"Psychical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... child, the adult, and the community—is considered in connection with the effect on the home of the influences outside it, and the reaction of each on the other. These relations and influences are partly physical and material, partly ethical and psychical. ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... social relations and passes from them to the relations maintained with the other life and with the Gods. Or, if one prefers to consider ghosts and gods as inseparable elements of the primary organism, then we should say that morality is born in that all-embracing psychical atmosphere. But it does not follow from that fact that the rise and development of morality are conditioned by belief in Gods and in immortality. Merely human relations are sufficient to the production of ethical appreciations. The invisible ghosts and Gods would never have been thought ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... 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 the tangle thus: 'Look ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... reality. This is in the vague world of modern psychical imagination. Nevertheless it has its own beauty, and it enlarges Browning's picture of the character ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... distinguish itself from mere psychical fancy through a curious contact of one of Auber's dreams with ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... expected; for with every week passed in bitter abstinence, some new well would break from the rich soil of his intellect, and irrigate with its sweet waters the parched border land between his physical and psychical being. And when he had once again betaken himself to the forsaken pen, there was little reason to fear a relapse or doubt a final victory. A playful humanity radiated from him, the result of that powerfullest of all restoratives—giving of what one has to him ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... this refuge turn to spiritualism and psychical research in a futile effort to find a satisfactory solution of the problem of the Hereafter. Again and again we see the unrest of the ever-questioning soul depicted in the drama and the literature of the day as it seeks enlightenment ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... of chronic disease, of widespread misery. In abandoning that rule, as we have been forced to do, are we not left free to seek that our children, though few, should be at all events fit, the finest, alike in physical and psychical constitution, that the ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... anything "arbitrarily," and everything of necessity, their feeling of freedom, of subtlety, of power, of creatively fixing, disposing, and shaping, reaches its climax—in short, that necessity and "freedom of will" are then the same thing with them. There is, in fine, a gradation of rank in psychical states, to which the gradation of rank in the problems corresponds; and the highest problems repel ruthlessly every one who ventures too near them, without being predestined for their solution by the loftiness and power of his spirituality. Of what use is it for nimble, everyday intellects, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... which organic evolution is tending is the production of the highest and most perfect psychical life.—JOHN FISKE. ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... had read the article you would have found a much perplexed man. (777/1. Probably Sir W. Crookes' "Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism" (reprinted from the "Quarterly Journal of Science"), London, 1874. Other papers by Crookes are in the "Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.") I cannot disbelieve Mr. Crooke's statement, nor can I believe in his result. It has removed some of my difficulty that the supposed power is not an anomaly, but is common in a lesser degree ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... say so! Let's send it to the Psychical Research, or whoever those people are who collect coincidences and say it's spooks. And a match please, one of you Georgies. Oh, how I should like never to see the inside of an Opera House again. Why mayn't I grow on the walls of a garden like ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... Harvard, two more in postgraduate courses, two more in Europe to perfect himself in electrical engineering, and a year at home attempting to invent a wireless apparatus for intercepting and transmitting psychical waves had left him pitifully unfit ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... this but to confess that the Power manifested in the cosmos is identical with the Power manifested in life, that physical and psychical are ultimately one, that virtue and well-being are indissolubly associated? What is this but to confess the supreme synthesis, embracing all apparent contradictions, the ultimate harmony in which all discords are ultimately merged ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... quite know what he had meant himself. It was a sensation come and gone, in an instant, as Frank had moved ... a sensation which I suppose some people would call "psychical"—a sensation as if a shock had vibrated for one moment through every part of his own being, and of the pleasant little warm room where he was sitting. He looked at the other, dazed for a second or two, but there was nothing. Those two ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... less of the spontaneity of an individualistic people than of the exaltation of a religious revival. If the army were a machine of material force, then the people were a machine of psychical force. Though the thing might leave the observer cold, as a religious revival leaves the sceptic, yet he must admire. I was told that I should succumb to the contagion as others had; but it was not the optimism which was dinned into my ears that affected ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... speculation about an independent immaterial soul-existence and its puzzling temporary connection with the animal body, but rather the comparative investigation of the organs of the soul and the experimental examination of their psychical functions. For scientific psychology is a part of physiology, the doctrine of the functions and the life-activities of organisms. The psychology and psychiatry of the future, like the physiology and pathology ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... that class of psychical states which are in process of being organised. It continues so long as the organising of them continues; and disappears when the organisation of them is complete. In the advance of the correspondence, each more complex class of phenomena which ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... 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 life is ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... Psychical Research have given much attention to the subject, and have reported some remarkable observations—especially those of Miss Goodrich, a lady who has made several scores of experiments of her own in crystal-reading, ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... the liqueur still in her mouth, she went to her daughter who was ill with one of those maladies which, being primarily psychical, science cannot treat. Science is a classification of human ignorance. It has remedies for the flesh, it has none for the soul. The remedies exist, but they are dispensed only by the great apothecaries that time and ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... 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, however ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... lifeless forms of a mechanical mass, but as the living, active instruments of the soul." And even this is not sufficient; "for the gymnast, the ultimate aim of whose art is the beau ideal of humanity, must know what effects applied movements produce upon the corporeal and psychical condition of man; a knowledge which can be obtained only from the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... metaphysical pabulum 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 ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... influences will not admit of that; the traditions of the Far East, that mysterious thing, will prevent the other—we have been told all this, I repeat, and told it ad nauseam. Japan as it is to-day refutes these prophecies, these dogmatic pronouncements, psychical and ethnological. The Japanese race, when regarded from what I deem to be the only correct standpoint for forming a sound judgment as to the position it holds among the races of the world, namely, in respect of the size and convolution of the brain, occupies in my opinion ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... psychical character perplexed them much more than my zooelogical. It seems that these islanders had been accustomed to call themselves, in their own tongue, "rational animals with sentiments of justice and piety,"—all which, be it remembered, is expressed in their wonderful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... took a great interest in occult phenomena, and was for some time an enthusiastic member of the "Psychical Society." It was his interest in ghosts that led to his meeting with the artist Mr. Heaphy, who had painted a picture of a ghost which he himself had seen. I quote the following from a letter to ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... 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 existing conjointly ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... with surprise. Was this the trivial Harry talking? Fact is, the pair we were talking about had by some psychical magic rarified the atmosphere for all of us until half our notes were ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... anew under new circumstances, which they would continue until something would occur to bring about a restoration of memory, when the past in all of its details would come back in a flash. The annals of the English Society for Psychical Research contain quite a number of such cases, which are recognized as typical. Now, would one be justified in asserting that such a person, while living in the secondary personality and consequently in entire ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... wave of modern psychism. He hardly knew the meaning of such words as "clairvoyance" and "clairaudience." He had never felt the least desire to join the Theosophical Society and to speculate in theories of astral-plane life, or elementals. He attended no meetings of the Psychical Research Society, and knew no anxiety as to whether his "aura" was black or blue; nor was he conscious of the slightest wish to mix in with the revival of cheap occultism which proves so attractive to weak minds of ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... present day the little child has not received rational aid in the accomplishment of this laborious task. As regards the psychical development of the child we find ourselves in a period parallel to that in which the physical life was left to the mercy of chance and instinct—the period in which infant mortality ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori
... Scandinavian immigrants to the States, factory-workers, he had run away to sea at the age of fourteen, with the call of the ocean ringing in his ears from the Viking inheritance that was his. But on this was superposed the fierce desire for success that formed the psychical atmosphere of the new American environment. As a boy in the smoke-blackened factory town, he had breathed in the longing to make money—big money—to use men to his own ends, to ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... 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 ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... 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 apparent from the supposition of several ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... to Main Street. He didn't want a big ocean—just a kind of an oceanette with a seating capacity of five thousand square miles was his idea, and when he had done with his phantasie, the doleful dumps that rose at the psychical aroma of the hypothetical fried chicken and mashed potatoes ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... is a large amount of a posteriori confirmation. I am quite unable to distinguish anything in my sense of right and wrong which I cannot easily conceive to have been brought about during the evolution of my intelligence from lower forms of psychical life. On the contrary, everything that I can find in my sense of right and wrong is precisely what I should expect to find on the supposition of this sense having been moulded by the progressive requirements of social development. Read in the light of evolution, Conscience, ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... females. And when we rise to the human species these sex differences persist and are even emphasised, though finding their expression in a greater number of less strongly marked characters, not on the physical side alone, but on the mental and psychical. It is difficult to divest the mind of facts with which it is most familiar. Thus it is easy to understand the widely-held opinion of the superiority of the male half of life, and that the female is the sex sacrificed to ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... slowly up into his round, boyish face. He looked at her with disconcerting steadiness. Perhaps something in his expression gave her the key to his thought, or it may have been that peculiar psychical receptiveness which in a woman we are pleased to call intuition; but at any rate Stella divined what was coming and would have forestalled it by rising. He prevented that move by catching ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... that such other forms may be determined by the dominating thought and wish of the owner. For this Double, or astral body as you call it, is really the seat of the passions, emotions and desires in the psychical economy. It is the Passion Body; and, in projecting itself, it can often assume a form that gives expression to the overmastering desire that moulds it; for it is composed of such tenuous matter that it lends itself readily to the ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... 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, of course, many sorts. The Village is neither so unique nor so uniform ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... I had my ghost—a first-hand, authenticated article. I would write to the Society for Psychical Research—I would paralyze the Empire with the news! But I would, first of all, put eighty miles of assessed crop land between myself and that dak-bungalow before nightfall. The Society might send their regular agent to ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... regrets the excessive 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. ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... they are extravagant, or against some of his notions that they are fantastic, I answer 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 of the blood which ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... the fact that their hearers have, in the depths of their beings, a profound reverence for the object of their sallies. And so, by taking advantage of the moral shock they produce and linking it to the idea of an absurdity, they convert the whole psychical reaction into an explosion of humor. Thus the ring of raconteurs telling blackguardly stories around the stoves in Hooker's Bend stores, are, in reality, exercising one another in the more delicate sentiments of life, and may very well be classed ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... of psychical essence which makes necessary all these ephemeral entanglements which to you seem so severe, and you will yet see from your own standpoint of reason why such hardships must be endured by questioning souls ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... the Sacred Books of the World, what have I found? A letter of thy name, O God, I have deciphered in the Vedas, another in the Zend-Avesta, another in the Bible, another in the Koran. Ay, even in the Book of the Royal Society and in the Records of the Society for Psychical Research, have I found the diacritical signs which the infant races of this Planet Earth have not yet learned to apply to the consonants of thy name. The lisping infant races of this Earth, when will they learn ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... appears from a passage in Saint Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians (xv, 44), where the "spiritual body" (soma pneumatikon) is contrasted with the "natural body" (soma psuchikon). The spiritual body is declared to be more essential than the natural body (the psychical or intellectual body); and the former really and materially penetrates the bodies of ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... O'Connor's built-in freezer coils were working overtime, he told himself. "The field of psionics is so young that I can say, without qualification, that I am acquainted with everything written on the subject. By that, of course, I mean scientific works. I do not doubt that the American Society for Psychical Research, for instance, has hundreds of crackpot books which I have never read, or even heard of. But in the strictly scientific field, ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the physical quality caught you first, then the psychical?" I asked, keeping him to the point, for his Irish imagination was ever apt to ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... necessarily artificial and symbolical, since it makes the total activity of life shrink to the form of a certain human activity which is only a partial and local manifestation of life, a result or by-product of the vital process? We should have to do so, indeed, if life had employed all the psychical potentialities it possesses in producing pure understandings—that is to say, in making geometricians. But the line of evolution that ends in man is not the only one. On other paths, divergent from it, other forms of consciousness have been developed, which have not ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... 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 already ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... writers, begins to be angry with his creatures. Instead of analysing and explaining, he simply reviles and leaves us in presence of a moral anomaly. Blifil is not more wicked than Iago, but we seem to understand the psychical chemistry by which an Iago is compounded; whereas Blifil can only be regarded as a devil (if the word be not too dignified) who does not really belong to this world at all. The error, though characteristic of a man whose great intellectual merit is his firm grasp of realities, and whose ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Schoenberg, its outer side, has thus far been uneventful, though doubtless rich in the psychical sense. He is still young, born in Vienna, September 13, 1874. He lived there till 1901, then in the December of that year he went to Berlin, where he was for a short time conductor in Wolzogen's Bunten Theatre, and also teacher of composition at Stern's Conservatory. In 1903 he returned ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... 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 psychological[4] ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... armful of the publications of "The Society for Psychical Research" before him, was busied with the arguments of the spiritists and their bearings on Viola ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... back. She slowly, carefully, sat down on the edge of Jennka's bed; there, where the shadow of the lamp fell. Out of that deep, though deformed psychical delicacy, which is peculiar to people sentenced to death, prisoners at hard labour, and prostitutes, none had the courage to ask her how she had passed this hour and a half. Suddenly she threw upon the ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... head. Like a lecturer making his first appearance before the public, he saw everything that was before his eyes, but apparently only had a dim understanding of it (among physiologists this condition, when the subject sees but does not understand, is called psychical blindness). After a little while, growing accustomed to his surroundings, Ryabovitch saw clearly and began to observe. As a shy man, unused to society, what struck him first was that in which he had always been deficient—namely, ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... applies Haeckel's biogenetic law to the domain of the spirit. As the human embryo passes through the principal stages of the development of the individual from lower forms of life, so the growing male must pass through the stages of psychical development through which the race has passed. The gynecocratic government of prehistoric time is revived in the nursery, where the mother rules supreme and the sisters dominate. The normal, healthy school-boy, preferring the company of his school-fellows to all others, shunning his mother ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... philosophical terms 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 type ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... given to psychical interests and speculations, it might have suggested itself that, on the night when the creature who had seemed to Andrews a soft tissued puppet had suddenly burst forth into defiance and fearless shrillness, some cerebral change had taken place in her. From that hour her softness ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... has passed beyond the psychical stage of the Imagination into the stage of Logical Thought, it is immensely important that in this stage also she should not miss a systematic education. If this should be the case, she is defrauded of the key ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... saw Him eat—but what of that? The laws of 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 ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... things psychical, and a copious reader of all the phenomena of the unseen world, I have only had one other psychic adventure in the whole of my life, and that an insignificant one. It is, however, worth recording shortly. It happened that in the early autumn of the year 1920, while my son was away ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... evidence as to the reality of evolution, we may establish four sections of the subject before us: these are (1) the anatomy, (2) the embryology, and (3) "palaeontology" of mind, and (4) an inquiry into the way nature deals with the psychical characteristics of organisms in accomplishing their evolution. To specify more particularly, it is possible in the first place to compare the activities belonging to the category of mental and nervous operations, ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... soul and to the Plēroma:—the spiritual natures, [Greek: φύσεις πνεματικαί] [Phuseis Pneumatikai]: 2d. The natures originating in the life, divided from the former by the mixture of the [Greek: ύλη]—the psychical natures, [Greek: φύσεις ψυχικαί] [Phuseis Psuchikai]; with which begins a perfectly new order of existence, an image of that higher mind and system, in a subordinate grade; and finally, 3d. The Ungodlike or Hylic ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... not savages, whose fears are not of material things, but of the world of mysteries in and beyond the grave. He dares not only wild animals and savage men; but has tackled African magic and Indian mysticism. The Psychical Research Society has long exploited his deeds of valiance, and looked upon him as perhaps their most trusted agent or source of discovery. He is in the very prime of life, of almost giant stature and strength, trained to the use of all arms of all ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... a rather strange and fascinating woman—a physician I believe—but I am not sure. Anyway she is associated with the psychical research people, and she asked if she might ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... attempted to make, as he himself phrases it, "a modest contribution to the natural history of Weltschmerz." What goes by that name is no doubt somewhat elusive; one can not easily delimit and characterize it with scientific accuracy. Nevertheless the word corresponds to a fairly definite range of psychical reactions which are of great interest in modern poetry, especially German poetry. The phenomenon is worth studying in detail. In undertaking a study of it Mr. Braun thought, and I readily concurred in the opinion, that he would do best not to essay an exhaustive ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... the 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 ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... while their embryos are vastly more so than the parents. If then we recognize the spiritual being in man, and the same spiritual being disembodied as a potential existence,—if, moreover, we recognize the illimitable and incomprehensible psychical power behind the universe, of which man is one expression, we cannot fail to see that the embryonic development of animals from a lower to a higher form is entirely possible and probable; and in the absence of any other practicable ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... monograph 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 investigation, observation, ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... 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 ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... that such a thing could have happened, but on making inquiries concerning his division, the number of which I have forgotten, it proved to be perfectly true. Surely this case presents physiological and psychical ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... The paper on Psychical Research is added to the volume for convenience and utility. Attracted to this study some years ago by my love of sportsmanlike fair play in science, I have seen enough to convince me of its great importance, and I wish to gain for it what interest I can. The American ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... science; but otherwise the whole intellectual atmosphere was charged with occult views. In fact, the learned world of the sixteenth century would have found itself quite at home in the pretensions and fancies of our modern theosophist and psychical researchers, with their notions of making erstwhile miracles non-miraculous, of reducing the marvellous to being merely the result of penetration on the part of certain seers and investigators of the ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... an idiotic persuasion trying to creep into my mind, as it were, that I was in a railway carriage in a train just stopping, that I was peering out of the window at some unknown station. I gripped the bed-rail firmly to reassure myself. "It's clairvoyance, perhaps," I said. "I must write to the Psychical ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... of the first division—physical science—is voluminous. In addition to that gathered by the Society for Psychical Research there are the researches and experiments by the scientists of England, France and Italy, among whom are Crookes, Lodge, Flammarion and Lombroso. Crookes was a pioneer in the work of studying ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... little that night. She could not decide what to make of this adventure. Nowadays we are provided with a name for the peculiar psychical state which Miriam was undergoing, and with abundant instances and illustrations; but we perhaps know what it is no more than we did twenty-five or thirty years ago. Grace's first idea had been that Miriam was demented; then ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... 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, parts of a vast nature-system, ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... to be a fanciful structure reared on a legendary foundation, it was a veritable happening which gave it currency a century ago and brought it to the notice of the composer; and this happening may have an explanation in some of the psychical phenomena to which modern science is again directing attention, such as hypnotism, animal magnetism, ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... to me the answer to the second main question: What influence does the moon exercise upon the sleeper? It was earlier discussed, along with the various psychical overdeterminations, that the moonlight awoke first the infantile pleasure memories, among other things that that light shining everywhere lighted the way which led to the house and the dwelling of the earliest ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... 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 ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... call the 'unanalyzable fact' that the two 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
... Neighbour), and the poor lad was always afraid he should be dropped down upon to "say it." Mr. Ashman's book is a little bewildering to an outsider who fails to distinguish the two vital forces. He says: "It is much rarer to find a high development of a temperament in which the psychical element prevails, than in which it is well blended with the vital-magnetic, or than in which the latter excels. In nearly all popular public men there is a blending of the two. We see it well exemplified in John Bright, Spurgeon, and others. This is the secret ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... 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 screw is there and stops ...
— 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 interest. Thus ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... very raising of an idea to a general idea, to a concept—a process connected with the forming of a sign—is manifested the influence of the lack of hearing and of speech upon the psychical development of the deaf-mute. It appears at first to be an advantage that the sign by which the deaf-mute represents an idea is derived from the impression, the image, the idea, which the user of the sign himself has or has had; he expresses by the sign nothing foreign to him, but ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... expeditious method, the Necrophorus is the first of the little purifiers of the fields. He is also one of the most celebrated of insects in respect of his psychical capacities. This undertaker is endowed, they say, with intellectual faculties approaching to reason, such as are not possessed by the most gifted of the Bees and Wasps, the collectors of honey or game. He is honoured by the two following anecdotes, which I quote from Lacordaire's "Introduction ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... 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 in science ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... Balfour's victims" would only depreciate the value of property to a point consistent with the support of an agricultural population. But Mrs. Drabdump's new lodger paid so much for his rooms that he laid himself open to a suspicion of special interest in ghosts. Perhaps he was a member of the Psychical Society. The neighborhood imagined him another mad philanthropist, but as he did not appear to be doing any good to anybody it relented and conceded his sanity. Mortlake, who occasionally stumbled across him in the passage, ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... is but one small child, a boy of eight. One evening we were acting charades. Divided into camps, we chose words in turn, and in turn were chosen to superintend the "acting-out" of the particular word. It happened that the word "Psychical-research," and the turn of the eight-year-old boy to be stage-manager coincided. Every one in his camp laughed, but no one so much as remotely suggested that the word ...
— The American Child • Elizabeth McCracken
... is more interested in Psychical Investigation Work than Miss Torfrida Vincent, one of the three beautiful daughters of Mrs. H. de B. Vincent, who is, herself, still in the heyday of life, and one of the loveliest of the society women ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... a sure-enough 'winter of our discontent,'" one of these letters runs, "but the scope of our operations will widen as the frost comes out of the ground. We're now confined to the psychical field. Subjectively speaking, though, the plot thickens. Captain Tolliver is in the secondary stages of real-estate dementia, and spreads the contagion daily. There's no quarantine regulation to cover the case, and Lattimore seems doomed to the acme of prosperity. This is the age of great cities, ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... occupied, however, with the smaller aspect of things, he had not the art of forcing Nature to speak, and in the province of psychical aptitudes he was barely able ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... 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 of discussing this question leads me to ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... 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. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the "Psychical Basis of Objective Existence" is excellent. Look out for it in the "Juvenile ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... So long as he maintains a rational self-control, and the healthy order of his life be not disturbed, they may continue quiescent; but if his brain loses its equipoise, or is hurt or impaired, then a diseased psychical condition may be induced and the latent evil forces be quickened ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... Mediaeval religion withdrew Italian sculptors and painters from the problems of purely physical form, and obliged them to study the expression of sentiments and aspirations which could only be rendered by emphasising psychical qualities revealed through physiognomy. At the same time, modern habits of life removed the naked body ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... pointed that interrogation relating to Nesta's precociousness of the intelligence. For, as they say in dactylomancy, the 'psychical' of women are not disposed in their sensitive early days to dwell upon the fortunes of their sex: a thought or two turns them facing away, with the repugnant shiver. They worship at a niche in the wall. They cannot avoid imputing some share of foulness ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... exertion. For mental distress sets up, 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 ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... there are mysterious forces in nature that we do not yet fully comprehend could have done in the circumstances. I backed down the steps to the sidewalk and then hurried away frontward, fully understanding how incidents like that must bother the psychical research people and the ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... astronomer, Correspondent of the Institute of France, Member of the Royal College of Science, Demonstrator of Astronomical Physics, author of the pamphlet, "Star-Gazers," and the brochure, "An investigation into the psychical condition of those who see stars," C.B.F.R.S. and popular member of the Colley Cibber ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... the reason must be sought in qualities which were deeper and more elemental in both their characters than any mere matter of opinion. Mrs. Orr, in her excellent Life of Browning, states that the difficulty arose from Mrs. Browning's firm belief in psychical phenomena and Browning's absolute refusal to believe even in their possibility. Another writer who met them at this time says, "Browning cannot believe, and Mrs. Browning cannot help believing." This theory, that Browning's ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... being tormented by diabolical agencies, which he banished by his word? The last of these possibilities should not be held to be impossible until much more is known than we now know about the mysterious phenomena of abnormal psychical states. If this is the explanation of the maladies for Jesus' day, however, it should be accepted also as the explanation of similar abnormal symptoms when they appear in our modern life, for the old hypothesis of a special activity of evil spirits at the time of the ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... all innuendo and strange hints and whispered secrets, and I-could-if-I-woulds. One of my recent winters had been devoted, not to dabbling in magic, for which I have not the temperament, but to reading the literature of magic or of all things psychical, and I could then, though I could not now, have passed a fairly good examination in the modern authorities, from Madame Blavatsky to Louis Jacolliot. Therefore I proved a sympathetic listener and heard, for my pains, of the revival of old religions, and above all of old rites, ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... was very happy as long as he was only second mechanic at the garage of Messrs. Smith Brothers, of High Street, Puddlesby. It was when he became a member of the Puddlesby Psychical Society that his troubles began. Up till then he had been as sober and hard-working a little man as ever stood four foot ten in his shoes and weighed in at seven stone four. But above all he was an expert in rubber tyres; he knew them, I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 18th, 1920 • Various
... other geniuses who have brought forth fruits effective enough for commemoration in the pages of biography, such religious geniuses have often shown symptoms of nervous instability. Even more perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of exalted emotional sensibility. Often they have led a discordant inner life, and had melancholy during a part of their career. They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... 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 ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... to tell 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 ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... come to 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 if rightly placed ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... still facing the Mummy just as 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 ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... language is an acquisition, starting with the original capacity for imperfect speech found in the physiological structure of man. This is accompanied by certain tendencies of thought and life which furnish the psychical notion of language-formation. These represent the foundations of language, and upon this, through action and experience, the superstructure of language has been built. There has been a continuous evolution ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... 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
... features of the scientific tendencies of the present day is the extraordinary interest taken in the investigation of those peculiar physical and psychical conditions attending the states now known collectively under the name of hypnotism, varying from lethargy, catalepsy, etc., to somnambulism. Until quite recently these investigations have been frowned upon and tabooed in scientific circles, and the fact that any man of scientific inclinations ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... 'The Robbers', an aged father whose dynastic hopes center in an excellent son; this son the object of mad jealousy on the part of a younger brother, and both brothers in love with the same girl. The plays exhibit talent of a high order, but talent that always falls short of genius. Psychical states are portrayed by means of talk, and the talk is big enough; but very little actually happens. The mighty passions have to be taken largely upon trust and the conversation often drags. Dramatic possibilities are not fully grasped, the situations are felt but not seen, and there ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... have seen, the human being is the climax of animal evolution and the starting-point of psychical development. The lower animal, he maintained, as all will now agree, is hindered by his definite instincts, but the instincts or instinctive tendencies of the human being are so undefined that there is room for spontaneity, ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... must ask 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. It was just after ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... certainly he would put his own personality into this, as into everything that he undertook to investigate; for he was held back on the steeps of mysticism by the science which he had created, and which could only afford a shelter to the supernatural as an extension of those psychical faculties which have been called ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... may imagine. I was a 'psychical researcher,' and a young woman of new tendencies, and proud of my liberty, but I did not care to find myself in an empty house with a stranger. Something of my confidence left me. Confidence with ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... The psychical function of humor is to delicately cut the surface tension of consciousness and disarrange its structure that it may begin again from a new and strengthened base. It permits our mental forces to reform under cover, as it were, while the battle is still on. Then, ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... 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 often at the shortest intervals ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... music and poetry is lost in an irrevocable past; but, as the operation of psychical laws is universal, it may be that some of the influences that have been operative in the growth of these arts can be discovered through the study of native American story and song, born of a race living in a state of culture ...
— Indian Story and Song - from North America • Alice C. Fletcher
... between men and women cause for great dissatisfaction if not known and corrected—Instructions for correcting psychical mismatching if husband is at fault; if wife is at fault—Extending time of first part of coitus—Inducing pre-coital flow in woman—Essential that first part of coitus be continued until woman is ready for second part—Necessity for husband to know ways to extend time of third ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... the consideration of beautiful eyes and a beautiful forehead; they depend upon the psychical qualities, and in particular, the intellectual, which are inherited from the mother. The unconscious considerations which, on the other hand, influence women in their choice naturally cannot be so accurately specified. In general, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... either; or, as in the transition of inorganic to organic matter, the power of reproduction is attained; so, positively new powers may attend the development of mind. From sensations it progresses to emotions, from emotions to reason. The one is the psychical climax of the other. "We have still to do with the one mind,whose[TN-2] action developes itself with perception, through discrimination, till it arrives at notions, wherein its most general scheme, 'truth and error,' serves ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton |
