"Mental process" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sink in and ripen, which is an essential of development. Results (external answers or solutions) may be hurried; processes may not be forced. They take their own time to mature. Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less than a revolution in ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... right habits will go farther and rise higher than he who has only brilliant attainments. It is an error, and a very common one, to suppose that education is merely, or chiefly, a mental process, and consequently that the best school is that in which the various kinds of knowledge are best taught. Our whole being, physical, intellectual, and moral, is subject to the law of education. We may educate the eye, the ear, the hand, the foot; and each member of the body may be trained in many ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... The mental process by which certain gifted arithmetical computers reach almost in an instant the results of the most complicated calculations is a psychological problem of great interest, which has never been investigated. ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... States, gave a fatal blow to the credit of the bank (which, though calling itself the United States Bank, was not a Government institution) by removing from its custody the Government deposits. My impression upon the subject (simple, as I have no doubt you would expect to find the result of any mental process of mine) is that paper money is a financial expedient, the substitution of an appearance or makeshift for a real thing, and likely, like all other such substitutes of whatever kind, to become a source of shame, trouble, and ruin whenever, after the appointed time of circulation, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... life appears to contract by some mental process. That long, slow agony of ten years' duration can be brought to memory to-day in some few phrases, in which pain is resolved into a mere idea, and pleasure becomes a philosophical reflection . . . When I left school, my father submitted me to a strict discipline; he installed ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... imparted a terrible shock. It did not look like "thinking" after all! The mental process was different from the process of the German mind! The wonderful fact that Hans could remember and recognize and reproduce the ten digits was entirely lost to view. At once a shout went up all over Germany,—in the scientific circle, that Hans was an "impostor," ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... not greatly enamoured of his work for its own sake, and that he chose his themes, not because of any imperative attraction they had for him, but simply and purely for the use to which he could put them. His choice of subject has always been the result of a deliberate search for the effective. The mental process which gave rise to 'A Mummer's Wife' is easily traceable. The domestic life of the class of people he made up his mind to treat was as little known to him as to almost anybody, but if properly handled it was pretty sure to make good copy. He must know it first, however, and ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... been highly grateful to your brother, for whom I find no epithet, for several hours of frank, friendly conversation; for although assimilation of his theory of geology, and practical work in accordance with it, are impossible for my mental process, yet I have seen with true sympathy and admiration how that of which I cannot convince myself in him obtains a logical coherence and is amalgamated with the tremendous mass of his knowledge, where it is then held together by ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... we speak of a "cad," or "making a mull," or "bosh," or "shindy," or "cadger" or "bamboozling," or "mug," or "duffer," or "tool," or "queer," or "maunder," or "loafer," or "bung," we are using pure gipsy. No distinct mental process, no process of corruption, is made manifest by the use of these terms; we simply have picked them up unconsciously, and we continue to utter them in the course ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... The same kind of flimsy mental process results in ignoring the question. Instead of sticking closely to the proposition to be proved the speaker argues beside the point, proving not the entire proposition but merely a portion of it. Or in some manner ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... at the same time, I blundered. The first was a poser and might have elicited some interesting revelation of feminine mental process. In forlorn ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... universal among the Indians of the Plains, and those still comparatively unchanged by civilization. Its successful execution is by an art, which, however it may have commenced as an instinctive mental process, has been cultivated, and consists in actually pointing out objects in sight not only for designation, but for application and predication, and in suggesting others to the mind by action and the airy forms produced by action. To insist that sign language is uniform were to assert ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... of man is written it will be the record of mind not the story of the physical acts which follow the mental process. ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... College for the first time might be easily pardoned for mistaking the chapel for a parish church, and those familiar with the buildings cannot by any mental process feel that the aggressive bulk of Sir Gilbert Scott's ill-conceived edifice is anything but a crude invasion. More than half a century has passed since this great chapel replaced the Tudor building which had unluckily come to be ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... contemplate this bracing picture of a boisterous turmoil of all the classes of England, I am suddenly asked to accept as example of it, Lord Milner, Lord Curzon, and the present Chancellor of the Exchequer. What part do these gentlemen play in the mental process? Is Lord Curzon one of the rugged and ragged poor men whose angularities have been rubbed away? Or is he one of those whom Oxford immediately deprived of all kind of social exclusiveness? His Oxford reputation does not seem to bear out either ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... subliminal faculty." We have all heard of the distinguished lady novelist who declares that when she has chosen her theme she is in the habit of committing it to her subconscious mind and letting it alone for a while. She is not aware of any mental process which goes on, but sooner or later she finds that the theme is ripe for treatment; she knows what she thinks about it, and the work of stating it can profitably begin. Poets, preachers, and musicians can bear testimony of a somewhat similar kind. The thoughts which are most valuable ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... will have discovered that he makes no distinction between logic and metaphysics. These are closely united in the one science to which he gives the name of "Dialectic" and which was at once the science of the ideas and laws of the Reason, and of the mental process by which the knowledge of Real Being is attained, and a ground of absolute certainty is found. This science has, in modern times, been called Primordial ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... mind of man, however, is involved in inscrutable darkness, (as the profoundest metaphysicians well know) and is to be estimated, if at all, alone by an inductive process; that is, by its effects. Without entering on the question, whether an extremely circumscribed portion of the mental process, surpassing instinct, may or may not be extended to quadrupeds, it is universally acknowledged, that the mind of man alone, regulates all the actions of his corporeal frame. Mind, therefore, may be regarded as a distinct genus, in the scale ascending above brutes, and including the ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... it to apprehend and contemplate truth. Now the intellect in its present state, with exceptions which need not here be specified, does not discern truth intuitively, or as a whole. We know, not by a direct and simple vision, not at a glance, but, as it were, by piecemeal and accumulation, by a mental process, by going round an object, by the comparison, the combination, the mutual correction, the continual adaptation, of many partial notions, by the employment, concentration, and joint action of many faculties and exercises of mind. Such a union and concert ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... the supposition or presumption of disease to be employed as an excuse for wrongdoing. It is, of course, clear that there may be perfect method in such madness as springs from partial or commencing brain disease; for every element in the mental process which culminates in a mad act may be sane except the inception of the idea in which the act took its rise. Thus, in the case of the suspected murderer of Mr. Gold, there may have been perfect sanity in respect to every stage of the process by which ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... letting it be filled with the general, the absolute alone; and similarly by forbidding the desires to fasten on any worldly objects, by extinguishing desire and ceasing to be affected in any way by worldly things. The positive task is performed by means of a mental process which we cannot here describe, but by which the mind returns to the self that is within and realises it as it is, cleared from all particular thoughts and affections. These exercises cannot be called moral; where all is illusion morality disappears. ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... musician one must become conscious of that particular thing called music. He must learn to think music. The elements of music are rhythm, melody, harmony, and form, and their mastery is no less a mental process than is the study ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... who entered the board-room that late afternoon remembered that it was May Eve; and even had he remembered, it would have amounted to nothing more than the mental process of association. It would not have given him the faintest presentiment that at that very moment the Little People were busy pressing their cloth-o'-dream mantles and reblocking their wishing-caps; that ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... irresistible. No power outside of us can stop it while life lasts. We cannot stop it ourselves. When we try to stop thinking, the stream but changes its direction and flows on. While we wake and while we sleep, while we are unconscious under an anaesthetic, even, some sort of mental process continues. Sometimes the stream flows slowly, and our thoughts lag—we "feel slow"; again the stream flows faster, and we are lively and our thoughts come with a rush; or a fever seizes us and delirium comes on; then the stream runs wildly onward, defying our ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... By an elaborate mental process, she convinced herself that the cedar chest and the old trunks did not concern her in the least, and tried to develop a feminine fear of mice, which was not natural to her. She had just placed herself ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... out of his equanimity by this unlooked-for demonstration on his sister's part. He got off the stool and walked about in the little cleared space round the desk. When he spoke, it was to utter something which he could trace to no mental process of which he ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... assure you," Bell said, coolly. "Call it intuition, if you like. I prefer to call it the result of logical mental process. I'm ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... of the theists to the contrary, are also agreed. It matters not what a man calls his mental process; be he infidel, sceptic, rationalist, agnostic, or atheist; he is firm in the conviction that religions of all varieties are rapidly sinking into the limbo of all other ancient superstitions. To him it is but a ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... to maintain this critical attitude to select and reject suggestions with reference to a goal, the suggestions as they come cannot be accepted as units and followed. Such a procedure is possible only when the mental process is not controlled by an end. Control by a goal necessitates analysis of the suggestions and abstraction of what in them is essential for the particular problem in hand. It is because no complete association at hand offers a satisfactory response to the situation ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... creed wrong; and in this I had found it right. Madly as Christians might love the martyr or hate the suicide, they never felt these passions more madly than I had felt them long before I dreamed of Christianity. Then the most difficult and interesting part of the mental process opened, and I began to trace this idea darkly through all the enormous thoughts of our theology. The idea was that which I had outlined touching the optimist and the pessimist; that we want not an amalgam ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... irritable,—a little unduly sensitive about being greeted as a returned jail-bird,—but most miraculously purged of all morbid craving for liquor, and with every digital muscle as coolly steady as yours, and every conscious mental process clamoring cleanly for its ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... possesses it is not always at the moment able to render an account of the course which he may have pursued; but it by no means follows, that the thinking power had not a great share in it. It is from the very rapidity and certainty of the mental process, from the utmost clearness of understanding, that thinking in a poet is not perceived as something abstracted, does not wear the appearance of reflex meditation. That notion of poetical inspiration, which ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration? After our subtlest analysis of the mental process, we must still say that our highest thoughts and our best deeds are ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... upon the County Council for suppressing some vulgar obscenity in the music-halls, or tickles the ribs of a Vigilance Association for its care of our hoardings, he should do his best to imagine the mental process of some nice boy or girl he knows, "taking it in." To come outright to the essential matter of this paper, we are all too careless of the quality of the stuff that reaches the eyes and ears of our children. It is not that the stuff is knowledge, but that it ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... the following nightmare, consisting of a series of dreams. To make the sequence of the whole intelligible, it is necessary to explain that, though the scene of each vision was the same, yet by some curious mental process I had no recollection of the place whatsoever. In each dream the locality was totally new to me, and I had an entirely fresh detachment. Thus I had not the great advantage of working over familiar ground. One thing, and one only, was ...
— The Defence of Duffer's Drift • Ernest Dunlop Swinton
... that I could not afford to take a conveyance, and that it did not seem at all likely that I should succeed in getting the money, and asked whether this impulse was not a mere clutching at a straw, some mental process of my own, rather than His guidance and teaching. After prayer, however, and renewed waiting upon GOD, I was confirmed in my belief that He Himself was teaching me to ...
— A Retrospect • James Hudson Taylor
... somebody. In life, in a majority of cases, there are no stars, yet life does not on that account cease to be interesting; and even if stars should happen to be struck out, it is not the collision, nor the stars either, which interest us most. No, it is our state of soul, our mental process under the stress which we care about, and as mental process is always going on, and the state of the soul is never the same for two moments together, there is ample material for a novel of extreme interest, which need never finish, which might indeed be as perennial as a daily newspaper ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... full accounts which the participants in the experiment wrote down the following day indicated clearly that we had a true imitation of the mental process in spite of the striking simplicity of our conditions. One man, for instance, described his inner experience as follows: "I think the experiment involves factors quite comparable to those that determine the verdict of a jury. The cards with their ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... in timidity, and had not the courage of physical force in painting. With them it was wholly a mental process. But we shall count them great for their purity of vision as well as for the sincerity and conviction that possessed them. Artistry of this sort will be welcomed anywhere, if only that we may take men seriously ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... mental process is helped by the score described in the last chapter; and the quantity of each color chosen for the group is easily indicated by a variable circle, drawn round the various points on the diagram. Thus, in the case of the child's clothes, a large circle ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... this mental process the articulation of sounds is gradually becoming perfected. The finer sense detects the differences of them, and begins, first to agglomerate, then to distinguish them. Times, persons, places, relations of all kinds, are expressed by ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... said Captain Wragge. "You shall have the net result of the whole mental process. Said process ranges over the present and future proceedings of your disconsolate friends, and of the lawyers who are helping them to find you. Their present proceedings are, in all probability, assuming the following form: the lawyer's clerk ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... absolutely no landmark on the even surface of sand which could serve as guide, and the borders of the forest were not nearer than half a mile. The action of the wasp would be said to be instinctive; but it seems plain that the instinct is no mysterious and unintelligible agent, but a mental process in each individual, differing from the same in man only by its unerring certainty. The mind of the insect appears to be so constituted that the impression of external objects or the want felt, causes it to act with a precision which seems to us like that of ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... own, without seeming conscious of the discussion; and would give the orders to carry it out with all the energy that belonged to his nature. They could never measure his character or be sure when he would act. They could never follow a mental process in his thought. They were not sure that he ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... of this Sutra is, to distinguish between the mental process of predication, and observation, induction or testimony. Predication is the attribution of a quality or action to a subject, by adding to it a predicate. In the sentence, "the man is wise," "the man" is the subject; "is wise" is the predicate. This may be simply an interplay of thoughts, ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... together by a specific emotional tone, experienced as feeling when the complex is aroused. Apart from the mental processes and corresponding actions depending on purely rational mental systems, it is through complexes that the typical mental process (the specific response) works, the particular complex representing the particular set of mental elements involved in the process which begins with perception and cognition and ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... the whole story; and the mental process of regarding it for the sake of telling it, revealed to him pretty clearly some of the treatment of which he had been unconscious at the time. Heinrich was quite sure that his suspicions were correct. And now the question was, what was to ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... enter merely as factors is in itself not really an explanation. We have not settled by it the nature of that higher central process. But it is enough for us to see that the impression of the continuity of the motion results from a complex mental process by which the various pictures are held together in the unity of a higher act. Nothing can characterize the situation more clearly than the fact which has been demonstrated by many experiments, namely, that this feeling of movement is in no way interfered with by the distinct consciousness ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... seeing the look that went through the crowd. He knew, by some strange mental process, that they were condemning him, that they were drawing away from him. He was bewildered. Then suddenly he understood. It came like a blow. Something rushed up into his ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... itself. The specific types of these fetishes naturally arise from the mental combination of images, emotions, and ideas into a whole, and these impersonations generate the various forms of anthropomorphic polytheism. As the synthetic mental process goes on, these varied forms of polytheism are gradually united in one general but still anthropomorphic form, which ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... recollections, the child's slowly-working mental process arrived more easily than usual at the right conclusion. The way to make Carmina well and happy again, was to bring Ovid back. One of the two envelopes which he had directed for her still remained—waiting for the letter which might ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... methods of purification from contamination, but the main point in the priest's mental process of self-extenuation was that an infidel awaiting the verdict of the Great Mother should not ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... brother, who had a very long red nose, having come to the conclusion with me, that frigging made people mad, and worse, prevented them afterwards from fucking and having a family. Fred, my favorite cousin, arrived at the same conclusion—by what mental process, we all arrived at it, ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... Bok reasoned it out that the novelist did not really expect an answer or an opinion, but was at such times thinking aloud. The mental process, however, was immensely interesting, particularly when Stevenson would ask Bok to hand him a book on words lying on an adjacent table. "So hard to find just the right word," Stevenson would say, and Bok got his first realization of the truth ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... remarkable freethinking books appeared at this period which were widely read, F. W. Newman's Phases of Faith and W. R. Greg's Creed of Christendom (both in 1850). Newman (brother of Cardinal Newman) entirely broke with Christianity, and in his book he describes the mental process by which he came to abandon the beliefs he had once held. Perhaps the most interesting point he makes is the deficiency of the New Testament teaching as a system of morals. Greg was a Unitarian. He rejected dogma and inspiration, ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... the artist as a place presenting beautiful combinations of colours. This ability of the mind to retain and use its former knowledge in meeting and interpreting new experiences is known in psychology as apperception. A more detailed study of apperception as a mental process will be made ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... When his consciousness had duly registered this perception, there instantly followed a recognition of the fact that the eidolon now filling his vision was not the effect of the dazzled eyes, but of a mental process, of thinking how the thing which it ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... Intellect, you will be able to hold out for examination each mental process and principle. You don't believe it, you may say. Then read and study some good work on Psychology, and you will learn to dissect and analyze every intellectual process—and to classify it and place it in the proper pigeon-hole. ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... fitted into a particular job, and show yourself there to the mind's eye of your prospect, he will have to go through the mental process of getting you out of the imaginary job. That will be much harder for him than it would have been to keep you out in the first place. If you merely present the services you could render, and don't picture yourself as ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... hastily, without the slightest idea of what he would, or indeed could, do. He only knew that the position was intolerable. He strolled aimlessly beyond a sort of ramshackle little granary on posts, and his eyes fell on the broken stakes of the palisade; and then—he says—at once, without any mental process as it were, without any stir of emotion, he set about his escape as if executing a plan matured for a month. He walked off carelessly to give himself a good run, and when he faced about there was some dignitary, with two ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad |
