"Sentient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... idolaters. So Christian poets write odes and invocations to Peace, to Disappointment, to Spring, to Beauty, in which they impersonate an idea, or a principle, and address it in the language of adoration, as if it were a sentient being, possessing magical and mysterious powers. In the same manner, the rites and celebrations of ancient times are not necessarily all to be considered as idolatry, and denounced as inexcusably wicked and absurd. ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... of Kind and the Sense of Difference.—Doctor Giddings declares in fine summary "we may conceive of society as any plural number of sentient creatures more or less continuously subjected to common stimuli, to differing stimuli and to inter-stimulation, and responding thereto in like behaviour, concerted activity or cooeperation, as well as in unlike or competitive activity; and becoming, therefore, with developing intelligence, ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... his compliant machine to repose in himself, in a dream of absolute stagnation, with the thermometer at 120 deg. outside the refrigerator, you must not say, "Damn that boy,—he's asleep again!"—but patiently survey and intelligently admire the spiritual processes by which an exalted sentient force prepares itself for the repose of a future life. But our reckless Karlee took no thought for the everlasting rest into which his soul should enter "when removed from this world of care," according to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... Chesterton the crowning absurdity. It succeeded because the party machines combined to finance their candidates and offered them to a rather dazed country whose men were still in great numbers under arms. "There is naturally no dissentient when hardly anybody seems to be sentient. Indifference is ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... terrible thing that one so peculiarly strong, sentient, luminous, as my father should grow feebler and fainter, and finally ghostly still and white. Yet when his step was tottering and his frame that of a wraith, he was as dignified as in the days of greater pride, holding himself, in military self-command, even more erect than before. He did not ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... owner and his prejudice about the last pennyworth of tar. She was not a transporter to us, an earner of freights, something to which was attached a profit and loss account and an insurance policy. She had a name. She was a sentient being, perhaps noble, perhaps wilful; she might have any quality of character, even malice. I have seen hands laid on her with affection in dock, when those who knew her were telling ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... there monads are grouped around a central monad to which they are subordinate, and which they are constrained to serve so long as that connection lasts. Masses of inorganic matter are aggregations of monads without a regent, or sentient soul (unum per accidens). There can be no monad without matter, that is, without society, and no soul without a body. Not only the human soul is indestructible and immortal, but also the animal soul. There is no generation out of nothing, and no absolute death. Birth is expansion, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... believe, or, more accurately speaking, we feel, that it is otherwise in the universe of mind. Whoever attentively observes the phenomena of thinking and sentient beings, will be convinced, that men and animals are under the influence of motives, that we are subject to the predominance of the passions, of love and hatred, of desire and aversion, of sorrow and joy, and that the elections we make are regulated by impressions supplied to us by these passions. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... there is none; or he is not the centre of the world, which yet carries in its forms and colours the aspects of his mind; and then, horror of horrors! is man the one conscious point and object of a vast derision—insentient nature grinning at sentient man! rose or saffron, his sky but mocks and makes mows at him; while he himself is the worst mockery of all, being at once that which mocks and that which not only is mocked but writhes in agony under the mockery. Such as Bascombe reply that they find it not so. I answer—For the best ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... the stupefaction which the artistic nature feels when life proves sentient under its hand, and not the mere material of situations and effects. He could not conceive the full measure of the disaster he had wrought, the outrage of his own behavior had been lost to him in his preoccupation with the romantic ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... knew, together. Love made them sentient. Not merely a possibility, but almost a glimpse had come—as if an ominous presence had ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... out in the name of God?" he asked. "And if from human tenements, then why not from dwellings made with human hands also? May not a house be similarly cleansed as well as a soul? This unknown spirit—angel or fiend, or other sentient being—is permitted to challenge mankind and draw attention to its existence. A mystery, I grant, but its Maker has now willed that some measure of this mystery shall be revealed to us. We are called to play our part in ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... years of waiting it was before me at last. The great face was so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was a dignity not of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as never anything human wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient. If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking. It was looking toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing—nothing but distance and vacancy. It was looking over and beyond everything of the present, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... which had been given to him. For he thought to himself: "Surely the mystery of the comeliness of flesh, and the mystery of that by which it is moved, are the secrets of the Supreme Tao. How shall man lend the aspect of sentient life to dead clay? Who save the ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... was a depth at which the heat was deemed to be intolerable to such organised life as was known to the experience of the Vril-ya, though their philosophers believed that even in such places life of some kind, life sentient, life intellectual, would be found abundant and thriving, could the philosophers penetrate to it. "Wherever the All-Good builds," said she, "there, be sure, He places inhabitants. He loves not empty ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... pounded and ploughed to pieces by artillery, heavy wagons, tramp of men and horses, and the struggle of every wheeled thing that could carry wounded soldiers; jolted among the dying and the dead, so disfigured by blood and mud as to be hardly recognizable for humanity; dead, as to any sentient life that was in it, and yet alive,—the form that had been Lieutenant Richard Doubledick, with whose praises England rang, was conveyed to Brussels. There it was tenderly laid down in hospital; and there it lay, week after ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... plants and animals the graduation is closer than from magnetised iron to vitalised sarcode. From reflex acts of the nervous system animals rise to sentient and volitional ones. And with the ascent are associated brain-cells progressively increasing in size and complexity. Thought relates to the "brain" of man as does electricity to the nervous "battery" of the torpedo; both are forms ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... the parts of the world are all the things which exist in it, and which are maintained by sentient nature; in which perfect reason is placed, which is also everlasting: for that there is nothing more powerful which can be the cause of its dissolution. And this power they call the soul of the world, and also its intellect and perfect wisdom. And they call it ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... bedside was fondly unbuttoning a small body from its clothes, ready to hear a sleepy child's voice say its evening prayers. In his heart there flamed the love for the child that was beckoning him into love for every sentient thing. And as Laura Van Dorn, bride of Thomas of that name, heard the whistle, her being was flooded with a love high and marvelous, washing in from the infinite love that moves the universe and carrying her soul in aspiring thrills of joy out ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... provisional definitions, which adequately express our knowledge of the things denoted by them, at the time, though a further study of their attributes may induce us subsequently to alter the definition. Thus the old definition of animal as a sentient organism has been rendered inadequate by the discovery that so many of the phenomena of sensation can ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... explicit. There occur formidable hours in our civilization; there are moments when the penal laws decree a shipwreck. What an ominous minute is that in which society draws back and consummates the irreparable abandonment of a sentient being! Jean Valjean was condemned to five years ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... that sense I have lived more in the past six weeks than in all the years that preceded them. I am filled with this feverish sense of liberation; it keeps rising to my head like the fumes of strong wine. I find I am an active, sentient, intelligent creature, with desires, with passions, with possible convictions—even with what I never dreamed of, a possible will of my own! I find there is a world to know, a life to lead, men and women to form a thousand ...
— Eugene Pickering • Henry James
... husband. She was still leaning back on his shoulder, with her hand clasping his. Accompanying her consciousness of escape came a new lightness of spirit. There seemed to come over her, too, a new sense of gratitude for the nearness of this sentient and mysterious life, of this living and breathing man, that could both command and satisfy some even more mysterious emotional hunger in ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... Silence holds her court Before Decay's last revel. Yet, O king, I would insult thee not. But if thy spirit Circle unseen around the guilty clay, Till it be buried, and those solemn words Give "dust to dust," leaving the soul no home On this vain earth, O hear me! Or if still There be a something sentient in the body, Through all corruption's stages, till our frames Rot, rot, and seem no more,—and thus the soul Is cag'd in bones through which the north wind rattles, Or haunts the black skull wash'd up by the waves Upon the moaning shore—poor weeping skull, ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... Let me remind you of a curious fact with reference to the seat of the musical sense. Far down below the great masses of thinking marrow and its secondary agents, just as the brain is about to merge in the spinal cord, the roots of the nerve of hearing spread their white filaments out into the sentient matter, where they report what the external organs of hearing tell them. This sentient matter is in remote connection only with the mental organs, far more remote than the centres of the sense of vision and that of smell. In a word, the musical faculty might be said to have a little brain of its ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... no other object on earth can ever do, except one of its own great kindred, the promise of immortal life to man and man's pathetic faith in that promise. Dark and lonely it comes back upon my vision, but during all hours of its daily and nightly life sentient, eloquent, vital, participating in all the thought, conduct, and experience of those who dwell ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... lack a basis. It has need of a subject, of a sentient being; and it is powerless to furnish us with the great fundamental truths: God, merit and demerit, the Just, the Beautiful—ideas which are all innate, that is to say, anterior to facts, and to experience, ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... kindred life to promote his own amusement. Like most young men, he was delighted if he made a good shot; moreover, he had some aptitude for shooting, but unlike most young men, to him afterwards came reflections. Who gave him the right to kill creatures as sentient, and much more beautiful in their way then himself, just because it was "great fun"? Of course, he was familiar with the common answer, that day by day his body was nourished upon the flesh of other animals destroyed for that purpose. But then this was a matter ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... its beauty had gladdened, seemed now in its careless desolation awaiting the hour when it should die. It really looked, with its drooping boughs, its torn blossoms, and its brown leaves, rustling and sighing to the breeze, like a sentient being mourning without hope. Those who have never lived in exile from their native land, can have no idea of the feelings with which a lonely colonist, long separated from all the associations of home, would regard a solitary plant which so peculiarly ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... against saddle-flaps, the rattle of a curb chain or the rings of a bit. A call, a challenge, smothered exclamations. The long-drawn swish of the polo stick through the air, and the whack of the wooden head of it against ball, or ground, or something unluckily softer and more sentient. A pause, broken only by distant voices, and the sound, or rather sense, of men and horses in quiet and friendly movement; followed by the tumultuous rush and scurry, and all the moving incidents of the heard, yet ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... Peter had said that the next morning he was in as much doubt as ever about the princesses. He thought he would go and have a look at them but forgot what he had come for once he had entered the spacious quiet of the Academy. Warmed still from his contact of the night before he found the pictures sentient and friendly. He found trails in them that led he knew now where, and painted waters that lapped the ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... fifty yards apart at the moment. Before the order could be carried into effect, however, Arkal uttered a low hiss. Instantly the double banks of oars bent almost to the breaking point, and the Penelope leaped forward like a sentient creature. Each man seized sword and shield and sprang up, and Bladud, forgetting both helmet and shield in the hurry of the moment, poised the mighty javelin which had so astonished its owner's enemies in days gone by, and in another moment hurled it shrieking through ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... The medic was amazed. "Next thing we'll have sentient amebas!" He aimed the camera at Rat. "I suppose I'll have to record you as a member of the crew," he said, as the camera began ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... through infancy and youth like ordinary mortals, until at the prescribed age they abandon the world and retire to the wilderness, where they receive the supernatural powers with which the office is endowed. Their highest glory is that they receive the wisdom by which they can direct sentient beings to the path that leads to the desired cessation ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... our normal experience, and not misery. We hear much, for example, about the suffering which is part of the order of the animal creation; how a stronger beast feeds upon a weaker, and is in turn the prey of another stronger still. While again we are told that the joys of these myriads of sentient creatures are immeasurably greater than their pains. They have pleasure more than sufficient to justify their call into existence, in spite of the drawbacks to their happiness incident to the conditions of ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... tall masts, of every build and tonnage. Steam-tugs were beating the water, towing sailing-vessels out to sea; others, moving about freely, made their way hither and thither, with that precision which makes a steam-boat seem like a conscious being, endowed by a will of its own, and served by sentient organs. From the elevation the Elbe is seen, spreading broadly like all great rivers as they near the sea. Its waters, sure of arriving at last, are in no haste; placid as a lake, they flow with an almost invisible motion. The low ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... Further advances are impossible, yet our end is not attained; we have not yet reached the monad, for the animalcul and the less sentient particles of matter, light, are ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... to talk. Paul tried to follow him on paper, but the task was hopeless. Darco talked with a choking incoherence and at a dreadful pace. It was as if a big-bellied bottle were turned upside down, and as if the bottle were sentient and strove to empty the whole of its contents at once through a narrow neck. At last a meaning began to declare itself—the merest intelligible germ of a meaning—but it grew and grew until Paul clapped his hands with a ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... ear,—a minstrel, sooth to say, Nearly as good. And now a hum like that Of swarming bees on meadow-flowers comes up. Each hath its just and yet luxurious joy, As if to live were to be blessed. The mild Maternal influence of nature thus Ennobles both the sentient and the dead;— The human heart is as an altar wreathed, On which old wine pours, streaming o'er the leaves, And down the symbol-carved sides. Behold! Unbidden, yet most welcome, who be these? The high-priests of ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... as has been suggested, that experience (application ritre des sens) and reason are trustworthy guides to knowledge. By them we become conscious of an external objective world, of which sentient beings themselves are a part, from which they receive impressions through their sense organs. These myriad impressions when compared and reflected upon form reasoned knowledge or truth, provided they are substantiated by repeated experiences carefully made. That is, an idea ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... Mitchell of the Cincinnati Observatory, in his work, "Popular Astronomy," says,—"It is most incredible to assert, as so many do, that our planet, so small and insignificant in its proportions when compared with the planets with which it is allied, is the only world in the whole universe filled with sentient, rational, and intelligent beings capable of comprehending the grand mysteries of the physical universe." Camille Flammarion, in referring to the utter insignificance of the earth in the immensity of space, puts forward ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... passed away becomes the symbol of a wrestle between the most ancient gods and the young will of man. Mr Kipling has put the Bridge into the foreground of his picture, has made of it the really sentient figure of the tale. Here definitely he writes the first chapter of his book of steam and steel; and we begin to be aware of an enthusiasm which is lacking in many of the highly finished proofs which preceded it that Mr Kipling could write almost anything as well as almost anybody else. ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... more immediately connected, must be limited by wider considerations. A man has duties, not only to himself and his own family, but to his neighbours, to the various institutions with which he is connected, to his town, his country, mankind at large, and even the whole sentient creation. How far these should limit each other or a man's individual or family interests is a question by no means easy to answer, and is the main problem which each man has to be perpetually solving for himself, and society at ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... at once calls the fine arts into existence, and accounts for the satisfaction which arises from the contemplation of them; and also points out the relation which subsists between this and all other sentient and cognizant faculties of man. To the man of thought and speculation, therefore, it is of the highest importance, but by itself alone it is quite inadequate to guide and direct the essays ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... hold with those (I need not name them to a man of your reading) who have taught that all matter is sentient, that every atom is a living, feeling, conscious being. I do. There is no such thing as dead, inert matter: it is all alive; all instinct with force, actual and potential; all sensitive to the same ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... space Where Jehovah sits, absolute Lord, Who made out of nothing the whole Round world, and man's sentient soul— Will He crush, like a creature abhorred, What He fashioned with ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... Ghek realized that in his escape he could take with him but a single rykor, and there was none in Bantoom that could give him better service than this giant lying here. Quickly he transferred himself to the shoulders of the great, inert hulk. Instantly the latter was transformed to a sentient creature, filled with pulsing life and ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... called, was a buoyant ship and lightly sparred, and presently bringing the sea on the bow, through our seizing a small tarpaulin in the weather main shrouds, she erected her masts afresh, like some sentient creature pricking its ears for the affray, and with that showed herself game and made ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... relatively to its size. And now, for the purpose of grasping this subject of relativity, I want you to ask yourself whether it is conceivable that a world, so small as those bodies are, could possibly be inhabited by sentient beings. Leaving you to form your own conclusion upon this point, I will ask you to follow me down another path leading to the elucidation ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... satisfy everyone who feels compassion for cosmic suffering. Professor Huxley has told us that there is no sadder story than the story of sentient life upon this planet, and in so saying he has the testimony of modern science behind him. A vast amount of attention has been directed to this phase of the subject within the past fifty years. We seem to be more sensitive to the presence of pain as well as more ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... of conscience is love—love of the well- being or welfare of all sentient beings, or of all beings capable of enjoying happiness. Our conscience goads us to do what love demands as our duty. He who, through want of discrimination, ignores the love element in conscience, becomes a cruel misanthrope, ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... in evidence, rising and falling under and around the racing Aircars like serpents, or dragging ropes; but seeming like living things in the sentient manner of their moving—eager to come in contact with the first of the earthlings, and to wrap those tentacles about them, crush ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... indeed, to regard the dark valleys, and the gray rocks, and the waters that silently smile, and the forests that sigh in uneasy slumbers, and the proud watchful mountains that look down upon all,—I love to regard these as themselves but the colossal members of one vast animate and sentient whole—a whole whose form (that of the sphere) is the most perfect and most inclusive of all; whose path is among associate planets; whose meek handmaiden is the moon, whose mediate sovereign is the sun; whose life is eternity, whose thought is that of a God; whose enjoyment ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... parts are not sufficiently poetical; in its hue, it may be appropriate. The other, "Jacob's Dream" is one of the finest by the master—there is an extraordinary boldness in the clouds, an uncommon grandeur, strongly marked, sentient of angelic visitants. This picture has been recently wretchedly engraved in mezzotinto; all that is in the picture firm and hard, is in the print soft, fuzzy, and disagreeable. Sir Joshua treats very tenderly the mistaken manner of Gainsborough in his late pictures, the "odd scratches ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... perhaps in a rage at the awkward manner in which the victim adjusts itself to a convenient position for suffering. Horrid, we call the prevailing practice, because it is the infliction, on millions of sentient and innocent creatures every year, in what calls itself a humane and Christian nation, of anguish unnecessary to the purpose. Unnecessary—what proof is there to the contrary?—To what is the present practice necessary?—Some readers will remember the benevolent (we were going to say humane, ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... time is come, we alight at Fort-William-Henry Hotel, and all night long through the sentient woods I hear the booming of Johnson's cannon, the rattle of Dieskau's guns, and that wild war-whoop, more terrible than all. Again old Monro watches from his fortress-walls the steadily approaching foe, and looks in vain for help, save to his own brave heart. I see the light ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... night, the young being kept for safety within their ring, while others, grazing longer or wandering farther from the rest, were approaching the main herd. But nightfall coming upon them with dire magic turned them all to stone; and there they remain, sentient, yet motionless, awaiting the day of their release. By fancies like this we may convey the feeling ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... the stretch of universes the same force pulsates that is recognizable here. A deduction is obvious. Throughout infinity are sentient beings, perhaps ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... detonated with the frost. There by the cold last night's camp the four human figures posed, motionless as a wind that has died. Only the dogs, lolling, stretching, sending the warm steam of their breathing into the dead air, seemed to stand for the world of life, and the world of sentient creatures. And yet their very presence, unobtrusive in the forest shadows, by contrast thrust farther these others into the land of ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... to pity. There he sat with eyes poring upon the ground just as she had seen him the first time. And while she had sat with him and talked with him he had seemed to awaken out of that dull despondency, gleams of pleasure had lighted up his wrinkled face—he had grown animated, a sentient living instead of a corpse alive. It was very hard that this little interval of life, these stray gleams of gladness should be denied to the poor old creature, at the behest of ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... thought—the ancient loveliness of life. The beings whom the Christians can win over—a patch-work medley of loathsome Barbarians—let them wear out their lives as they choose! We are Greeks—the thinking brain, the subtle and sentient soul of the world. The polity, the empire, that we shall found on the overthrow of Theodosius and of Rome shall be Hellenic, purely Hellenic. The old national spirit, which made the Greeks omnipotent against the millions of Darius ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... but to construct—a shelter for costly machinery; as to those who worked it, let them manage anyhow. The buildings were massive and expensive where used to protect senseless iron and steel; low, squalid, and flung together in the cheapest way where used to house sentient human beings. ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... person. Yet the tree looked to him like a living, sentient thing, dooming him and warning him. As in the compression of the brain in drowning, it is said forgotten memories are hustled uppermost, and the events of early life vividly written on the consciousness,—so in this unwonted stir of past and present associations, Swan found himself ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... to Gerald Burton a sudden overwhelming understanding of the transience not only of human life, but what means so much more to most sentient human beings, the transience of such measure of happiness as we poor mortals are ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... Caras or Carians—had, with the Siamese even of to-day, and the Egyptians of old, many notions in common concerning the immortality of the soul, and its existence after its earthly mission was accomplished. They believed that the sentient and intelligent principle, pixan, which inhabits the body, survived the death of that body, and was bound to return to earth, and live other and many mundane existences; but that between each separate existence that pixan went to a place ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... imaginations of men have rendered the ascertaining of what IS NOT TRUE, the principal direct service which metaphysical science can bestow upon moral science. Moral science itself is the doctrine of the voluntary actions of man, as a sentient and social being. These actions depend on the thoughts in his mind. But there is a mass of popular opinion, from which the most enlightened persons are seldom wholly free, into the truth or falsehood of which it is incumbent on ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... piled over what had lately been an open grave, and the green sod was adjusted over all with the accuracy of an experienced sexton. Halbert stood aghast. The idea rushed on his mind irresistibly, that the earth-heap before him enclosed what had lately been a living, moving, and sentient fellow-creature, whom, on little provocation, his fell act had reduced to a clod of the valley, as senseless and as cold as the turf under which he rested. The hand that scooped the grave had completed its word; ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... interval that separates the lowest from the highest of those sentient beings which inhabit our planet, all the results of observation, enlightened by all the reasonings of the philosopher, combine to render it probable that, in the vast extent of creation, the proudest attribute of our race is but, perchance, the lowest step in the gradation of intellectual existence. ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... issues from the relativity of perception. At the very dawn of philosophy it was observed that what is seen, heard, or otherwise experienced through the senses, depends not only upon the use of sense-organs, but upon the special point of view occupied by each individual sentient being. It was therefore concluded that the perceptual world belonged to the human knower with his limitations and perspective, rather than to being itself. It was this epistemological principle upon which Berkeley founded his empirical idealism. ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... some occult power of blessing, such as was formerly ascribed to the stars; we may say a good man has an air of benignity. Kindness and tenderness are personal; benevolence and charity are general. Kindness extends to all sentient beings, whether men or animals, in prosperity or in distress. Tenderness especially goes out toward the young, feeble, and needy, or even to the dead. Humanity is so much kindness and tenderness toward man or beast as it would be inhuman not to ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... fixed intently on his gods Long reigned in Saligram of ancient fame, The mighty monarch of the wide, wide world. Chief of the virtuous, never in his life Harmed he, or strove to harm, his fellow-man, Or any creature sentient. But he left His kingdom in the forest-shades to dwell, And changed his sceptre for a hermit's staff, And with ascetic rites, privations rude, And constant prayers, endeavoured to attain Perfect dominion on his soul. At morn, Fuel, ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... the utmost,—but half an hour had passed, and still the spectacle, wilder and more brilliant than ever, remained unexplained. For a stretch of miles, the hills above, beyond, and below were all ablaze with rushing flames that seemed guided by no sentient agency; then, suddenly, a single torch glanced out from a small grove of trees a short distance ahead and darted diagonally across their path. Decius stopped for an instant, with trembling knees; but Sergius bounded forward to intercept the ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... apprehension of sin! I feel that the highest commandment is that of sympathy for all sentient beings. Love is the foundation of all religion. The other day I read in one of the English papers that 50,000 pounds of animal carcasses had been sent to some army station in Africa, but the meat ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... the natural law causes the heat to rise toward the ceiling. If you put your hand on some books occupying the highest places in some library rooms, in mid-winter, when the fires are kept at their maximum, the heat of the volume will almost burn your fingers. If these books were sentient beings, and could speak, would they not say—"our sufferings ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... the death of my old friend W. F. Mills, which took place whilst I was writing that chapter. Now, as I pen these lines, I hear of the loss of another old familiar railway friend; not indeed a sentient being like you, dear reader, or him or me, yet a friend that lacked neither perception ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... not this sight of a living, breathing, sentient human body strained and stretched to the point of being torn asunder that excited the lads' commiseration and horror, and caused them inwardly to register a solemn and awful vow of vengeance upon the human fiends around them should the opportunity ever arise. No, terrible as was that sight, ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... it possible that the idea of outness (in the sense of discontinuity with the sentient body) could be attained by such a person; for, as we have seen, every tactile sensation is referred to a point either of the natural sensory surface itself, or of some solid in continuity with that surface. Hence it would ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Letisimulation, apparently, is not confined to animals; we see that certain plants have acquired a habit that is strikingly like death-feigning. We are apt to regard the plants as being non-sentient, yet there is an abundance of evidence in favor of the doctrine that vegetable life is, to a certain extent, percipient. Darwin has shown conclusively that plant life is as subject to the great law of evolution ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... independent, though apparently fraternal, natures, of silver, of lead, of platinum,—aluminium,—potassium. Hence, a rational philosophy would deduce the probability that when the arborescence of dead crystallization rose into the radiation of the living tree, and sentient plume, the splendor of nature in her more exalted power would not be restricted to a less variety of design; and the beautiful caprice in which she gave to the silver its frost and to the opal its fire, would not be subdued under the slow influences of ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... thinking will be forced on common minds by thoughtful observation of common things. Animate nature of the lowest rank, as in the grass, is of a higher natural order than inanimate nature in the soil the grass springs from. Sentient nature, as in the ox, is of a higher order than the non-sentient in the grass. Self-conscious and reflective nature in the man is of a higher order than the selfless and non-reflective nature in his beast ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... at the extremity of Europe, slavery in America, the death penalty all over the world. The reason was that the tribune of France had quivered. At certain hours the quiver of that tribune was an earthquake. The tribune of France spoke, and every sentient being on this earth betook itself to reflection; the words sped into the obscurity, through space, at hazard, no matter where,—"It is only the wind, it is only a little noise," said the barren minds ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... have induced his brother scientists at least to listen to his report had he stopped with this. But he proceeded to say that he had witnessed the magic birth of a sentient, palpable, intelligent human being, who walked about in his household, conversing freely, while the medium, from whom the spirit form sprang, lay in the cabinet like one dead. It was his account of this 'spirit,' who called herself 'Katie King,' that caused the whole ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... rend their talons from the adhesive soil; The impatient serpent lifts his crested head, And drags his train unfinish'd from the bed.— As Warmth and Moisture blend their magic spells, And brood with mingling wings the slimy dells; Contractile earths in sentient forms arrange, And Life triumphant stays their ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... with thousands upon thousands of perished mules and horses. Grant regretted this terrible wastage of animals as much in a personal as in a military way; for, like nearly all great men, his sympathies were broad enough to make him compassionate toward every kind of sentient life. No Arab ever loved his horse better than Grant loved his splendid charger Cincinnati, the worthy counterpart ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... Expedition. It is hard to write what I feel. To a sailor his ship is more than a floating home, and in the 'Endurance' I had centred ambitions, hopes, and desires. Now, straining and groaning, her timbers cracking and her wounds gaping, she is slowly giving up her sentient life at the very outset of her career. She is crushed and abandoned after drifting more than 570 miles in a north-westerly direction during the 281 days since she became locked in the ice. The distance from the point where she became beset to the place ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... her pulses throb unevenly. The whole atmosphere seemed sentient and athrill with the surge of some deep-lying emotion. She could feel it beating up against her—the clamorous demand of something hardly ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... love. Lastly, his letter, so simple, so direct, and yet, to one who knew his quiet, reserved nature, so deeply charged with feeling, had brought the first small seed to a blossoming which quickened every pulse of her nature into ardent, sentient life. This woman, who had always been singularly selfless, far more interested in the lives of those about her than in her own, ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... with a silver clasp; it contained but one sheet of thick vellum, and on that sheet were inscribed, within a double pentacle, words in old monkish Latin, which are literally to be translated thus: "On all that it can reach within these walls—sentient or inanimate, living or dead—as moves the needle, so work my will! Accursed be the house, and ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... have we sympathies that make the best of us so afraid of inflicting pain and sorrow, which yet we see dealt about so lavishly by the Supreme Governor? Why should our notions of right towards each other, and to all sentient beings within our influence, differ so widely from what appears to be His notion and rule, if every thing were to end here? Would it not be blasphemy to say that, upon the supposition of the thinking principle being destroyed by death, however inferior we ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... yet he had hardly been seated before I conceived a profound aversion to him. Mrs. Bannister's treatment of him did much to arouse it. Here, she seemed to say, is a human being, a sentient creature with ideas in his head, a finished man with an appreciation of the finer things of life. She asked him if he was going to the ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... that its own which is homogeneous with its nature. It has happened to some men of genius during a long period of their lives, that an unsettled impulse, unable to discover the object of its aptitude, a thirst and fever in the temperament of too sentient a being, which cannot find the occupation to which only it can attach itself, has sunk into a melancholy and querulous spirit, weary with the burthen of existence; but the instant the latent talent had declared itself, his first work, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... meditative souls the sombre and heavy genius of French tragedy,—and not very far away, up one of those little shadowy winding streets and out at the corner, stands the restored house of Diane de Poitiers, so sentient and alive in its very look that one almost expects to see at the quaint windows the beautiful wicked face of the woman who swayed the humours of a king by her smile or ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... and has told their movements, their seasons, and the length of their days. Such resemblances to our own globe are ascertained in their general laws, and such diversity in their peculiar ones, that we are led irresistibly to believe they all teem with beings, sentient and intelligent as we are, yet whose senses, and powers, and modes of existence, must be very dissimilar, and indefinitely varied. The regions of space, within the field of our vision, present us with phenomena the most incomprehensibly mysterious, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... beings. It may well be that a soul, which by persistent and deliberate rejection of every appeal of the Divine Love even to the very end—in this life or beyond—has become so wholly self-identified with evil as to be finally incapable of life in GOD, passes, of necessity, out of sentient existence altogether. We do not know. What we do know is, in the first place, that wickedness is of its very nature instinct with the eternal quality of "hell"; and, in the second place, that GOD is Love, and that GOD "desireth not the death of a ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... Broke from their bonds rejoicing. As the down Shoots from the winged nations, or from beasts Bristles or hair, so poured the new-born earth Plants, fruits, and herbage. Then, in order next, Raised she the sentient tribes, in various modes, By various powers distinguished: for not heaven Down dropped them, nor from ocean's briny waves Sprang they, terrestrial sole; whence, justly Earth Claims the dear name ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... as though the world, so strangely blotted out by these dim, obliterating vapours, were indeed vacant of all human interest, human purpose, human history, save that incarnate in this fair woman and his own relation to her. She alone existed, concrete, exquisite, sentient, amid the vague, shifting immensities of fog. She alone mattered. Her near neighbourhood worked upon him strongly, causing an excitement in him which at ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... his glorious eye Once light the clouds that 'wilder me, I ne'er had raised this coward cry To cease to think, and cease to be; I ne'er had called oblivion blest, Nor, stretching eager hands to death, Implored to change for senseless rest This sentient soul, this living breath— Oh, let me die—that power and will Their cruel strife may close, And conquered good and conquering ill Be ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... hypothesis that animals are automata, for which indeed there is much to be said from some points of view; but he unfortunately believed that they were unconscious and non-sentient automata, and this belief led his disciples into acts of abominable cruelty. Professor Huxley lectured on this hypothesis and partially upheld it not many years since. The article is included in his volume ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... extrinsic: therefore he affirms, that of necessity there must be several sorts of matter, or elements. He says, "there are only two theories on this subject deserving our attention; one of which affirms that sentient bodies are composed of elements possessing the faculty, (cum patiendi tum sentiendi,) both of suffering and perceiving an alteration;" while the other affirms that such bodies are formed (ex patibilibus, ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... started up, and with the cry "Father!" sat up on her bed, gazing out with staring eyes. The Persian quilt fell down from her lap, the night-dress slipped from her shoulders. She looked more like a Greek marble than a sentient being. ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... combined, can exercise; and for the same reason they can not, except in a dream, be imagined to possess that which, in our eyes, must always be the capital feature of a planet, rendering it in the highest degree interesting wherever it may be found—sentient life. ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... usually no head man or chieftain to determine the action of the community; there is no deliberative assembly to lay down rules of conduct. In Galton's phrase the members of a primitive community form 'a sentient web', dominated by traditional beliefs and customs. I have no wish to analyse the subconscious states and instinctive reactions which rule and bind together the members of a primitive community; what I want to make clear is that the tribal instincts have above ...
— Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View • Arthur Keith
... from the homocentric point of view, are the living, the sentient, and the thinking kingdoms that have grown up with the later phases of the physical evolution. It does not militate against this view that each of these kingdoms is, in itself, the subject of special sciences, and that these, in turn, envelop a multitude of sub-sciences, ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... a physical object the reproductive power of the sun in spring-time, as well as the action of that power on all sentient beings, the ancients adopted that symbol of the male gender which the Greeks, who derive it from the Egyptians, called—Phallus.[1] This worship was so general as to have spread itself over a large portion of the habitable globe, ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... Origin of Species is on the subject of the genesis and evolution of organic life from non-sentient nature up to Man, the work of Marx is on the subject of the genesis and evolution of association among human beings, of States and the ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... types of existence and infinite stages of development. Physically speaking, one cannot imagine the countless variety of ways in which flesh and bone may congregate around the human brain to make a sentient and intelligent creature. ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... round over the hills and through the worst brier patches and across and across the creek, doubling and circling until the easy mile was spun out into three uncommonly difficult ones. But at bottom the motive was purely wicked. In all the range of sentient creatures there is none so innately and barbarously cruel as the human boy-child; and this was the first time Thomas Jefferson had ever had a helplessly ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... the foremast! She was lying down to it like a racing yacht, with the foam seething and hissing and brimming to her rail at every lee roll, and the lee scuppers all afloat, while she swept along with the eager, headlong, impetuous speed of a sentient creature flying for its life. The wailing and crying of the wind aloft—especially when the ship rolled to windward—was loud enough and weird enough to fill the heart of a novice with dismay, but to the ear of the seaman it sang a song of wild, hilarious sea music, fittingly accompanied ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... garden, where lobsters, crabs, sea-urchins, turbos, starfish, and hundreds of other sentient beings lived, I saw a thousand true scaled fish, most of them highly colored, and many so curiously marked, fashioned, and equipped with eccentric members that I was startled into biblical phrases. In the market they were strange enough, dead and on the marble slabs, or in green leaves, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... The clergyman's sentient fingers sought, found, and closed tightly upon a ruler. "That I cannot answer directly," he said, slowly. "Miss Lambert's case is not simple. She is a very remarkable musician, that you know, and yet her talent is fitful. She ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... I stood there, I wondered for the first time in a highly material existence, whether there might not be, after all, a spirit-world surrounding us, cognizant of all that we did, touching but intangible, sentient but tuned ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and that, its pasture?—what have we here? Irritability and a tissue. Lo! it shrinks back as the heel of the philosopher has touched it, coiling and writhing itself—what is this? Sensation and a nerve. Does the nerve feel? you inconsiderately ask, or is there some sentient being, other than the nerve, in which sensation resides? A smile of derision plays on the lip of the philosopher. There is sensation—you cannot express the fact in simpler or more general terms. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... "It becomes sentient and reacts upon you. It becomes a magnet, a loadstone to draw you. Your constant habit of associating it in your mind with the past, creates around it an atmosphere which is a part of your being and welds you to it, so that you, the house, and the deed, become one mighty monster, inseparable. ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... sentient surface (1) an afferent impulse passes along (2) to the posterior root of the spinal cord, the nerve fibers of the posterior root ending in minute filaments among the small cells of this part of the cord (3). In some unknown way this impulse passes across the gray ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... Subsequent to this second meeting, Lynde thought the matter over quite calmly, and decided that he must make a definite effort to become more intimate with Aileen. Though she was not as young as some others, she suited his present mood exactly. She was rich physically—voluptuous and sentient. She was not of his world precisely, but what of it? She was the wife of an eminent financier, who had been in society once, and she herself had a dramatic record. He was sure of that. He could win her if he wanted to. It would be easy, knowing her as he did, and ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... was then, a rough voluptuary, a thoughtless, sentient beast who up to that time had lived a life of emptiness and of mockery, eating and drinking and sleeping and waking again day after day, year after year. And he saw himself as he was on that day, he one of thousands and thousands of lookers-on gazing on the three hours' ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... which now engages us with the fascination of a new and vast discovery is what we term "Evolution." Its spectacle, on the one hand, prompts a sure and soaring hope. In the sum of things we see a movement upward and still upward,—from unorganized to organized matter, from unconscious to sentient existence, from beast to man, from savage to saint,—and who can say to what height in the coming ages? But on the other hand we see that thus far at least the progress of the favored is at deadly cost to the losers. And we see that parallel with the ascending white line of ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... of the knee-jerks, and a gradual change in the limbs from the flaccid to the spastic condition. Sensibility returns in the order—touch, pain, temperature, and the parts supplied by the lowest sacral segments usually become sentient first. Voluntary power returns earlier in the flexors than in the extensors, and flexion of the toes is almost invariably the earliest voluntary movement possible. Infection from bed-sores or from the urinary tract ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles |
