"Volition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... expelled and ruined. But if he served the Order well, he belonged to a vast incalculably-potent organism, of which he might naturally, after such training as he had received, be proud. The sacrifice of his personal volition and intelligence made him part of an indestructible corporation, which seemed capable of breaking all resistance by its continuity of will and effecting all purposes by its condensed sagacity. Nor was he in the hands of rigid disciplinarians. His peccadilloes ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... for the dogs had become excited, the sheep were running wildly; but the girl's exquisite voice was as clear and calm as ever, and the big horse cantered over the broken ground, taking a big boulder now and again with lilting jump, as if he were going by his own volition and was well up in all the points of the game. After a time the dogs got the sheep into a heap, and the young girl rode round them; but something still seemed to be wrong, for she got down, and, leaving the horse quite free, made her ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... photographer is observant or not. It will remain upon the plate and may be reproduced under proper conditions. Such is the subconscious memory, and it is generated automatically by each of us during every moment of time, independently of our volition, in the following manner. ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... of life. In it is involved all one's personal happiness as well as all his power for usefulness. To feel that this ever-flowing current of events is something entirely outside one's own choice or volition is to stand helpless—if not hopeless—before the spectacle of life. It is out of this aimless and chaotic state that resort is had to the seeking of all kinds of divination, omens, prophecies, and foreshadowings, with the ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... end of her third year in America, wrote to the police appealing for help, but the lieutenant who in response to her letter visited the house, was convinced by Lair that she was there of her own volition and that therefore he could do nothing for her. It is easy to see why it thus becomes part of the business to break down a girl's moral nature by all those horrible devices which are constantly used by the owner of a white slave. Because life ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... glittered on its summit, and sweeping slowly down, held it within reach of Animula. The sylph took it in her delicate hand, and began to eat. My attention was so entirely absorbed by her, that I could not apply myself to the task of determining whether this singular plant was or was not instinct with volition. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... remembered a book he could show Robin tomorrow and he thought of that. There was also a game in a little box which could be easily carried under his arm. His mother was "thinking" and he was used to that. It came on her sometimes and of his own volition he always, on such occasion, kept as quiet as ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... as coolly as if nothing out of the usual course had happened; he and his crew having, seemingly, regarded the attempt to board them as men regard the natural phenomena of the planets, or in other words, as if the ship, of which they were merely parts, had escaped by her own instinct or volition. This habit of considering the machine as the governing principle is rather general among seamen, who, while they ease a brace, or drag a bowline, as the coachman checks a rein, appear to think it is only permitting ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... quite prompt. "I'm not giving anything—or doing anything. What has happened seems to me to have come about simply and naturally, like the sunrise or the seasons, because it's the fullness of time and what God means. I can't say more about it than that. If it depended on my own volition I shouldn't be able to speak of it so frankly. But now—if you want ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... far back in an overlooked corner of Eden, and I prefer the forceful father influence that teaches one to overcome rather than the mother cult which is to bear, for so much is cumbrously borne in self-glorified martyrdom by women of their own volition. ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... than a mere human reaction, I believe. I have not the power of writing myself at all, though I have felt the pencil turn in my hand—a peculiar spiral motion like the turning of the tables, and independent of volition, but the power is not with me strong enough to ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... OF THE, the doctrine that in and under the dominion of pure reason the will is free, and not free otherwise; that in this element the Will "reigns unquestioned and by Divine right"; only in minds in which volition is treated as a synonym of Desire does this doctrine ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... capabilities of magnetism was entertained at the same time. It was believed that a sympathetic alphabet could be made on the flesh, by means of which persons could correspond with each other, and communicate all their ideas with the rapidity of volition, although thousands of miles apart. From the arms of two persons a piece of flesh was cut, and mutually transplanted, while still warm and bleeding. The piece so severed grew to the new arm on which it was placed; but still retained so close a sympathy with its native ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... that she is about to die. With her head resting on her shoulder, she has glided before the smoking altar. Her body has lost all rigidity on her bending legs, her arms hang down at her side; her glance is distracted; she has lost all volition in the use of her limbs; and she is there, sinking motionless, her throat scarcely distending with a breath, turning white under her crown of roses, which the painter's brush has made to pale in sympathy. Between her body and the altar a young priest is leaning in horrified ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... not give account of all sides of our laboratory work. An essential part of the investigations every year has been the study of the active processes, such as attention, apperception, and volition. During the last year several papers from these fields have been completed, but we were unable to include them in this volume on account of the space limits; they are kept back for the second volume, in which accordingly the essays on the active functions ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... parable and that of the lost sheep there are certain notable differences, though the lesson in each is in general the same. The sheep had strayed by its own volition; the coin[963] had been dropped, and so was lost as a result of inattention or culpable carelessness on the part of its owner. The woman, discovering her loss institutes a diligent search; she sweeps the house, and perhaps learns of dirty corners, dusty recesses, cobwebby nooks, ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... figure swaying, more than shoulder high, and disappearing up above into the darkness. For me, under my cowl, it was suffocatingly hot; but I seemed to move forward, following, swept along without any volition of my own. It appeared an immensely long journey; and then, as we went at last up the cathedral steps, a voice cried harshly, "Death to the heretic!" My heart stood still. I clutched frantically at the handle of a pistol that ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... answer to his hail, and Stevens paused in shocked amazement. He knew that never of her own volition would she be out so late—Nadia was gone! A rapid tour of inspection quickly confirmed that which he already knew only too well. Forgotten was his hunger, forgotten the power plant, forgotten everything except the fact that ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... acquaintance with death impress us! What a thrill passes through the living, as it bends over the inanimate body, from which the spirit has departed! The clay that returns to the dust from which it sprung, the tenement that was lately endued with volition and life, the frame that exhibited a perfection of mechanism, deriding all human power, and confounding all human imagination, now an inanimate mass, rapidly decomposing, and soon to become a heap ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... how it is that women possess tenacity of will in precise proportion to the frivolity of their lives? All these butterflies have a volition of iron." ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... of mental phenomena, as revealed in consciousness, and not constructed in an "independent" and a priori method. The most careful psychological analysis has resolved the whole complex phenomena of mind into thought, feeling, and volition.[61] These orders of phenomena are radically and essentially distinct. They differ not simply in degree but in kind, and it is only by an utter disregard of the facts of consciousness that they can be confounded. Feeling is not reason, nor can it ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... swaying flowers, changed by one written word into a desert of silence. It is the sudden annihilation of purpose and significance in a body and mind vital with it; so that as we close the poem we seem to see for ever moving up and down the garden path a stiff, brocaded gown, moving with no volition. The days will pass: the daffodils will change to roses, to asters, to snow; but the unbroken pattern ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... Nell Darrel there not more than twenty minutes since, drugged into complete insensibility. She could not have gone from the seat of her own volition. ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... this blind obedience the text of her entire character. It is difficult for those who think very earnestly for their children to know when their children are thinking on their own account. The exercise of their volition we construe as revolt. Our love does not like to be invalided and deposed from its command, and here I think yonder old thrush on the lawn who has just kicked the last of her lank offspring out of the nest to go shift for itself, much the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... gathered on its way sea-birds and birds from the land; there were gulls, electric white and black man-of-war birds, butterflies, and they all seemed imprisoned under a great drifting dome of glass. As they went, travelling like things without volition and in a dream, with a hum and a roar the south-west quadrant of the cyclone burst on the island, and the whole bitter business ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... of Lady ——. Her sister, who is thought handsomer, and is a lovely creature (and morally and mentally as worthy of that epithet as physically), has not this severely sweet expression, or sweetly stern, if you prefer it, though this implies a shade of volition, which falsifies the application of it. This is what I especially admire in Lady ——, who adds to that faultless Greek outline, which in its integrity and justness of proportion seems the type of truth, an eye whose color deepens, and a fine-textured cheek, where the ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... worked upon by the Jansenists, suddenly refused to appear. In a statement drawn up before a notary, we read: "To-day appeared before me, the Sieur Jean Ramponneau, cabaretier, living in the basse Courtille, who has of his own free will and volition declared that the serious reflections which he has made upon the dangers and the obstacles to the salvation of those persons who appear upon the stage of a theatre, and upon the justness of the censures which the ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... log in a tideway; others, without appendages, were as inert and helpless as the huge red-and-gray disks. He saw four ball-shaped creatures float by, clinging together; then a group of eight, then one of twelve. All these, to the extent of their volition, seemed to be in a state of extreme agitation ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... we can draw an extremely practical conclusion. If, namely, we wish our trains of ideation and volition to be copious and varied and effective, we must form the habit of freeing them from the inhibitive influence of reflection upon them, of egoistic pre-occupation about their results. Such a habit, like other habits, can be formed. ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... than to start with inanimate molecules and smuggle life into them; and that, therefore, what we call the inorganic world must be regarded as up to a certain point living, and instinct, within certain limits, with consciousness, volition, and power of concerted action. IT IS ONLY OF LATE, HOWEVER, THAT I ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... obligations. Our text is not only a remonstrance on the grounds of prudence, showing God-neglecting men that they are foolish, but it is an appeal to conscience, convincing them that they are sinful. God loves us and cares for us. We are bound to Him by ties which do not depend on our own volition. And so there is punishment for the sin, and the evils experienced in a godless life are penal ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... day, wearing a strange metallic apparatus over ear and mouth, watching small lights that wink significantly at her and perpetually pulling out and slipping in and releasing little flexible strings that seem to have a resilient volition of their own. They hunted out Mrs. Barnet and heard her ideas about conjoint homes for spinsters in the Garden Suburb. And then they went over a Training College for elementary teachers and visited the Post Office and then came back to more unobtrusive contemplation, ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... doctrine that the state's promise to pay is payment, and Napoleon was one of these. He was equally childish in regard to the knotty social question which confronted him, apparently believing that his personal volition, as the expression of political power, was or ought to be equivalent to popular spontaneity. The mixture of the old and new aristocracies had, in spite of all efforts, been mechanical rather than chemical, except so far as that the former was rather the preponderating ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... above hers. This was a naked savage with hawk-like face. Yet the eyes were the ones that she had come to know so well, half tragic, somber, but clear and, toward her, tender, very, very tender. With a shuddering sigh, Rhoda looked away. But against her own volition she ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... the moist odour of the river and the reeds; an atmosphere now hot, now cold; profound silence. Suddenly, unaccountably, she lost all power of volition and of thought; her limbs relaxed, and she ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... to instinct is reason. They are the negative and positive of mental volition. The man who retains the animal gift of unreasoning divination, preserving that clear power against the handicaps which mind training and education impose, is necessarily psychic, or, as they say ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... on yoga it is laid down that the main duct should be brought under the control of the will. The soul may then, by an act of volition, be withdrawn from the whole physical system into the convolutions of the brain in the head. The brain, in the language of yogins, is a lot us of a thousand leaves. If the soul be withdrawn into it, the living creature will ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... has a listener to bother about Pierrot? What's Pierrot to him or he to Pierrot? Perhaps Schoenberg had caught his fish in the musical net he used, and what more did he want, or what more could his listeners expect?—for to be hooked or netted by the stronger volition of an artist is the object of ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... viewed death afar off, but not until the past three days had it threatened her own loved ones. In that hour she was experiencing the extremity of sorrow, and each aching nerve in her body seemed to possess a stabbing volition of its own, for again and again the torturing points ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... in the heart of the maiden? 'Where it had died!'—it had not died. Seventy years had passed, and the love-story was presently enacting itself, as all past and all future must for ever be enacting to beings for whom time is not. Then, too, where was he who, by some means, whether of his own volition or not, had become so much a part of the pulsing life of a young girl that, when all else of life passed from her with the weight of years, her heart still remained obedient to him? Where was he? Had his life gone out like the ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... her new-found joy, it seemed as though she were borne along on the waves of the music without effort or volition of her own. She dared not trust herself to speak. Once or twice she raised her eyes to meet the dark ones whose gaze she felt upon her face, but the love-light shining in their depths overpowered her glance and she turned ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... implies that the taking of the census had been so well established a custom that it was a long time before Rome itself had cared to enact a law which changed the year of census taking in those towns which had not of their own volition made their census ...
— A Study Of The Topography And Municipal History Of Praeneste • Ralph Van Deman Magoffin
... behind them, stirred to life at last, but the horsemen did not hear. What were those looming up ahead? Not naked slingers—armoured cavalry! Hasdrubal with his Gauls and Spaniards were before them—upon them; and all sense and volition were lost ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... proved a drain upon the Vanderbilt fortune, although, thanks to their large share in the control of laws and industrial institutions, the Vanderbilts possess at all times the power of recouping themselves at volition. The American marriages, on the other hand, contracted by this family, have interlinked other ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... Royal Family advances us to the most marked of all the superficial English characteristics; or, perhaps, loyalty is not superficial, but is truly of the blood and bone, and not reasoned principle, but a passion induced by the general volition. Whatever it is, it is one of the most explicitly as well as the most tacitly pervasive of the English idiosyncrasies. A few years ago—say, fifteen or twenty—it was scarcely known in its present form. It was not known at all with many in the time of the latest and ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... side and then on the other, and weighs them until the two sides hang in equipoise, with no prepondering motive to enable him to decide. He is in stable equilibrium, and so does not move at all of his own volition, but moves very easily at the ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... of a lump of reef falling from the roof somewhere far down the drive brought Dick sharply to his feet. His work was not yet accomplished. The scheme that had come to him without volition was nevertheless clearly set forth in his mind. He started dragging at Hardy again, and gradually drew him to the ordinary level of the drive. Once the water attained this height it would flow away towards the shaft, and do the young man no harm. Dick feared Harry was dead; but he did not reason, ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... mind too dulled to be conscious of more than a despairing dejection. As he scarcely expected to reach the post, it did not matter how soon he fell. Yet, by instinctive effort stronger than conscious volition, the struggle for life continued; and Lisle's keen anxiety concerning him diminished as the hours went by. Every step brought them nearer warmth and shelter, and made it more possible that help could be obtained if the lad collapsed. That was the only course that would be available because ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... always yield to the strongest motive; and motives are not of our own creation or choice, but are brought to bear upon us independently of our own action. There has been, from the creation until now, an unbroken series of causes and effects, and we can trace every human volition to some anterior cause or causes belonging to this inevitable series, so that, in order for the volition to have been other than it was, some member of this ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... of volition is the life of action. Now all our actions represent a resultant of the forces of impulse and inhibition, and by constant repetition of actions this resultant may become almost habitual and unconscious. Such ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... upward along the rough door all the forces of his being down to the last shred of vitality. At once the indomitable spirit of the woods-runner answered the call. Regis Brugiere concentrated his will on a pinpoint. Like a sprinter his volition was fixed on a ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... human affairs; or, as Mr. Buckle expresses it, that social phenomena 'are the results of large and general causes which, working on the aggregate of society, must produce certain consequences, without regard to the volition of the particular men of whom the society is composed.' Now, though free agency may co-exist with invariable regularity, it obviously cannot co-exist with necessary regularity, which, consequently, is incompatible likewise with moral responsibility. If men ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... time when the little party arrived there happened to be a circle gathered around one of the most accomplished performers to witness an exhibition of his skill, and surely nothing could be more graceful. Without sensible effort, and as if by mere volition, he seemed to glide over the glossy surface, now forwards, now backwards, now sideways, now swiftly, now slowly, whirling like an eagle in rapid or dilatory curves, describing all the lines that Euclid ever drew or imagined, and cutting such ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... familiar curly ringlets skipped past on the opposite side of the street. When she had gone perhaps fifty yards, John walked down the steps and followed not too rapidly. He must catch up quite as if by accident, for it would never do to have the meeting occur seemingly of his own volition. ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... information. I believe it scarce will be asserted, that the first species of reasoning alone is ever the cause of any action. As its proper province is the world of ideas, and as the will always places us in that of realities, demonstration and volition seem, upon that account, to be totally removed, from each other. Mathematics, indeed, are useful in all mechanical operations, and arithmetic in almost every art and profession: But it is not of themselves they have any influence: Mechanics are the art of regulating the motions ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... of the bar, Clara panted fever-stricken. The weeks went on; what strength supported her from the Monday morning to the Saturday midnight she could not tell. Acting and refraining, speaking and holding silence, these things were no longer the consequences of her own volition. She wished to break free from her slavery, but had not the force to do so; something held her voice as often as she was about to tell Mrs. Tubbs that this week would be the last. Her body wasted so that all the garments she wore were loose upon her. The only ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... a Frog a Soul? and if so, of what Nature is that Soul?" (1870), a physiological discussion as to the seat of those purposive actions of which the animal is capable after it has lost ordinary volition and consciousness by the removal of the front part of its brain. Are these things attributes of the soul, and are they resident not even in the brain, but in the spinal marrow? If metaphysics starts from psychology, psychology itself depends greatly upon physiology; current ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... one's life of one's own volition is one thing. To permit another to take it in a fashion of his own arbitrary selection is quite another. Hamilton Burton had never been submissive. He meant to die as he had lived—"captain of his soul," and ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... raining, but the fire of filial love was in her heart, and its flame rendered her impervious to creature discomforts. At length the dawn came, and the sun's bright beams soon dispersed the mists of the night, his revivifying rays inspiring the girl with new courage. The horse, of his own volition, struck into a brisker gait, and Francis was obliged to control her emotion as each succeeding moment brought her ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... powerful frame and lowering aspect, and as he came forward and stood in the doorway there was observable in his fierce and desperate countenance no attempt at the insinuation of the other, only a fearful resolution that made her feel like a puppet before him, and drove her, almost without her volition, ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... who could give confidence to her shy spirit to forget the limitations of this world, and to stray forth to meet invisible comrades from other spheres. Sometimes it has been given to an artist to rise, not by his conscious volition, above his wonted power; to portray one beloved face with the force of his emotion rather than that of his capacity, transcending the limits of his ordinary skill, just as a horse will put forth his last ounce of effort in response to the magnetism of one ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... property-holders, who knew that their possessions would double in value the day the United States Constitution was signed. "Thus, in the first place, by the encouragement of our people, and latterly, apparently, by its own volition, the Union has increased enormously in power, till it now embraces 10,000,000 square miles, and has a free and enlightened population of 300,000,000. Though the Union established by Washington and his contemporaries ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... inquisitor, that I do not enter politics of my own volition. In pushing myself in this unexpected manner into the electoral breach, I merely follow an inspiration that has been made to me. A ray of light has come into my darkness; a father has partly revealed himself, and, if I may believe appearances, he ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... Arabs[4]," seems to doubt if the Slave-Trade can be abolished or civilization advanced, in Central Africa, because of the neighbourhood of The Desert. This, however, is transferring the guilt of slavery and of voluntary barbarism, if barbarism can be crime, from the volition of responsible man to a great natural fact, or circumstance of creation—The Desert; and is a style of observation perfectly indefensible, as well as contrary to philosophy and facts. First, we cannot limit ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... most beautiful language and soaking up all the credit of it for himself. The Englishman, said the letter, was not there at all. He was a backslider without Power or Asceticism, who couldn't even raise a table by force of volition, much less project an army of kittens through space. The entire arrangement, said the letter, was strictly orthodox, worked and sanctioned by the highest Authorities within the pale of the Creed. ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... human welfare is deeply involved in the operations of nature, man's chief interest is in the gods. In this interest religion originates. Man, impelled by his own volition, guided by his own purposes, aspires to a greater happiness, and endeavor follows endeavor, but at every step his progress is impeded; his own powers fail before the greater powers of nature; his powers are pygmies, nature's powers ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... and universality in all our knowledge by means of principles a priori [56]; the will, or practical reason; the faculty of choice (Germanice, Willkuehr) and (distinct both from the moral will and the choice,) the sensation of volition, which I have found reason to include under the head of single and double touch." To this, as far as it relates to the subject in question, namely the words (the aggregative and associative power) Mr. Wordsworth's "objection is only that the definition ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... powerful stimulus to exertion, and the best means of attaching the people to the institutions under which they live. It is apparent that this political effect upon the character of society cannot have any action upon slaves. Having no choice or volition, there is nothing for stimulus to act upon; they are in fact no part of society. So that, in the language of political economy, they are, like machinery, merely capital; and the productions of ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... that saturates the soul with despair, and blights it with the negation which seems the only possible truth in the circumstances; so that one questions whether the Russian in which Turgenieff and Tolstoy, and even Dostoyevsky, could animate the volition and the expectation of better things has not sunk to depths beyond any counsel of amelioration. To come up out of that Bottomless Pit into the measureless air of Mr. White's Kansas plains is like waking from death to life. We are still among dreadfully ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a tall, raw-boned young man, with high jutting cheek-bones, low forehead, and close knees; to his shoulders, which were very high, hung a pair of long bony arms, whose motions seemed rather the effect of machinery than volition. His hair, which was a bad black, was cropped close, and trimmed across his eye-brows, like that of a Methodist preacher; the small-clothes he wore were of the same web which had produced Father Ned's, and ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... Maistre's mind was of the highest type of those who fill the air with the arbitrary assumptions of theology, and the abstractions of the metaphysical stage of thought. At every point you meet the peremptorily declared volition of a divine being, or the ontological property of a natural object. The French Revolution is explained by the will of God; and the kings reign because they have the esprit royal. Every truth is absolute, not relative; every explanation is universal, not historic. These differences in method ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... things, Howard saw, in a moment like that. He went down and met them in the hall, and had that strange sense of unreality in moments of crisis, when one hears one's own voice saying courteous things, without any volition of one's own. The big doctor looked at him kindly. "It is all quite simple and straightforward!" he said. "You must not let yourself be anxious; these times pass by and one wonders afterwards how one could have ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... calculating egoist— which seems to flatter grossly the drunkard and the excited man laying about him in blind fury. But one may hold that egoism is inevitable without going so far. [Footnote: Psychological Hedonism, the doctrine that "volition is always determined by pleasures or pains actual or prospective," need not be thus exaggerated. See SIDGWICK's Methods of Ethics, ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... of Naples who essayed to galvanize volition through my paralyzed limbs, but those who knew the utmost resources of their art. And so I lived,—lived, too, by reason of my inextinguishable vitality, by reason of this spark that will not quench,—and so I came to Hellberg. It would have been mockery to give this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... seashore, how experiments are carried on, the results of these special studies, and much of controversy with other observers. It combines science and description in a happy manner. Another result of his physiological studies was a paper "On the Spinal Cord as a Centre of Sensation and Volition," read before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in 1858. This was followed the next year by three published addresses on "The Nervous System," in which he presented those theories which were more carefully ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... of Europe combined against him, could not fail to realise that the first condition which a peace would demand of him would be the re-installment of the Bourbons on the throne of Spain. He decided therefore to do of his own volition what he would be forced to do later: he set free King Ferdinand, who had been detained at Valancay, and ordered Suchet's army to retire behind ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... returns, for the soul, which is immortal, is composed of the four higher spiritual essences that surround the ego, and are carried on into the next life. These astral bodies, therefore, fail to terrify the Buddhists, who know them only as shadows, with no real volition. The Japs, in point of fact, have learned ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... imperative, Maurice asked himself, that the accident of noble blood should paralyze a man's volition, and that the bearing of a noble name should render his life inertly ignoble? He recognized that, in the seeming curse which condemned man to "work," God had hidden the richest blessing, even as he buried golden veins in the dark bosom of the earth. "Labor was privilege," ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... is every where subject to laws, fixed in their weight, measure and duration, capable of the most exact calculation, and which in no case admit of variation and exception. Whatever is not thus to be accounted for is of mind, and springs from the volition of some being, of which the material form is subjected to our senses, and the action of which is in like manner regulated by the laws of matter. Beside this, mind, as well as matter, is subject to fixed laws; and thus every phenomenon ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... exposure. He considered the vulgar passenger as so much troublesome freight, which, while it brought the advantage of a higher remuneration than the same cubic measurement of inanimate matter, had the unpleasant drawback of volition and motion. With this general tendency to bully and intimidate, the wary patron had, however, made a silent exception in favor of the Italian, who has introduced himself to the reader by the ill-omened name of Il Maledetto, or the accursed. This formidable personage had enjoyed ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... know him better, you find that he is a marvel of muscular power and swiftness. I have seen a "school" of porpoises in the Pacific swimming for hours alongside one of our fleetest ocean-steamers, darting a few yards ahead now and then, as if by mere volition, cutting their way through the water with the directness of an arrow. The porpoise is playful at times, and his favorite game is a sort of leap-frog. A score or more of the creatures, seemingly full of fun and excitement, will chase one another at full ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... He thrust human beings onto this earth against their will, without their volition, to suffer the tortures ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... down their arms. As to your other objection, it falls to the ground the moment you agree with me that all the nations of the world must ultimately become democracies. At first, it is true, men fought of their own volition, but it was to secure food, to guard their homes, or to replenish their supply of women. But since those very early days, all wars have been wars not of the people, but of their rulers. They were wars of revenge or of ambition, in which the people joined because ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... traces the various confusions which have obscured the true nature of this belief. He insists especially that we can no more discover power in mental than in physical sequences. The will had been supposed to be the type of causal power; but volition, according to Brown, reveals simply another succession of desires and bodily actions. The hypothesis of 'power' has been really the source of 'illusion.' The tendency to personify leads us to convert metaphor into fact, to invent a subject of this imaginary 'power,' and thus to create ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... resulting from an indefinite continuance of this state of things. It was stated that at this juncture our Government was constrained to seriously inquire if the time was not ripe when Spain of her own volition, moved by her own interests and every sentiment of humanity, should put a stop to this destructive war and make proposals of settlement honorable to herself and just to her Cuban colony. It was urged that as a neighboring ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • William McKinley
... to please. He was the most cuddlesome cat, Madame Jolicoeur unhesitatingly asserted, that ever had lived; and he had a purr—softly thunderous and winningly affectionate—that was in keeping with his cuddlesome ways. When, of his own volition, he would jump into her abundant lap and go to burrowing with his little soft round head beneath her soft round elbows, the while gurglingly purring forth his love for her, Madame Jolicoeur, quite justifiably, at times was moved to tears. Equally ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... all her members, and her brain was clear. Along with this well-being came again appreciation of the dreadfulness of her case. She grew rigid under the shock of dire realization, tensing her muscles, without volition, as if to repel attack. Her eyes went fearfully to Hodges, who sprawled at ease on a heap of spruce boughs across the cavern from her. The man was puffing lazily at a corncob pipe. The rank, acrid smell of the tobacco-smoke ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... of love and hope, and to evoke good even from the meanest and wickedest of mankind. Passing through life, the soul is to be a happiness producer and a joy distributer. Without conscious thought the violets pour forth perfume; without volition the magnet pulls the iron filings; with no purpose the candle pushes its beams of light into the darkness; and such is to be the weight of goodness in each man, that its mere presence will be felt. For the soul carries power to bless or blight; it can lift up its faculties ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... sort the cab started off, seemingly of its own volition. Mr. Leary's gait became a desperate gallop, and as he galloped he ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... had hoped, to mellow things. Indeed, the succeeding weeks brought more trouble, and most of it came through the organ. Some of the rattling panels, in spite of every effort to make them fast, rattled the more. One night when the servants were alone in the house, of its own volition the organ sent forth, to break the still hours, a blood-curdling basso-profundo groan that suggested ghosts to their superstitious minds. The housemaid came to regard the instrument as something uncanny, and, even as the ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... three guides, so far as Duncan could discover, except that the strokes of their paddles were longer and more in unison, and caused the little bark to spring forward like a creature possessing life and volition. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... worthy of notice in this remarkable account of the intellectual powers. In the first place the Reviewer ignores emotion and volition, though they are no inconsiderable "kinds of action to which the nervous system ministers," and memory has a place in his classification only by implication. Secondly, we are told that the second "kind of action to which the nervous system ministers" is "that in which stimuli from without result ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... it becomes this country to take on a question of this sort, so far as it is called upon to take any part, cannot be doubtful. Our side of this question is settled for us, even without our own volition. Our history, our situation, our character, necessarily decide our position and our course, before we have even time to ask whether we have an option. Our place is on the side of free institutions. From the earliest settlement of these States, their inhabitants were accustomed, in ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... placed the aesthetic faculty under the jurisdiction of the 'judgment', which he regarded as a sort of connecting link between the pure reason and the practical reason, that is, between cognition and volition. A judgment is teleologic, according to his scheme, if it implies a pre-existing notion to which the object is expected to conform; it is aesthetic when pleasure or pain is produced directly by the object itself. In the good and the agreeable we have an interest,—we will the former and desire ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... down-town—Madison Square, Union Square, then westward by Jefferson Market and West Tenth Street. Ever edging a little closer to the river, you observe, and yet, upon my honor, I was not conscious of any definite volition in the matter; it was as though some one were gently pushing me along. Then Abingdon Square and your entrance upon the boards of my little drama—you and Mr. Bardi. Gentlemen, I thank you for ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... There was no warning of approach now as the creature passed over the grass. Suddenly, like a dark, drifting shadow, the huge bulk loomed up once more before me, making for the entrance of the cave. Again came that paralysis of volition which held my crooked forefinger impotent upon the trigger. But with a desperate effort I shook it off. Even as the brushwood rustled, and the monstrous beast blended with the shadow of the Gap, ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sanctifying grace cannot reveal its presence through our inner consciousness. Having no intuitive knowledge of our own Ego, we are compelled to specify the different acts of the soul by means of their respective objects and their various tendencies (cognition, volition). To our consciousness the supernatural love of God does not present itself as essentially different from ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... mother, with her pleading, wistful eyes, spoke day after day of Julia, of her dutiful love toward her, and her growing love for me, I drifted, almost without an effort of my own volition, into an engagement with her. You see there was no counter-balance. I was acquainted with every girl on the island of my own class; pretty girls were many of them, but there was after all not one that I preferred to my cousin. My old dreams and romances about love, common ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... Ross, his eyes ablaze with scorn and rage. He had already shed his coat and vest. Now he rolled up his shirt-sleeves. "Will you go into that tube of your own volition, conscious, so that you may take a long breath before I flood the tube, or unconscious, and pushed in like a bag of meal, to drown before ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... Adam; and other well-known celebrities assisting). Then he describes me: "A muffled creature of sinister aspect. Short, auburn-locked, extinguished by a portentous hat, tripping and stumbling over a cloak, or robe, in whose dragging folds he conceals his identity as well as his power of volition, a weird and gruesome phantom. What—oh what—is this hovering ghost? He must be just defunct, for the purgatorial garments fit him not, he stumbles at every step, and when he trips an underdress is unveiled that's like a City waiter's. What is he—the arch conspirator—doing himself? ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... later we were sitting together on deck. I had offered to read to him. I noticed that he got up out of his chair. Suddenly I saw the chair move. It gave me a great shock, for the chair twisted apparently of its own volition, so that when he sat down again the sunlight was at his back and not in his eyes, as I knew it had been previously. But I reasoned with myself and managed to satisfy myself that he must have turned the chair round with his foot. It was just possible that he could ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... that of memory. It grows out of the biological discussion of instinct, heredity, etc. Included in the subject of memory is that of association. Following this come imagination, imitation, training of the senses, apperception, formal discipline, feeling, volition, motor training, induction, etc. Periods of mental development and the specific topics of childhood and adolescence should receive definite consideration, though more exhaustive treatment should be reserved for a distinct course in child study. The genetic point of view ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... hurriedly drying her eyes, and rising to her feet with a motion so easy, and an effort so slight, that it appeared like the power of mere volition,—the superiority of the spirit over her light frame,—"father, do not let a thought of me distress you at this awful moment. You have known me only in happiness and prosperity,—an indulged and indolent ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... had no right attempting to advise men like Burleigh, who proclaimed himself an old campaigner. The aide-de-camp was getting both sleepy and impatient, but he, too, was much the quartermaster's junior in rank. As for Dean, he had no volition whatever. "Escort the party," were his orders, and that meant that he must govern the movements of his horses and men by the wishes of the senior staff official. And so they jogged along perhaps twenty minutes more, and then there was a sudden ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... by no choice of Harriet's that she was born of a woman who valued children as a kind of social collateral, high-class investments to mature after long periods with at least reasonable profits for the original investors. Nor was it by any volition of hers that she had commended herself to her mother in the beginning by being a beautiful and healthful child: initial pledge that she could be relied upon to turn out lucrative in the end. The parent herself ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... only by some desperate chance he could hope to meet her in his random wanderings, it seemed to him that he was more likely to be successful by resigning as far as possible all volition, and leaving the guidance of the search to chance; as if Fortune were best disposed toward those who most entirely abdicated intelligence and trusted themselves to her. He sacredly followed every impulse, never making up his mind an hour ...
— Lost - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... the face of urban conditions impressed him,—he would have stood gossiping, as in New Babylon's sluggish streets,—and almost without volition he obeyed. ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... lay down their lives to uphold the fair fame of England. Braver soldier never drew sword. He had no hatred of the enemy. His spirit did not need that ugly stimulant. Tenderness and pity filled his heart and yet he had the overflowing enthusiasm and contempt of death which alone can give troops the volition to attack when they have been crouching so long under a pitiless fire. Doughty Wylie was no flash-in-the-pan V.C. winner. He was a steadfast hero. Years ago, at Aleppo, the mingled chivalry and daring with which he placed his own body as a shield between the Turkish soldiery and their victims during ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... than the place. Here were no whirlwind, no chariots and horses of fire, no sudden rapture; but, as the narrative makes emphatic, a slow, leisurely, self-originated floating upwards. He was borne up from them, and no outward vehicle or help was needed; but by His own volition and power He rose towards the heavens. 'And a cloud received Him out of their sight'—the Shechinah cloud, the bright symbol of the Divine Presence which had shone round the shepherds on the pastures of Bethlehem, and enwrapped ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... form the foundation masses, leverage-bars, and protection plates for the higher tissues of the body. Here the cells, in consideration of food, warmth, and protection guaranteed to themselves and their heirs for ever by the body-state, have, as it were, deliberately surrendered their rights of volition, of movement, and higher liberties generally, and transformed themselves into masses of inorganic material by soaking every thread of their tissues in lime-salts and burying themselves in a marble tomb. Like Esau, they have sold their birthright for a mess of "potash," or rather lime; and if such ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... extraordinarily brave acts by individual burghers, but it was extremely difficult to hear of them owing to the Boers' disinclination to discuss a battle in its details. No Boer ever referred to his exploits or those of his friends of his own volition, and then only in the most indefinite manner. He related the story of a battle in much the same manner he told of the tilling of his fields or the herding of his cattle, and when there was any part of it pertaining to his own actions he passed it over without comment. It seemed ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... a rapidity that surprised the skilful man of herbs. Love fed and nourished the fire of life. The will often effects the deed, and say as you may, volition has its power upon the body. The wish to be well, to live, an object to live for, are often the speediest restoratives. ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... impressions and also, in his mild surprise over the pertinency of reviving them, wondering whether he had better pass them on. Or would they knot another tangle in the snarl he and Dick seemed to be, almost without their volition, making? ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... direction of any man or woman who may pass a hand, with faith, backwards and forwards over the skull. The extremities of the body—the fingers—send forth and radiate certain electric, or galvanic, or invisible influences, and thus one has full power over another's organization and volition! But as to any influence beyond the sensible world, that Miss Martineau stoutly denies. The following passage is not an uninteresting specimen of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... ladyship," said Jeeves, "it is more reasonable to suppose that a gentleman of his lordship's character went to prison of his own volition than that he committed some breach of the law which ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... searching party of her own volition, was the only one of the Martians whose face had not been twisted in laughter as I battled for my life. She, on the contrary, was sober with apparent solicitude and, as soon as I had finished the monster, rushed to me and carefully examined my body for possible wounds or injuries. Satisfying ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... look at the picture, which had been faintly showing in my imagination from time to time, the eyes, more anxious than ever, looking at me from out the silent air? But no; I passed the door of that room swiftly, moving, it seemed, without any volition of my own, and before I knew where I was going, went into my father's library with my ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... mind or temper were not known to depend, in many instances, on preputial irritation; children were, accordingly, worried and punished for something over which they had no earthly control or the least volition. Humanity cannot, at present, sufficiently appreciate what Louis A. Sayre has done in its behalf. It is here that we realize the hidden wisdom of the Mosaic law and the truth of the assertion of the ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... years of this secret relationship, in which the ties of sympathy and understanding grew stronger instead of weaker, came the storm. It burst unexpectedly and out of a clear sky, and bore no relation to the intention or volition of any individual. It was nothing more than a fire, a distant one—the great Chicago fire, October 7th, 1871, which burned that city—its vast commercial section—to the ground, and instantly and incidentally ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... attempt to explain it, the fact remains that volition is the fundamental characteristic of Spirit. We may speak of conscious, or subconscious or super-conscious action; but in whatever way we may picture to ourselves the condition of the agent as contemplating his own action, a general purposeful lifeward tendency becomes abundantly evident ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... sacrifice, and retribution are here: neither Shelby, nor Eliza, nor the tall Kentuckian who aids her, nor John Bird, nor Uncle Tom himself in the final act of his drama, can help himself. For good or evil they are the products and results of the system; and yet they have and they give the illusion of volition. ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... still obey the strongest motive doubtless, but there is something in ourselves which makes it a motive and regulates its strength. We can drift like other animals, and often do; but we can also obey our own volition. ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... magician, who as often as the king cut off his head grew another in its place, as we see the machinery for a feat almost as wonderful in the exact anatomy of steel springs and leather ligaments made to fit upon the very nerves of volition themselves, till the halt walk and the maimed are made whole. In this spot is the jar into which the fisherman shut the afrite; in that are the great genii who gather in a harvest; and in still another there lies a tiny thing answering your touch with no louder noise ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... deeds? Of all the criminals we have encountered in doss-houses, shelters, and labour-colonies, scarce a single one. And the deed came nearly always like a flash from the blue. Implacable, dire, and for the most part unconscious compulsion, but no premeditated volition, drove them to it. And here Gorki is a true creator, even if as ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... in whose hands I now found myself, upon hearing that I had returned of my own volition to Phutra evidently felt that it would be safe to give me liberty within the building as had been the custom before I had escaped, and so I was told to return to whatever duty had been ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... but always apparently coming down hill with a slanting motion. So they rode in majestically, always just ahead of the breaker, carried shorewards by its mighty impulse at the rate of forty miles an hour, yet seeming to have a volition of their own, as the more daring riders knelt and even stood on their surf-boards, waving their arms and uttering exultant cries. They were always apparently on the verge of engulfment by the fierce breaker whose towering white crest was ever above and just behind them, but just as one expected ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... The Colonel Sahib would return; indeed, yes. There would be no further difficulty regarding the filigree basket of gold and gems. Still, he would pursue them, if only for the mere sport of it. If he failed to catch them all he had to do was to sit down and wait for them to return of their own volition. ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... Lee's army, outnumbered and exhausted, lay with the Potomac at its back. So serious was the situation that all the subordinate officers advised retreat. But Lee, though too maimed to attack, would not leave the field save of his own volition. "If McClellan wants a battle," he declared, "he can have it." McClellan hesitated, and through the whole of the next day kept his great army idle. The effect upon the morale of the two forces, and the two governments, ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... mind or spirit, consists of volition and intelligence; or, what is the same, of emotion or affection, and of the thoughts which are created by this affection. Nothing can be affirmed of man as a spirit which does not fall under one or other of these two parts. Now, a creature consisting solely of affections and thoughts must, of course, ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... education in bulls and their ways, I apprehended nothing. I never dreamed that bull was after me. Out of my respect for the law I was actually all ready to pause the next moment and let him cross in front of me. The pause came all right, but it was not of my volition; also it was a backward pause. Without warning, that bull had suddenly launched out at me on the chest with both hands. At the same moment, verbally, he cast the ...
— The Road • Jack London
... instinct has invaded the regions of politics and ethics, owing to defective analysis in theory, and in practice to over-confident reliance on personal ability. The individual has attained to freedom; but he has not learned the necessity of submitting his volition to law. At all points the development of the Italians strikes us as precocious, with the weakness of precocity scarcely distinguishable from the decay of old age. A transition from the point attained in the Renaissance ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds |
