"Visual" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... building up a certain part of the brain. For example, the man who has cultivated his hearing until he can hear sounds inaudible to ordinary men, has made for himself more brain-cells in the hearing area. If he has cultivated his sight assiduously, he has created more visual cells. If his touch has been cultivated, his brain has received new touch sensation-cells. And Professor Gates asserts that his mental ability has been thereby increased. You will be interested in hearing of his experiments with animals and what he ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... instances of the habitual deceptions of sight and touch and hearing. I came upon these things in my reading, in the laboratory, with microscope or telescope, lived with them as constant difficulties. I will only instance one trifling case of visual deception in order to lead to my next question. One draws two ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... in such a place that the visual ray did not strike the upper part of the man's body; and, despite the baron's efforts, he was unable to see the face of this friend—he judged him to be ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... thirty thousand miles between us and the enemy was cut to ten thousand; to five. The ship was soon visible to the naked eye. Its visual movement, for all this time measurable only as a drift upon the amplified images of our instruments, now was obvious. We could see it plunging forward, could see that probably we would cross its bow. Within fifty miles? We hoped and guessed that would ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... world, who convey to our organs of hearing, either by suggestion or actual presentation, the sensations of uncanny knocks, crashes, shrieks, etc.; and to our organs of sight, all kinds of uncanny, visual phenomena. ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... worshipful people. Hast thou seen it in its lonely grandeur on a moonlight night? It is well worth a trip across the ocean to read its message. Sweeping westward, the eye sees planted on a hill-top Georgetown College, the outward symbol of tenet and propaganda. Raising the visual angle and dropping back to the northwest, the white marble walls of the American University come to view, planted that Methodism with justification by faith might preach the Gospel for the redemption of man. Turning to the northeast, the great Catholic University presents itself ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... opportunity of observing, that they who have studied the appearances of Nature feel that the superiority, in point of visual interest, of mountainous over other countries—is more strikingly displayed in winter than in summer. This, as must be obvious, is partly owing to the forms of the mountains, which, of course, are not ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... definite objects a working model may be serviceable; but when complex changes of shape, pace, and local relations exist, when intricate interaction takes place, and when new phenomena arise affecting by their presence all former ones, little can be effected by such visual presentment. Still less can a succession of diagrams assist us to realise the continuity of the working of such shifting forces as are presented ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... give true balance to the aesthetic sense. No matter how great one's admiration for a thing, there is always a final point of satiety at which the desire needs rest or balance. A woman may love flowers, for example, but in the season of flowers, when all nature supplies an over-abundance, the visual sense becomes satiated, and the house interior that is furnished in cool tints and two-tones gives ...
— Color Value • C. R. Clifford
... half an hour the white men in the "Ofiss" had written his name on a document as Serang of the fire-ship Sofala. Since that time he had repeatedly looked at that estuary, upon that coast, from this bridge and from this side of the bar. The record of the visual world fell through his eyes upon his unspeculating mind as on a sensitized plate through the lens of a camera. His knowledge was absolute and precise; nevertheless, had he been asked his opinion, and especially if questioned in the downright, alarming manner of white ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... I have tried to develop a complete theory of visual art. I have put forward an hypothesis by reference to which the respectability, though not the validity, of all aesthetic judgments can be tested, in the light of which the history of art from palaeolithic ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... can talk about," he said savagely, "is how wonderful he is! He agrees with the Observatory that you must all be dead. He said so. Can you give us any evidence that you're alive and out in space? Visual evidence, for broadcast?" ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... crossed the clearing, still blackened from the landing blast; he pushed open the sliding door of the schoolroom. It was large and pleasantly yellow-walled, crowded with projectors, view-booths, stereo-miniatures, and picture books—all the visual aids which Ann Howard would have used to teach the natives the cultural philosophy of the Galactic Federation. But the rows of seats were empty, and the gleaming machines still stood in their cases. For no one had come to Ann's school, in spite of her extravagant offers ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... enough for him to learn many things about her. The storm of the previous night had cleared the air, and Paris shone in morning beauty under a sky that was all broad wet washes of white and blue; but Darrow again noticed that her visual sensitiveness was less keen than her feeling for what he was sure the good Farlows—whom he already seemed to know—would have called "the human interest." She seemed hardly conscious of sensations of form and colour, or of any imaginative ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... painted by Fra Angelico than with the Disputa of Raphael, to which German critics compare it; however, it possesses as little of Angelico's sweet blissfulness as the Dominican painter possessed of Duerer's accuracy of hand and searching intensity of visual realisation. Both painters are interested in individuals, and, representing crowds of faces, make every one a portrait; both evince a dramatic sense of propriety in gesture, both revel in bright, clear colours, especially azure; but as the ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... per cent, of the cases there had been no actual sexual experiences (either masturbation or intercourse); in 23 per cent, there had been masturbation; in the rest, some form of sexual contact. The dreams are mainly visual, tactual elements coming second, and the dramatis persona is either an unknown woman (27 per cent, cases), or only known by sight (56 per cent.), and in the majority is, at all events in the beginning, an ugly or fantastic figure, becoming more attractive later in life, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the tip of the apex of the roof of the nearest seraglio. But this wild report had never been established. Nor, indeed, was it susceptible of a test. For was not that rock inaccessible as the eyrie of young eagles? But to guard against the possibility of any visual profanation, Donjalolo had authorized an edict, forever tabooing that rock to foot of man or pinion of fowl. Birds and bipeds both trembled and obeyed; taking a wide circuit to avoid ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... animated conversation, I often see the face of the person with whom I am speaking so clearly and sharply defined before me, according to the thought he expresses, or which I believe to be evoked in his mind, that the degree of distinctness far exceeds the STRENGTH of my visual faculty—the delicacy of the play of the muscles and of the expression of the eyes MUST therefore be imagined by me. Probably the person put on quite a different expression, or none ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... restlessly awaiting him, fearing lest the whole episode of the day before might not have been one of his waking dreams. His failing sight made reading almost a torture and writing more a matter of feeling than visual perception. Time therefore hung wearisomely on his hands; Bridget was not a good reader, besides being too busy a housekeeper to have time for it. Had David really returned to him? Would he sometimes read aloud and sometimes write ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... malboniga. Virus veneno. Visage vizagxo. Vis-a-vis kontrauxulo. Viscera internajxo. Viscuous gluanta. Visible videbla. Visibly videble. Vision (sense) vido. Vision (apparition) aperajxo. Visit viziti. Visiting-card vizitkarto. Visitor vizitanto. Visor viziero. Visual vida. Vital vivema. Vital necesega. Vitality vivemo. Vitiate difekti. Vitreous vitreca. Vitrify vitrigi. Vitriol vitriolo. Vivacity viveco. Vivid (color) hela. Vivifying viviga. Vixen vulpino. Viz nome, tio estas, t.e. Vizier veziro. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... stormy a time, a period that a man who had lived through the Terror (M. Daunou) called the most tragic century in all history, he by no means regarded his age as the worst of ages. He was not of those prejudiced and afflicted persons, who, measuring everything by their visual horizon, valuing everything according to their present sensations, alway declare that the disease they suffer from is worse than any ever before experienced by a human being. He was like Socrates, who did not consider himself a citizen of one city ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... say that the body is equipped with more than a dozen different kinds of end-organs, each prepared to receive its own particular type of stimulus. It must also be understood that some of the end-organs yield more than one sense. The eye, for example, gives not only visual but muscular sensations; the ear not only auditory, but tactual; the tongue not only gustatory, but tactual and ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... the remarkable performances of the Zancigs led to a heated controversy between the correspondents of the Daily Mail and the Daily Chronicle. Those of the first paper mostly asserted that the performance was an exhibition of true telepathy, while those of the second paper declared that codes—visual and verbal—would account for the phenomena. Previously to the experiment carried out by the Daily Mail I had obtained a letter of introduction to the Zancigs from a friend of mine who had had private tests with them, but as it was necessary ...
— Telepathy - Genuine and Fraudulent • W. W. Baggally
... obtain the manifestation of clairvoyant phenomena is that known as Crystal Gazing. In this class of methods the clairvoyant establishes the en rapport condition by means of a crystal, magic mirror, or similar object, which serves principally to concentrate the psychic visual powers to a focus, and thus to enable the psychic to raise his or her psychic vibrations at ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... hair, darkly clothed, manifestly two-legged male differs absolutely from the usually long-haired, colour bedizened, much beskirted female. Were the structural differences between male and female really one half as marked as the artificial visual differences, they would be greater than those dividing, not merely any species of man from another, but as great as those which divide orders in the animal world. Only a mind exceedingly alert and analytical can fail ultimately to be misled by ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... scenery, which in the aggregate so moves even the most sluggish faculties, as to make "the dullest wight a poet." It rises before the mind in imagination, as it does before the eyes in nature; and we can no more speak of it than look at it, but—as a whole. We can indeed fix our mental or our visual gaze on scene after scene to the exclusion of all beside, and picture it even in words that shall be more than shadows. But how shall any succession of such pictures, however clear and complete, give an idea of that picture which ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... shrine, And learns erelong, the perfect form confess'd, 35 Ideal Beauty from its mother's breast. Now in strong lines, with bolder tints design'd, You sketch ideas, and portray the mind; Teach how fine atoms of impinging light To ceaseless change the visual sense excite; 40 While the bright lens collects the rays, that swerve, And bends their focus on the moving nerve. How thoughts to thoughts are link'd with viewless chains, Tribes leading tribes, and trains pursuing trains; With shadowy trident how Volition guides, 45 Surge after surge, his intellectual ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... ectype[obs3], photo offset, electrotype; imitation &c. 19; model, representation, adumbration, study; portrait &c. (representation) 554; resemblance. duplicate, reproduction; cast, tracing; reflex, reflexion[Brit], reflection; shadow, echo. transcript[copy into a non-visual form], transcription; recording, scan. chip off the old block; reprint, new printing; rechauffe[Fr]; apograph[obs3], fair copy. parody, caricature, burlesque, travesty, travestie[obs3], paraphrase. [copy with ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Idiosyncrasies of the visual organs are generally quite rare. It is well-known that among some of the lower animals, e.g., the turkey-cocks, buffaloes, and elephants, the color red is unendurable. Buchner and Tissot mention a young boy who ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... entrusted with the especial duty of directing artillery-fire, a system of communication between the aerial observer and the officer in charge of the artillery is established, conducted, of course, by code. In the British Army, signalling is both visual and audible. In daylight visual signalling is carried out by means of coloured flags or streamers and smoke-signals, while audible communication is effected by means of a powerful horn working upon ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... along with us? The foolish reader thinks, Why, perhaps not, not altogether as to the quantity—the degree of emotion. Doubtless, it is undeniable that we moderns have far more sensibility to the phenomena and visual glories of this world which we inhabit. And it is possible that, reflecting on the singularity of this characteristic badge worn by modern civilization, he may go so far as to suspect that Christianity has had something to do with it. But, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... Bull Run battle so precipitately fled, were found sandwiches and bottles of wine; and that these refreshments actually lined the road to Washington. From this might be inferred that 'to-day's dinner' not only 'subtends a larger visual angle than yesterday's revolution,' but that it also subtends a larger angle than to-day's revolution. If one could ever forget one's own personal gratifications and comforts, it would be, I should think, in overlooking a nation's ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... at once recognize in the above description the well-known Ganser symptom-complex, the several variations of which have been so frequently discussed of late years. Ganser[5] further showed that these cases frequently evidenced vivid auditory and visual hallucinations. At the same time there existed a more or less distinct clouding of consciousness, with the simultaneous presence of hysterical stigmata, especially total analgesia. After a short time recovery took place, ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... von Schlichten was on the roof of the Palace, holding the Spear of State, with Firkked's head impaled on the point, while a Terran technician aimed an audio-visual recorder. ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... ye valleys, rise! With heads declined, ye cedars, homage pay! Be smooth, ye rocks! ye rapid floods, give way! The Saviour comes! by ancient bards foretold: Hear him, ye deaf! and all ye blind, behold! He from thick films shall purge the visual ray, And on the sightless eyeball pour the day: 'Tis he th' obstructed paths of sound shall clear And bid new music charm th' unfolding ear: The dumb shall sing, the lame his crutch forego, And leap exulting like the bounding roe. No sigh, no murmur, the wide world shall ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... in his robes and coronet—the beadle in his gaudy livery of scarlet, and purple, and gold—the dignitary in the fulness of his pomp—the demagogue in the triumph of his hollowness—these and other visual and oral cheats by which mankind are cajoled, have passed in review before us, conjured up by the magic wand ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... some displeasure at me, for not observing sufficiently the various objects upon the road. 'If I had your eyes, Sir, (said he) I should count the passengers.' It was wonderful how accurate his observation of visual objects was, notwithstanding his imperfect eyesight, owing to a habit of attention[955]. That he was much satisfied with the respect paid to him at Dr. Adams's is thus attested by himself: 'I returned last night from Oxford, after a fortnight's ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... a disputed question of priority is an event of very common occurrence. Not so with the true theory of the heavens. So complete is the deception practiced on the senses, that it failed more than once to yield to the suggestion of the truth; and it was only when the visual organs were armed with an almost preternatural instrumental power, that the great fact found ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... thick Films shall purge the visual Ray, v. 5, 6.] And on the sightless Eye-ball pour the Day. 'Tis he th' obstructed Paths of Sound shall clear, And bid new Musick charm th' unfolding Ear, The Dumb shall sing, the Lame his Crutch forego, And leap exulting like the ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... visibility; spectacle, phenomenon, panorama, vista, gapeseed, cynosure; (Colloq.) great number, many, multitude, great quantity. Associated Words: optics, optical, optic, ocular, optician, caligo, astigmatism, perimeter, perimetry, amaurosis, visual, visualize, apparition. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... decision. Emotionally, I must admit, I am tempted to destroy all twenty of the monsters. Intellectually, I realize that we should attempt to capture at least one family group—if we can discover what constitutes a family group in this species. Unfortunately, we cannot tell the sexes apart by visual inspection; the sex organs themselves must be hidden in the folds of that gray hide. And this is evidently not their breeding season, for we have seen ...
— The Asses of Balaam • Gordon Randall Garrett
... now to turn from the actual visual facts and to study the statements of others. While doing so however, we must bear in mind the main outlines of the history of the Congo Free State. The opening up of the Congo was entirely due to the initiative ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... English-German Dictionary, disguised in strong waters. But the thing that struck me most was the general aspect of the country. Everywhere gates. Nowhere fences. The gates guarded the bridges and the canals were the fences, but the canals and the low bridges were not to be seen at a distance, and the visual effect was that of isolated gates. It was an absurd landscape even after the brain had made the ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... or reflex arcs, at the higher levels of the cord, were next investigated: (1) eye-reaction to suddenly appearing stimulus, and (2) speech reaction to visual word stimuli. Dose A (30 cubic centimeters), accelerated the eye-reaction, while dose B (45 cubic centimeters) positively depressed it, agreeing with the simple reaction experiments of Kraepelin. This was the only instance of acceleration of movement of the voluntary ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... Leo. XII., the present Pope's predecessor, was, according to the visual mode of reckoning, the two hundred and fifty-second since Peter the Apostle. Of these 208 were natives of Italy, 14 were Frenchmen, 11 Greeks, 8 Syrians and Dalmatians, 5 Germans, 3 Spaniards, 2 North Africans, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... is established earlier than that for other visual impressions, and with this the ability to recognize members of the family. A little girl, who does not speak at all, looks at pictures with considerable interest in the seventh month, "and points meantime with her little forefinger ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... is a Grub-street attic to let,—-not so much as a joint-stool left in it; my hand writes, not I, from habit, as chickens run about a little when their heads are cut off. Oh for a vigorous fit of gout, colic, toothache—-an earwig{} * in my auditory, a fly in my visual organs; pain is life,—-the sharper the more evidence of life; but this apathy, this death! Did you ever have an obstinate cold, a six or seven weeks' unintermitting chill and suspension of hope, fear, conscience, and everything? Yet do I try ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... sticks and umbrellas: a pair of his gloves lay on the hall table. The same stair-carpet mounted between the same walls; the same old French print, in its narrow black frame, faced her on the landing. This visual continuity was intolerable. Within, a gaping chasm; without, the same untroubled and familiar surface. She must get away from it before she could attempt to think. But, once in her room, she sat down on the lounge, ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... in this well-fenced agricultural area, so the training embraced much route-marching, and barrack-square work, musketry, signalling, visual training, etc. There were several trying marches in the scorching May-June weather, to Clive's native district, Moreton-Say and Market Drayton, to Wem and Hodnet, and to the beautiful scenery of Hawkstone Park, and Iscoyd ...
— The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion) - Record of War Service, 1914-1918 • Various
... mass of mystic symbols is "beautiful, quite lovely." Well, you do not see it. They do see it, because the intellectual process, the process of comprehending the reasons symbolised by these figures and these signs, confers upon them a sort of pleasure, such as an artist has in visual symmetry. Take a science of which I may speak with more confidence, and which is the most attractive of those I am concerned with. It is what we call morphology, which consists in tracing out the unity in variety of the infinitely diversified structures of ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... effectively to the audience. The great Greek dramatists needed a sense of sculpture as well as a sense of poetry; and in the contemporary theatre the playwright must manifest the imagination of the painter as well as the imagination of the man of letters. The appeal of a play is primarily visual rather than auditory. On the contemporary stage, characters properly costumed must be exhibited within a carefully designed and painted setting illuminated with appropriate effects of light and shadow; and the art of music is often called ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... does as a "very common error;" and I cannot agree with him that the facade of Sennacherib's Palace (Layard's 2nd book on Nineveh) is an instance of the kind. The theory that horizontal lines in the plane of the picture should converge to a point on the horizontal line right and left of the visual ray, is by no means new; in truth, every line according to this view must form the segment of a circle more or less, according to circumstances. Apply this principle to the vertical lines of a tower or lofty building, and every such structure ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... appear very inconsistent. In the previous sections I have said that all figures in Flatland present the appearance of a straight line; and it was added or implied, that it is consequently impossible to distinguish by the visual organ between individuals of different classes: yet now I am about to explain to my Spaceland critics how we are able to recognize one another by the ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... flats and apartments we examined on that first day of our career, or "progress," as the recent Mr. Hogarth would put it. Our minds had not then become trained to that perfection of mentality which enables the skilled flat-hunter to carry for days visual ground-plans, elevations, and improvements, of any number of "desirable apartments," and be ready to transcribe the same in black and white ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the Ricaras, and who was as celebrated throughout the wilds of the west for his skill in song as Carolan in the palace of his mountain lord, or Blondel at the court of Coeur de Lion, commenced his tale. As far as the visual organ was concerned, Mr. Verdier was before acquainted with the curious images to which it referred. He had seen, a few miles back, from the Mississippi, a small "willow-bank," rising in the words of the song above ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... means for satisfying the thirst for supernal beauty. Hence the musical lyric is to Poe the only true type of poetry; a long poem does not exist. Readers who respond more readily to auditory than to visual or motor stimulus are therefore Poe's chosen audience. For them he executes, like Paganini, marvels upon his single string. He has easily recognizable devices: the dominant note, the refrain, the "repetend," that is to say the phrase which echoes, ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... face to the ceiling, and the boys held their mouths open that their teeth might not clack together. They closed their eyes: instinct bade them give heed to visual magnetism. Roldan immediately wanted to cough, Adan to scratch his nose. The next few moments were the most agonised of their lives. They felt the priest lift his hands and pass them slowly along the ceiling, they ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... returning to London on June 13. He resumed work on Jephtha, and finished it on August 30. It was some time this year (the precise date is unknown) that he consulted Samuel Sharp, a surgeon of Guy's Hospital, who told him that he was suffering from gutta serena, and that freedom from pain in the visual organs was all that he had to hope for during the remainder of his days. It was a severe shock, especially to a man whose general physical and mental health was already undermined, and it is no wonder that Handel began to give way to periods of profound depression. The ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... slow interview with two purposes, by visual, oral and written tests determining the amount of suggestibility to hypnotic conditioning plus the quicker giving of a card to ...
— Take the Reason Prisoner • John Joseph McGuire
... accompanying the prescriptions are noted the pious axioms to be repeated by the physician, while compounding and giving them to the patient. On the second line of the first page of our manuscript, it is stated that it came from Sais. A large portion of this work is devoted to the visual organs. On the twentieth line of the fifty-fifth page begins the book on the eyes, which fills eight large pages. We were formerly compelled to draw from Greek and Roman authors what we knew about the remedies used for diseases of the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of arrangement of physical objects which results from their spatial relations. We can know, for example, that the earth and moon and sun are in one straight line during an eclipse, though we cannot know what a physical straight line is in itself, as we know the look of a straight line in our visual space. Thus we come to know much more about the relations of distances in physical space than about the distances themselves; we may know that one distance is greater than another, or that it is along the same straight line as the ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... glow is from sodium vapor rockets fired from Wallops. The rockets allow visual measurement of meteorological data. People around here are used to seeing them to the southeast, over Wallops. When I saw that sightings had been made over Swamp Creek at the time of sodium shots, I got an idea. It wasn't much to go on, but it was at least a good clue. ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... mere extension as such, which distinguishes our active dealings with visual and audible sensations from our passive reception of the sensations of taste and smell. For while in the case of the latter a succession of similar stimulations affects us as "more taste of strawberry" or "more smell of rose" when intermittent, or as ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... the ingenious Dr. Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, [10] and published early in the reign of Charles II., a folio which I, in youthful days, not only read but studied, this language is recorded and accurately described amongst many other modes of cryptical communication, oral and visual, spoken, written, or symbolic. And, as the bishop does not speak of it as at all a recent invention, it may probably at that time have been regarded as an antique device for conducting a conversation in secrecy amongst bystanders; and this advantage it has, that it is applicable to ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Signal. Practical visual signals are of two general kinds: electromagnetic devices for moving a target or pointer, and incandescent lamps. The earliest and most widely used visible signal in telephone practice was the annunciator, having a shutter adapted to fall when the ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... if the field were strong enough, we could bring physical objects through space-time, instead of mere visual images. We could pick Virginia up and bring her right here to the crater! I'm sure ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... is that whenever I pass the hotel, which I do constantly, I see the same man. Scientists call that phenomenon an obsession of the visual nerve. ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... But the admirers of Three Men in a Boat see only trousers and butter, trousers and butter; and they find nothing offensive in the manner in which this incongruity has been thrust upon their sight. Their complacent minds receive this funny visual impression because they do not perceive the glaring artifice which for ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... obtained the observer in the ship waves the flag about his head, in token of approval. All this work of noting the effect of the shots must be taken while the airship is under fire, and while circling about within visual range ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... the thinker, in fine, who, to prepare himself for the greatest tasks he undertook, traveled five times over France, studying its life with the eyes of an artist, in the light of history and of psychology, ever preceding his philosophic study with visual investigation, would have been equal ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Marie for a long time, had asked somewhat anxiously about her parents, and had seemed greatly interested by what was told him of M. de Guersaint, this architect and inventor with a weak and exuberant mind. Then he had desired to measure the sufferer's visual field, and by a slight discreet touch had ascertained the locality of the pain, which, under certain pressure, seemed to ascend like a heavy shifting mass towards the breast. He did not appear to attach importance to the paralysis of the legs; but on a ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... question that we have to consider to-night is this: Is the eye, as an organ of vision, commensurate with the whole range of solar radiation—is it capable of receiving visual impressions from all the rays emitted by the sun? The answer is negative. If we allowed ourselves to accept for a moment that notion of gradual growth, amelioration, and ascension, implied by the term evolution, we might fairly conclude that there are ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... reflex present, but somewhat slow. Slight inequality of pupils, right distinctly larger than left. Color sense normal. No contraction of visual field. Slight horizontal nystagmus in both eyes on extreme outward rotation of the eyeballs. (Pupils equal ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... description to make side-remarks are as powerful to destroy unity as are scattered descriptive phrases. The only visual impression that can be effective is ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... creatures are not visible, and consist of single special cells scattered among the epidermal cells of the skin, and connected by means of a sensory nerve fibre with a little bunch of nervous matter in the body. Such a simple visual apparatus serves them only in distinguishing light from darkness, but this to them is most important knowledge, as it enables them to avoid the surface of the earth by day, when their worst enemies, the birds, are in ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... no longer young when he first saw, or, rather, noticed it. "Having found this in one place," he wrote, "I now find it in another. Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray. So, in the largest sense, we find only the ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... of the Mind Are busy with poor Peter Bell; Upon the rights of visual sense Usurping, with a prevalence More terrible than ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... few minutes the bird again disappears anew, but almost immediately reappears. The patient complains from time to time of a pain in the head at a point corresponding to what has been described in this book as the visual centre (some distance above and slightly posterior to the ear)." The magnet also has the same effect in suspending the real perception. One of the patients was shown a Chinese gong and striker, and took fright on ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... occasion to take alarm at this doctrine as if it condemned us to solitary confinement, and to ignorance of the world in which we live. We see and know the world through our eyes and our intelligence, in visual and in intellectual terms: how else should a world be seen or known which is not the figment of a dream, but a collateral power, pressing and alien? In the cognisance which an animal may take of his surroundings—and surely all animals take such cognisance—the subjective and moral ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... enjoyment, with a still smile that seemed to say in kindly triumph, "Was I not right about the tower and the wind that dwells among its pinnacles?" I drank deep of the universal flood, the outspread peace, the glory of the sun, and the haunting shadow of the sea that lay beyond like the visual image of the eternal silence—as it looks to us—that ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... motionless. The persistence and fixity of the phenomenon excluded any idea of hallucination. I am totally exempt from all nervous disorders capable of influencing the sense of sight. The cause of such visual disturbance is, I think, generally due to stomach trouble; and, thank God! I have an excellent stomach. Moreover, visual illusions are accompanied with special abnormal conditions which impress the victims of hallucination themselves, and ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... the evolution of Japan is one of unusual interest; first, because of the fact that Japan has experienced such unique changes in her environment. Her history brings into clear light some principles of evolution which the visual development of a people does not ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... sort of way in which I had never heard a woman spoken of before, was coming down the stairs, and my first sensation was that of profound astonishment at this evidence that she did really exist. And even then the visual impression was more of colour in a picture than of the forms of actual life. She was wearing a wrapper, a sort of dressing-gown of pale blue silk embroidered with black and gold designs round the ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... purely reproductive imagination with great eagerness and success. The works on the different image-groups—visual, auditory, tactile, motor—are known to everyone, and form a collection of inquiries solidly based on subjective and objective observation, on pathological facts and laboratory experiments. The study ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... of Booth had to be cut from his foot; within were the words "J. Wilkes." The doctor says he did not notice these, but that visual defect may cost him his neck. The two men waited around the house all day, but toward evening they slipped their horses from the stable and rode away in the direction ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... story, and only wrote in a high state of excitement when the "afflatus" was upon him. So far as we may judge from his description, he seems to have realised his story first as a complex psychological situation, not as a series of disconnected pictures. He thought in abstractions not in visual images, and he had next to make his abstractions concrete by inventing figures whose actions should be the result of the mental and moral conflict he had conceived. Godwin's attitude to his art forms a striking contrast to that ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... cigarette haughtily. "We in psychology have found certain stimuli productive of consistent human response. Especially true in tactile sensation, this, however, is not as true in the auditory and visual." ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... on the prepared plate are not exactly the same as those which are chiefly concerned in the production of the image on the retina of the human eye. A reflecting mirror, however, brings all the rays, both those which are chemically active and those which are solely visual, to one and the same focus. The same reflecting instrument may therefore be used either for looking at the heavens or for taking pictures on a photographic plate which has been substituted for the ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... of course, was intentional—in case enemy ears were listening. Actually, the small fleet was to use a variant on the tin can shield which protected the Platform. It would be most effective if visual observation was impossible. The fleet was seven ships in very ragged formation. Most improbably, after the long three-gravity acceleration, they were still within a fifty-mile globe of space. Number Four loitered behind, but was ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... Lodge—the name was the choice of a former tenant—the work of the day had begun in real earnest. Instinctively slackening his pace, he went by the house with his eyes fastened on the hedge opposite, being so intent on what might, perhaps, be described as a visual alibi for Bassett's benefit, in case the lad still happened to be there, that he almost failed to notice that Hartley was busy in his front garden and that Joan was standing by him. He stopped short and ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... has not forgotten him, will be for him, as he is by no means colour-blind, by no means a colourless place. He will suffer it to come to him, as his pages convey it in turn to us, with the liveliest variety of hue, as in that conspicuously visual emblem of it, the outline of which (essentially characteristic of himself as it seems) he had really borrowed from the old Eleatic teacher who had tried so hard to close the bodily eye that he might the better ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... novelty to me then, however, and I entered into it with much zeal and curiosity. I wanted to see how the lambs would behave, and also how the parasites would enjoy it. A boy's mind is eager for all kinds of visual information. ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... his arm he duplicates in wood and steel; the lenses in his eyes in glass; the visual impressions of his brain on chemically sensitised wood-pulp. He is able, reasoning from events and knowing the law, to control the blind forces and direct their operation. Having ascertained the laws of development, he ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... brutal—are first read in their true meaning by an age learned in the philosophy of the human heart. Of this philosophy the Romans had, by the necessities of education and domestic discipline not less than by original constitution of mind, the very narrowest visual range. In no literature whatsoever are so few tolerable notices to be found of any great truths in Psychology. Nor could this have been otherwise amongst a people who tried every thing by the standard of social value; never seeking for a canon of excellence, in man ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... alone. When you read a book there are only three things of which you may be conscious: (1) The significance of the words, which is inseparably bound up with the thought. (2) The look of the printed words on the page—I do not suppose that anybody reads any author for the visual beauty of the words on the page. (3) The sound of the words, either actually uttered or imagined by the brain to be uttered. Now it is indubitable that words differ in beauty of sound. To my mind one of the most beautiful ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... might have held privately, his genial exterior did not betray a shadow of dissent. For a full minute he continued to smoke as though he derived an actual visual enjoyment from the blue sprays that travelled and dispersed across the room. He had already placed before his visitor a box containing cigars of a brand which that gentleman keenly appreciated but generally regarded as unattainable, and the matter-of-fact ease and certainty ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... contemplative faculties an extraordinary fascination, to wit: wherein does the mind, in itself a muscle, escape from the laws of the physical, and wherein and wherefore do the laws of the physical exercise so inexorable a jurisdiction over the processes of the mind, so that a disorder of the visual nerve actually distorts the asomatous and veils ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... its head, and makes such movements of escape as are possible. What is the meaning of these facts? Why does not the frown make it smile, and the mother's laugh make it weep? There is but one answer. Already in its developing brain there is coming into play the structure through which one cluster of visual and auditory impressions excites pleasurable feelings, and the structure through which another cluster of visual and auditory impressions excites painful feelings. The infant knows no more about the ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... invention of stories, as a result in part of the second difference; and to think well of people and to be easily reconciled to them as a result of the third.' Thorndike finds the chief differences to be that the female varies less from the average standard, is more observant of small visual details, less often color-blind, less interested in things and their mechanisms, more interested in people and their feelings, less given to pursuing, capturing and maltreating living things, and more given to nursing, comforting and relieving them than is ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... no visual on the call, but the voice sounded urgent. I relayed the request without requiring special authentication, since the station was precisely on the correct settings, no inimical culture is known to be operating in this sector, and the coded call was correct. ...
— Indirection • Everett B. Cole
... into which these contributions were eventually gathered together); but most of the sketches were Mr. Boughton's, and the charming, amusing text is altogether his, save in the sense that it commemorates his companion's impressions as well as his own—the delightful, irresponsible, visual, sensual, pictorial, capricious impressions of a painter in a strange land, the person surely whom at particular moments one would give most to be. If there be anything happier than the impressions of a painter, it is the impressions of two, ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... nobler and better," I hereby tender my services to pilot them through that Perdition which does not hover indeterminate in the inane limboes of dogmatic theology, but hath a well-defined latitude and longitude; is visual, tactual,—in which untold millions of mankind writhe and shriek from ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... what reaches of farther imaginings do we greet the day, and how variously! Our eyes do not require a visual picture of the lone wild turkey on his cypress roost to know that he is ruffling his feathers, craning his neck inquisitively downward in all directions, before chancing to descend to earth and breakfast; nor ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... making the creations of a Jacquard loom mere child's play. The body is like a vast mental depot with lines running out into all the world. Everything outside has a desk inside where it transacts its special line of business. There is a visual desk where sunbeams make up their accounts; an aural desk where melodies conduct their negotiations; a memory desk where actions and motives are recorded; a logical desk where reasons and arguments are received and filed. Truly God hath woven the bones and sinews that fence ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... to her in the main by free grace, and not by training, and though she slipped at times from the beaten path, her extraordinary ear and good visual memory kept her from many or flagrant mistakes. It was her intention, especially when saying her prayers at night, to look up all doubtful words in her small dictionary, before copying her Thoughts into the sacred book ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... its quality, that counts. In specimens that show a very large proportion of late wood it may be noticeably more porous and weigh considerably less than the late wood in pieces that contain but little. One can judge comparative density, and therefore to some extent weight and strength, by visual inspection. ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... all sun-shine, as when his beams at noon Culminate from the equator, as they now Shot upward still direct, whence no way round Shadow from body opaque can fall; and the air, No where so clear, sharpened his visual ray To objects distant far, whereby he soon Saw within ken a glorious Angel stand, The same whom John saw also in the sun: His back was turned, but not his brightness hid; Of beaming sunny rays a golden tiar Circled his head, nor less his locks behind Illustrious ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... the average of history, it will be found that the Bible, in its historical parts, is not so strictly historical as to preclude associations of another sort. The Bible is remarkable for a visual and embodied relief, a bold and vivid detail. We know of no book, if we may except the compositions of professed dramatists, that contains so much of personal feeling and incident. In simplicity and directness, in freedom from exaggeration, and in the general unreserve of its expression, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... him; a considerable share of the fool and profligate was naturally engrafted in his character. A large black mark, in the shape of a half-moon, appeared to have been strongly indented by hard knuckles, below the left visual organ,—ornaments that are as frequently to be seen upon the inhabitants of St. Giles's, as rings are upon the visitors of St. James's. His ruffianly country dress, clownish manners, broad dialect of canny Yorkshire, with a certain cunning cast of the eye,—contracted no doubt ...
— Sinks of London Laid Open • Unknown
... hard-fighting Covenanters were tossed out, and the rest remained at home to distribute the prey; the lax party had the organization and held the Church; the strict party suffered disintegration and were banished. But such a view is only superficial; yea, it is a visual illusion. ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... generous, albeit so alien to the civilization of the present day. Lillian could but realize that the ministering angel is of no time or nationality, and the transcendent beauty of its apparition may well be a matter of spiritual and not merely visual perception. The heart of a woman is no undecipherable palimpsest for the successive register of fleeting impressions. Here was written in indelible script the tenderest thought of affection, the kindest charity, and all the soft graces of fostering sentiment, with no compensatory ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Code, given herewith, also called the Continental Code and the International Morse Code, is used by the Army and Navy, and for cabling and wireless telegraphy. It is used for visual signalling by hand, flag, Ardois lights, torches, heliograph, lanterns, etc., and for sound signalling with ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... practically prevented, and such cases as occurred yielded quickly when zinc and cocaine tablets were used and the eyes obtained rest. An undoubted factor in the causation of snow-blindness is the strain caused by the continual efforts at visual accommodation made necessary on dull days when the sun is obscured, and there is a complete absence of all ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... used exclusively for the purposes set out in condition (ii), through broadcasts lawfully made which are intended for recipients on the territory of the Contracting State, including broadcasts made through the medium of sound or visual recordings lawfully and exclusively made for the purpose ...
— The Universal Copyright Convention (1988) • Coalition for Networked Information
... it would be incredible to an inhabitant of cities, to one among a busy throng, to what extent we succeeded. It was as a man confined in a dungeon, whose small and grated rift at first renders the doubtful light more sensibly obscure, till, the visual orb having drunk in the beam, and adapted itself to its scantiness, he finds that clear noon inhabits his cell. So we, a simple triad on empty earth, were multiplied to each other, till we became all in all. We stood like trees, whose roots are loosened by the wind, which support ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... tradesman has had to contend with in procuring payment of the account, is the degree of laxity with which he may expect to be favoured in the examination of the items; especially if he have not omitted the visual means of corrupting the fidelity of the servants. The accuracy of a bill of old date is not in general very easily ascertainable, and it would seem to be but an ungracious return for the accommodation ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. 577 - Volume 20, Number 577, Saturday, November 24, 1832 • Various
... a limited freedom. To make sure that I should retain possession of it, I placed it in my mouth and held it snugly against my cheek. Its presence there did not interfere with my speech; nor did it invite visual detection. But had I known as much about strait-jackets and their adjustment as I learned later, I should have resorted to no such ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... physic laws, Empalms the empyrean or dissects a gaz, Weighs the vast orbs of heaven, bestrides the sky, Walks on the windows of an insect's eye; Turns then to self, more curious still to trace The whirls of passion that involve the race, That cloud with mist the visual lamp of God, And plunge the poniard in fraternal blood. Here fails his light. The proud Titanian ray O'er physic nature sheds indeed its day; Yet leaves the moral in chaotic jars, The spoil of violence, the sport of wars, Presents contrasted parts of one great ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... sentimentalist. He saw exactly, and saw all things in colour; the world was for him so much booty for the eye. Endowed with a marvellous memory, an unwearied searcher of the vocabulary, he could transfer the visual impression, without a faltering outline or a hue grown dim, into words as exact and vivid as the objects which he beheld. If his imagination recomposed things, it was in the manner of some admired painter; he looked on nature through the medium of a Zurbaran ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... body still drawn well back within the shadow line of the overhanging cornice Mr. Leary, coyly protruded his head and took visual inventory of the neighbourhood. So far as any plan whatsoever had formed in the mind of our diffident adventurer he meant to bide where he was for the moment. Here, where he had shelter of a sort, he would recapture ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... the horizon which occupied the visual rays and thoughts of the doctor, being opposite to the west, was illuminated by the transcendent reflection of twilight, as if it were day. This arc, limited in extent, and surrounded by streaks of ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... that the book will be found particularly valuable from the standpoint of visual education, and well adapted also for ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard
... Visual signalling is effected at night in the Morse code by means of a lamp fitted with an easily-moved shutter, which passes or cuts off the light at the will of the operator. Readers who know the Morse code might well go to the trouble of constructing in duplicate ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... utilitarian, we are executive, we are didactic, we are earth-tied, we are hopelessly adult! Actually children use their ears and noses and fingers much more than do we adults. Our stories rely mainly upon visual recalls. We forget to listen even to birds whose message is pure melody. And how many of us hear the city sounds which surround us, the characteristic whirr of revolving wheels, the vibrating rhythm of horses' feet, the crunch of footsteps in the snow? Noises we ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... with earnest, direct and undeviating attention, as when I suffered my eye only to glance in its vicinity alone. I was not, of course, at that time aware that this apparent paradox was occasioned by the center of the visual area being less susceptible of feeble impressions of light than the exterior portions of the retina. This knowledge, and some of another kind, came afterwards in the course of an eventful five years, during which I have dropped the prejudices of my former ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... organisation, and to give great weight to its educative influences. The potentiality of language, as the vocal symbol of thought, lay in the faculty of modulating and articulating the voice. The potentiality of writing, as the visual symbol of thought, lay in the hand that could draw; and in the mimetic tendency, which, as we know, was gratified by drawing, as far back as the days of Quaternary man. With speech as the record, in tradition, of the experience ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... then a definite root in his own nervous and muscular energy. It was no mere preference which might be indulged or not, but an instinctive bias, which deeply affected his way not only of imagining but of conceiving the relations of things. In this brilliant visual speech of sharply cut angles and saliences, of rugged incrustations, and labyrinthine multiplicity, Browning's romantic hunger for the infinite had to find its expression; and it is clear that the bias implicit in speech imposed itself in some points upon the matter it ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... to look over the packet, and does so without knowing the reason of the request, but when he perceives the card on which the portrait was suggested, he at once recognizes the imaginary portrait. It is probable that some insignificant mark has, owing to his visual hyperacuity, fixed the image in the ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... without any true constructive power, but with the mind adrift, blindly and passively following the laws of association, and with reason and will in torpor; the mental images being perhaps as varied and as vivid, but also as purposeless and unsystematized as the visual images in a kaleidoscope; such fantasy (often loosely called imagination) appears in dreaming, reverie, somnambulism, and intoxication. Fantasy in ordinary usage simply denotes capricious or erratic fancy, as appears in the adjective fantastic. Imagination ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... period in history is like a more or less extended real landscape: it has, if you will, actual, chemically defined colours in this and that, if you consider this and that separate and unaffected by any kind of visual medium; and measurable distances also between this point and the other, if you look down upon it as from a balloon. But, like a real landscape, it may also be seen from different points of view, and under different lights; then, according as you stand, the features of the scene ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... smoothed him down as well as we could by saying that we now thought we could see some faint resemblance to the objects referred to, and he looked as if he had, as the poet says, "cleared from thick films of vice the visual ray." ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... thing that was becoming more and more apparent in my own mind. Here, I should say, is a world, obviously on the face of it well organised. Compared with our world, it is like a well-oiled engine beside a scrap-heap. It has even got this confounded visual organ swivelling about in the most alert and lively fashion. But that's by the way.... You have only to look at all these houses below. (We should be sitting on a seat on the Gutsch and looking down on the Lucerne of ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... suddenly become clouded over with a whitish-blue opacity, and this will remain until the compression is interrupted. The interior of the eye contains three transparent media for the refraction of the rays of light on their way from the cornea to the visual nerve. Of these media the anterior one (aqueous humor) is liquid, the posterior (vitreous humor) is semisolid, and the intermediate one (crystalline lens) is solid. The space occupied by the aqueous humor corresponds nearly to the portion of the eye covered ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... assistant in his father's shop. But such was his aptitude for learning, that he was sent in 1728 to Pembroke College, Oxford. His youth was not a happy one: he was afflicted with scrofula, "which disfigured a countenance naturally well formed, and hurt his visual nerves so much that he did not see at all with one of his eyes." He had a morbid melancholy,—fits of dejection which made his life miserable. He was poor; and when, in 1731, his father died insolvent, he was obliged to leave the university without a degree. After ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... appears to have been an auditory organ, a single round drum at the back of the head-body, and eyes with a visual range not very different from ours except that, according to Philips, blue and violet were as black to them. It is commonly supposed that they communicated by sounds and tentacular gesticulations; this is asserted, for instance, in the able but hastily compiled pamphlet (written evidently by someone ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... appearance is, that the soul looks out at the tree; but the fact is, the image of the tree comes to the brain, and is there seen. Now the brain may be impressed, and respond by natural vision, from an internal as well as from an external communication. We see this in cases of visual aberrations, the instances of which given in books, and clearly authenticated, are innumerable. Things are distinctly seen in a room which have no existence in nature; and the illusion is so perfect that it seems impossible for ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... system; but in broad outline the nature of the organic mechanism and the manner of its functioning may at least be provisionally conjectured in the present state of physiological knowledge. Similarly in the case of the pecking of newly-hatched chicks; there is a visual presentation, there is probably a cooperating group of stimuli from the alimentary tract in need of food, there is an adaptive application of the activities in a definite mode of behaviour. Like data are afforded ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... English and Dutch masters held her with a spell forever new. And, as for the exquisite, naively self-conscious works of Greuze, Lancret, Fragonard, Boucher, Watteau, and Nattier, she adored them with all the fresh and natural appetite of a capacity for visual pleasure unjaded. ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... the idea which was taking form in those words. We shall see this more plainly when we come to transcribe some of Sir Philip Sidney's work. There is no irreverence in it. Nor can I take it as any sign of hardness that Raleigh should treat the visual image of his own anticipated death with so much coolness, if the writer of a little elegy on his execution, when Raleigh was fourteen years older than at the presumed date of the foregoing verses, describes him truly ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... classified with any writer of his own age or of any literary age in the past. His tremendous strength, his visual faculty, even his mannerisms, are his own. He has written too much for his own fame, but although the next century will discard nine-tenths of his work, it will hold fast to the other tenth as among the best short stories and poems that our ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... in the language of man, and in that of nature. The sound sun, or the figures s, u, n, are purely arbitrary modes of recalling the object, and for visual mere objects they are not only sufficient, but have infinite advantages from their very nothingness per se. But the language of nature is a subordinate Logos, that was in the beginning, and was with the thing it represented, and was the thing ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... to represent it to ourselves as a linking together of distinct notes instead of the uninterrupted continuity of the melody. But why? Simply because our auditive perception has assumed the habit of saturating itself with visual images. We hear the melody across the vision which the conductor of the orchestra can have of it in looking at his score. We represent to ourselves notes linked on to notes on an imaginary sheet of paper. We think ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... render an object visible; and if the height of the Piton greatly exceeded its base, the angle in the horizontal direction might be still smaller, and the object still continue to make an impression on our visual organs; for micrometrical observations have proved that the limit of vision is but a minute only, when the dimensions of the objects are the same in every direction. We distinguish at a distance, by the eye only, trunks of trees insulated in ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... oversights Boldwood was guilty of, were natural to the mood, and still more natural to the circumstances. The great aids to idealization in love were present here: occasional observation of her from a distance, and the absence of social intercourse with her—visual familiarity, oral strangeness. The smaller human elements were kept out of sight; the pettinesses that enter so largely into all earthly living and doing were disguised by the accident of lover and loved-one not being on visiting terms; and there was hardly awakened a ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others. In whatever form a slowly-accumulated past lives in the blood—whether in the concrete image of the old house stored with visual memories, or in the conception of the house not built with hands, but made up of inherited passions and loyalties—it has the same power of broadening and deepening the individual existence, of attaching it by mysterious links of kinship to all the mighty sum ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... by the controls who have been instrumental in giving the information about Mars, the purpose of these clairvoyant pictures was to give the compiler of this book real visual evidence as to life on Mars; and in particular, real pictures setting forth its topography, which could be elucidated in ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... the brain by the optic nerve, but everything came at once, so the impression of sight was confused. The result in the brain, however, was clear and permanent. The only drawback is that you haven't the visual memory of what you have learned, and that sometimes makes it hard to use your knowledge. You don't know whether you know anything about a certain subject or not until after you go digging around in your brain looking ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... towards Avignon, delayed by the condition of the roads covered by an unusual fall of snow which was now melting under the breath of a warm breeze from the south. On the way they pass "between the two hills a telegraph making signals." This was, of course, a semaphore by means of which visual signals ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... air, weighed with my sighs so chill, That hidest heaven's own light thick mists among, Give back those sighs to my sad heart, nor wrong My visual ray with thy dark ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... she was kneeling in a corner of the room by the letter files, one of which she had placed on the floor, she recognized his step in the outer office, heard him pause to joke with young Caldwell, and needed not the visual proof—when after a moment he halted on the threshold—of the fact that his usual, buoyant spirits were restored. He held a cigar in his hand, and in his eyes was the eager look with which she had become ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... grounds Dalgetty and Elena crouched in the long stiff grass and looked at the place they must enter. The man had had to lower his visual sensitivity as they approached the light. There were floodlights harsh on dock, airfield, barracks and lawn, with parties of guards moving around each section. Light showed in only one window of the house, on the second story. Bancroft must be there, pacing and peering out into the ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... appear in the ancient of days." I had scarcely concluded this ideal sentence when my reverie became deeper, the ruins surrounding me appeared to vanish from my sight, the light of the moon became more intense, and the orb itself seemed to expand in a flood of splendour. At the same time that my visual organs appeared so singularly affected, the most melodious sounds filled my ear, softer yet at the same time deeper and fuller than I had ever heard in the most harmonious and perfect concert. It appeared to me that I had entered a new ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy |
