinctively detect the strong side. Let it be remembered that, just so soon as they discerned it, they enthusiastically embraced it and clave to it, with a few immaterial oscillations, through much ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... open windows of the little grey house came the deadly sweet smell of anaesthetics, heavy with prescience and pain. It dominated, instantly, all the blended Summer fragrances and brought terror to ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... gods go in search of her, giving them a white wolfskin to envelop her in, so that she should not suffer from the cold, and bidding them make every effort to rouse her from the stupor which his prescience told him ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... to Deism, but which meets us quite apart from theology altogether. It is that which, in theological language, is involved in the contest between Calvinism and Arminianism; in philosophical, between free-will and necessity. 'The reconciling,' wrote Lord Lyttelton, 'the prescience of God with the free-will of man, Mr. Locke, after much thought on the subject, freely confessed that he could not do, though he acknowledged both. And what Mr. Locke could not do, in reasoning upon subjects of a metaphysical nature, I am apt to think few men, if any, can hope to perform.'[778] ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... 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 people, and he was true ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... the common story of extraordinary qualities balanced by striking defects. He was not a great statesman, but he was a supremely great administrator, a supremely great master of parliamentary management and of parliamentary legislation. He had little prescience; he often grossly misread the signs of the times, or only recognised them when it was too late; but when he was once convinced, he acted on his conviction with frankness and courage, and when a thing had to be done, no one could do it like him. As Disraeli said: 'In the course of time ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... lore, erudition, culture, enlightenment, attainments, information; cognizance, apprehension, cognition, understanding, ken; omniscience (universal knowledge); prescience (foreknowledge); polymathy. Antonyms: sciolism, ignorance, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... indifferent quality of mind, without a flaw of prejudice or a blur of theory, which can reflect passing events as they truly are, is as rare, if not so precious, as that artistic sense which can hold the mirror up to nature. The fact that there is so little historical or political prescience, that no man of experience ventures to prophesy, is enough to prove, either that it is impossible to know all the terms of our problem, or that history does not repeat itself with anything like the exactness of coincidence which is so pleasing to the imagination. Six months after ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... that had looked into his here appeared to clear and brighten with a sweet prescience. Was it the wind moaning in the chimney that seemed to whisper to him: "Too late, beloved, for ME, but not for you. I died, but Love still lives. Be happy, Philip. And in your happiness I too ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... least in some men: the Remonstrants, on the contrary, maintain, that all that is spiritually good in us, even the beginning of it flows from antecedent grace. Consult the Synod of Orange, by which the Priests of Marseilles were confuted. But those that believe predestination is a consequence of prescience, or that grace is given to all men, or in fine that it may be refilled, are certainly ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... with an odd note of prescience in her voice. It was so pronounced that the sense of foreboding communicated itself ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... her, rather than any other, is the deeper part of the riddle. The solution offered by the great German pessimist will not harmonize well with scientific psychology. The choice of the dead, evolutionally considered, would be a choice based upon remembrance rather than on prescience. And the ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... great personage of the Olympian divinities, was more respectable morally than his father. He was the sun-god of the Greeks, and was the embodiment of divine prescience, of healing skill, of musical and poetical productiveness, and hence the favorite of the poets. He had a form of ideal beauty, grace, and vigor, inspired by unerring wisdom and insight into futurity. He was obedient to the will of Zeus, to whom he was not much inferior in power. Temples ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... modern literature is advertised with the prospectus of this book, and think what a reading public it addresses, what criticism it expects. It seems to have been uttered from some eastern summit, with a sober morning prescience in the dawn of time, and you cannot read a sentence without being elevated as upon the table-land of the Ghauts. It has such a rhythm as the winds of the desert, such a tide as the Ganges, and is as superior to criticism as the ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... articulating a marvellous experience. For the rest, Asolando is a miscellany of old and new,—bright loose drift from the chance moods of genius, or bits of anecdotic lumber carefully recovered and refurbished, as in prescience of the ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... the Statesman whose far-seeing eyes Saw in the germ the nation that should be, Saw how a mighty empire should arise And span the continent from sea to sea, And building for the future, led the way With prescience and high courage, daring fate, An emperor's domain in a single day Bought for a purse of gold! a vast estate, From Europe's ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... 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 ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... 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 in favour ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... and went down the grand corridor. The bulldog tugged at his chain. Animals are gifted with prescience. He knew that his master had passed forever out of his life. Presently he heard the voice of the princess calling; and the glamour of royalty encompassed him,—something a human finds hard to resist, and he was only ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... saw instances of Miss Anthony's prescience—and one of these was connected with the death of Frances E. Willard. "Aunt Susan" had called on Miss Willard, and, coming to me from the sick-room, had walked the floor, beating her hands together as she ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... siren. His rival, or rather his partner, was—Philip of Spain! The revelation of promiscuous worship, threatened by Escovedo, sounded like a knell to Perez and the princess. Was it a mad defiance, or a profound prescience, of the consequences, which, when Escovedo, stung on one occasion beyond forbearance by the demonstration of iniquity which Othello in his agony demands of Iago, declared loudly his purpose of divulging every ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... of futurity, under the straining hands of our 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
... 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 ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... man to let the grass grow under his feet when an object was to be gained. It was with a sure prescience that Mark Wylder's letter had inferred that Stanley Lake would aspire to the representation either of the county or of the borough of Dollington. His mind was already ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... confirmed it. A l'aube du jour was not the key-word but the key-word was constructed from it by some arbitrary rule; and that rule was susceptible of solution. After he was free of this fellow Marston, he would solve the problem quickly enough. It was as sure as tomorrow. The prescience was come. ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... his Meetings as though they were mere scenes of "passing excitement" had any idea of the profound teaching he gave his people! The then editor of "The Christian," who took the trouble to visit them, as well as to converse with The General at length, with remarkable prescience wrote, as early as 1871, in his preface to The General's first important publication, "How to Reach the Masses with ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... terms, and keen antagonism resulted. What a contrast to-day! Ever since the King, whose services in the cause of international peace are regarded with affection in every quarter of his dominions, ever since by an act of prescience and of courage his Majesty went to Paris, the relations between Great Britain and France have steadily and progressively improved, and to-day we witness the inspiring spectacle of these two great peoples, the two most genuinely Liberal nations in the ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... light was visible, that in the cook's end of the mess-house, where that fat worthy lay upon his back and read a yellow-backed, sentimental novel. Faint and rumbling came the subdued roar of the mill at the Rattler, beating out the gold for Bully Presby; and through some vague prescience Dick was aware of its noise for the first time in weeks, and it conveyed a sense of menace. Everything was at stake. Everything watched him. He looked up at the white face of The Lily above him, and in the moonlight saw that her eyes were fixed, glowing, not on him or the ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... high cradles, by some hidden joy Gladdened beyond their wont, in bustling throngs Among the leaves they riot; so sweet it is, When showers are spent, their own loved nests again And tender brood to visit. Not, I deem, That heaven some native wit to these assigned, Or fate a larger prescience, but that when The storm and shifting moisture of the air Have changed their courses, and the sky-god now, Wet with the south-wind, thickens what was rare, And what was gross releases, then, too, change Their spirits' fleeting phases, and their breasts Feel other motions now, than ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... South by over half a million. This disparity in numbers had a direct political significance, for the national House of Representatives was beyond all question controlled by the delegations from the free States. No great prescience was needed to warn the South that in self-defense it must maintain the even balance of sections in the Senate. The contest for Missouri was therefore essentially "a struggle for ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... 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 ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... hard to the table edge. Reason, cold, remorseless reason surged back into his brain, accompanied by a paralyzing fear. Some prescience told him that the man in the doorway was Kane Lawler. And though he was convinced of it, he was a long time lifting his head and in turning it the merest trifle toward the door. And when he saw that the ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... 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
... prescience to picture a mighty Japanese tonnage on the seas in the near future. Next to industrial development, the controlling article of faith of the awakened Japan is the creation of an ocean commerce great enough ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... vows are folly, because they suppose a prescience of the future which has not been given us. They are, I think, a crime, because they resign that life to chance which God has given us to be regulated by reason; and superinduce a kind of fatality, from which it is the great privilege of our nature to be free.' Piozzi Letters, i. ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... of warning of the approaching "Eastern Question," when in the cartoon of "The Turkey in Danger," the Sick Bird is shown in the powerful hug of the Russian Bear; and "The Emperor's Cup for 1853" illustrates still further the prescience of Punch. Nevertheless, as has been said, he could not appreciate a suaviter policy, and in a cartoon entitled "Not a Nice Business" (p. 271, Vol. XXVI.) Lord Aberdeen, the Premier, is shown engaged in cleaning the boots of ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... Cantabrians, the Germans of Tacitus, etc. Woman, at that time, takes in the family and in public life a position such as she has never since taken. Along these lines, says Tacitus in his "Germania": "They (the Germans) even suppose somewhat of sanctity and prescience to be inherent in the female sex; and, therefore, neither despise their counsels, nor disregard their responses;" and Diodorus, who lived at the time of Caesar, feels highly indignant over the position of women in Egypt, having learned that there, not the sons, but the ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... later the child, as though stirred by some prescience, began to whimper and make little struggling movements—Phoebe had died as simply as she had lived, and ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... 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 death is ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... 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 ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... omnipresent creativeness. Milton is the deity of prescience; he stands ab extra, and drives a fiery chariot and four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them in. Shakspeare's poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakspeare; but John Milton himself is in every line of the Paradise Lost. Shakspeare's rhymed ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... latter ever prepared. It was a memorable moment when the great Carolinian, with the stamp of death already upon him, reiterated his love for the Union under the Constitution, but declared, with the prescience of a seer, that the only danger threatening the government arose from its centralizing tendency. It was "the sunset of life ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... interview with the lad, and the prescience of its waiting denouement, her mind went back into his and his father's history. Mr. Belcher could have alleviated that history; nay, prevented it altogether. What had been her own responsibility in the case? She could not have foreseen all the horrors of that history; but she, too, could have ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... 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 protection and for mitigating the horror and circumscribing the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... that we must place a barrier to His sovereignty, and fix the boundaries of Omnipotence between the Jordan and the Lebanon? It is not thus written; and were it so, I'll pit my inspiration against the prescience of my ancestors. I also am a prophet, and Bagdad shall be my Zion. The daughter of the Voice! Well, I am clearly summoned. I am the Lord's servant, not Jabaster's. Let me make His worship universal as His power; and where's the priest shall dare impugn my faith, because His altars ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... the work 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 ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... freedom and its prosperity. Again, do we participate in your feelings on first beholding Nature in her noblest scenes and grandest features, on finding man busied in rendering himself worthy of Nature, but more than all, on contemplating with philosophic prescience the coming period when those vast inland seas shall be shadowed with sails, when the St. Lawrence and Mississippi, shall stretch forth their arms to embrace the continent in a great circle of interior navigation: when the Pacific Ocean shall ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... without some agitation on the father's part, to the still more agitated suitor; and after assuring him of the paternal good-will, had turned him over to the daughter—the whole being done with a sorrowful prescience, shared by the unfortunate young man, of ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... brewing in their brains and brings it to a head. He is the epoch maker. Such an one was that little Corsican, who gave a stagnant pool the storm it needed, until he became overfed and mistook his ambition for a continuation of his youthful prescience. ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... refrain 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
... is the cause of death; and sin's alone The cause of God's predestination: And from God's prescience of man's sin doth flow Our ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... discussed amongst us. Men seldom see themselves as others see them; and while, to ourselves, everything connected with our contemplated escape appeared concealed, Mr. Freeland may have, with the peculiar prescience of a slaveholder, mastered the huge thought which was disturbing our peace ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... 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 ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... the colloquy of Moempelgard (Montbeliard), 1586, in disputing with Andreae, he defended the proposition "that Adam had indeed of his own accord fallen into these calamities, yet, nevertheless, not only according to the prescience, but also according to the ordination and decree of God—sponte quidem, sed tamen non modo praesciente, sed etiam iuste ordinante et decernente Deo." (186.) "There never has been, nor is, nor will be a time," said he, "when ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... of the topics discussed in the thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth Congresses. The day was fast coming when contests for the Speakership and battles over appropriation bills, ay, even the fierce struggle over Kansas, would sink into insignificance, and Mr. DAVIS, with that political prescience for which he was always remarkable, seemed to discern the first sign of the coming storm. The winds had been long sown, and now the whirlwind was to be reaped. The thirty-sixth Congress, which had opened so inauspiciously, and which his vote had saved from becoming a perpetuated bedlam, met ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell |
