"Psychic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... utterance all the time lost and all the long-concealed feelings take their reparation from existence. But with those who may express their true characters through the medium of some creative faculty, the illuminated moment comes at a psychic crisis—not to enforce the irony of death but to demonstrate and intensify the richness of humanity. The knowledge which depends upon suffering, and, in a way, springs from it, is good, yet it must always be incomplete. Happiness has its light ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... part never to do the same thing twice if it could be avoided. Now I resolved to invade the realm of the speculative and unseen by dipping into New Thought. The subject seemed to be fascinating, although one in which there was still something to be learned. The psychic research people claimed to have telepathy and thought transference about on a paying basis. I thought that if I could get some strong "health waves" permeating my system it would do me good. The thing ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... will settle itself. Public men will impress you not only by their deeds, words, and general attitude; but also through a sort of psychic sense within you which illumines and interprets all they say and do, and makes you understand them even better ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... greater influence on Helena's psychic development than might have been expected. The brutal outbreak of a natural instinct, the undisguised exhibition of which in the community of men is punished with a term of imprisonment, haunted her as if she had been ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... to trusting his team to such a pair of hands, Sam was compelled, by the psychic force of the little woman, to yield up the reins. It was with fear and trembling that he watched her handling of them for the first mile; but, as she really seemed to know what she was about, his confidence increased, and he watched her with admiration. Her veil ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... hot water for shaving he disappeared and did not come back until, by the use of telepathy (for Boots is always psychic), I had sent him a message that he was needed. In the afternoon he went with me to get a draft cashed, then he identified me at the post-office, and introduced me to a dignitary at the cathedral whose courtesy added greatly to my enjoyment ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... bandstand should suddenly fall through the parasol of a lady on the west—in a slightly singed condition due to the extreme velocity of its movements through the air. In these absurd days, too, when we are all trying to be as psychic, and silly, and superstitious as possible! People got up and trod on other people, chairs were overturned, the Leas policeman ran. How the matter settled itself I do not know—we were much too anxious ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... laughed, "your wonderful clairvoyant gift and your trained psychic knowledge of the processes by which a personality may be disintegrated and destroyed—these strange studies you've been experimenting ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... Occultism defined Psychic Phenomena The Ancient Iberians The Star Dust of the Universe MISCELLANEOUS—Bright Literature; The Two Worlds; Foote's Health Monthly; Psychic Theories; Twentieth Century Science, Dawning at the end of the Nineteenth; Comparative Speed of Light and Electricity; ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... heart for him to finish his coffee. It seemed to me that I could hardly wait for him to speak. For I had a psychic presentiment that before he left the table he would make known to us the reason for his rude pursuit ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... so much what you're doing as what you aren't doing. You're too aloof—detached—egg-headish. You know the score, words and music, but you don't sing. All you do is listen. Belle thinks you're not only a physical virgin, but a psychic-blocked prude. I know better. You're so full of conflict between what you want to do—what you know is right—and what those three-cell-brained nincompoops made you think you ought to do that you have got no more degrees of freedom than a piston-rod. ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... persistence of this individual, whose bets came with a sang-froid which, if a bluff, was excellent art. Hurstwood began to doubt, but kept, or thought to keep, at least, the cool demeanour with which, in olden times, he deceived those psychic students of the gaming table, who seem to read thoughts and moods, rather than exterior evidences, however subtle. He could not down the cowardly thought that this man had something better and would stay to the end, drawing his last dollar into the pot, should he choose to go so far. Still, ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... history of the world has there been such earnest searching for light and knowledge in all matters relating to Psychic Phenomena as in the present day. The desire to investigate some new disclosure has resulted in yet other discoveries. Such will be handed on in their various forms to be studied and used by those ...
— Telling Fortunes By Tea Leaves • Cicely Kent
... "spiritual things," an interest very definitely expressed in "Romantic Ballads" (1888), Sharp would not have come to "Vistas" (1894) without the guidance of M. Maeterlinck, and he admits as much in his preface to these "psychic episodes." "Vistas" he often referred to as heralding a "great dramatic epoch," and he evidently regarded them as, in a way, drama, but it is hardly likely that he dreamed of their enactment on the stage. Many of them are essentially dramatic, but their method ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... that it is easy to exaggerate the physical and mental evil effects of it. But what is beyond all question is that it produces bad psychic consequences, and does so leave men out of conceit with themselves that when they realize that they have become victims to the habit their mental sufferings are often pitifully acute. Indeed, it is because my pity and sympathy have been so drawn out ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... nature influenced its students profoundly. Their bold generalizations on the nature of matter and of the elements are still the wonder of chemists. We may trace to one of them, Anaximenes, who regarded air as the primary principle, the doctrine of the "pneuma," or the breath of life—the psychic force which animates the body and leaves it at death—"Our soul being air, holds us together." Of another, the famous Heraclitus, possibly a physician, the existing fragments do not relate specially to medicine; but to the philosopher ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... shook in my shoes this afternoon. Didn't you notice the lurid mixture of colors I was daubing on my block? And all because I knew you were having psychic thoughts and I was so afraid you would say what I thought you were thinking and startle Estelle. I wanted so much to know myself just what you were driving at with your watch-chains that I almost chewed my tongue off ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... factors to be considered. Nor, again, can religion be adequately and exhaustively dealt with by the psychological method of investigation. The psychological studies of religion in recent years have greatly enriched our knowledge of the range and scope and power of man's psychic nature and functions, of his instincts, desires, valuations, needs, yearnings, beliefs, and modes of activity and behaviour, and particularly of the important influence which the social group has exercised and still exercises in the furtherance of religious attitudes and ideals. ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... that something is going to happen up there"—he pointed to the distant mountains, then added—"to me, at least. I feel as though I were about to bid myself good-by—if you know what I mean. I hope that donkey of ours isn't a psychic donkey, or, if he is, that he'll listen to reason and be content with his escorts of flesh ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... Elite Restaurant. A motion picture theater arrested his attention; and presently, parting with one of his two remaining dimes, he entered. The feature of the bill was a detective melodrama. Nothing in the world could have better suited Willie's psychic needs. It recalled his earlier feats of the day, in which he took pardonable pride, and raised him once again to a self-confidence he had not felt since he entered the ever to be ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... thinkers have conceived, the immortal soul wraps itself about in some aural vapour that takes the form it wore on earth. This is a possibility, and I would gladly believe it. I must, I decided, try to bring my poor Jane into touch with psychic interests; it would comfort her to have the wonderful chance of getting into communication with Oliver. At present she scouts the whole thing, like all other forms of supernatural belief. Jane has always been a materialist. It is very strange to me that my children have developed, intellectually ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... at the interruption, was caught in this flood of charm and good will. Harry Banks, feeling a psychic current running about the room, looked up also; and that smile caught him. It carried away the last trace of his perverse mood. And Bertram heaved himself down the stairs and crossed at once to ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... facts that I have acquired through mediums not professional. Mr. Stowe has just been wading through eight volumes of "La Mystique," by Goerres, professor for forty years past in the University of Munich, first of physiology and latterly of philosophy. He examines the whole cycle of abnormal psychic, spiritual facts, trances, ecstasy, clairvoyance, witchcraft, spiritualism, etc., etc., as shown in the Romish miracles and the history ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... shows the spirit of science. But is it not self-evident, Mr. James, to a man of your fine intelligence, that all strong impulses (or instincts, as you call them) must have a special nervous apparatus in the psychic region of the brain; and that loving, blushing, stealing, and fighting cannot be functions of the same organs concerned in perceiving color, or comprehending music? If I have traced these instincts to the special convolutions ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... alone. She was under the impression that Smith had gone to do her bidding, but she could not be sure. No faith in angelic vision, no spell of psychic warfare, relieved the situation for her. The external evidences of some crisis which he had undergone only produced in her repulsion. Now, as ever since the temporary delusion that accompanied her baptism, Susannah endeavoured to possess her soul free ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... children, etc. During the study of the psychology of the child, scholars began to substitute for this term the expression "genetic psychology." For it was found that the big-genetic principle was valid for the development both of the psychic and the physical life. This principle means that the history of the species is repeated in the history of the individual; a truth substantiated in other spheres; in philology for example. The psychology of the child is ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... beginning to believe in the psychic," she mused, "for I have a feeling that a cry for help comes from ...
— The Motor Girls On Cedar Lake - The Hermit of Fern Island • Margaret Penrose
... its best, when it lies at rest On a cloudless summer day, And, tiger-like, forbears to strike, But, sated, basks at play, One seems to hear, with the psychic ear, Its ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... maddest assertions. It cannot discriminate between the intuitions of the sage and of the lunatic. It is forced to view energy of will in knowing as a source merely of corruption, and when it finds that as a psychic fact willing is ineradicable, it must conclude that we are constitutionally incapable of that passive reflection of reality which it regards as the sine qua non of truth. Hence, if disinterestedness is the condition of knowing, ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... were alike in their sleep-like withdrawal. It seemed as if their minds had been sucked out of them, that their very selves were elsewhere. It was a fantastic diagnosis, of course. But the trouble with those girls was nothing a physician could understand. It was psychic in ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... psychic phenomena were clearly known to Riseholme; those who produced them were fraudulent, those who were taken in by them were dupes. Consequently there was irony in ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... bitter. She saw herself describing these events at other house parties. It would be unfair to say that she was enjoying herself; still she knew nobody at Chadlands very well, it was her first visit, and adventures are, after all, adventures. Her uncle discussed the psychic significance of the tragedy, and gave instances of similar events. One or two listened to him for lack of anything better to do. There was a general sensation of blankness. They were all thrown. Life had let them down. Under the circumstances, to most of them it seemed an excellent ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... Stockholm a young Norwegian, Harriet Bosse, played Eleanora, the psychic, and in 1901 this young actress became Strindberg's wife. This third marriage ended in divorce three years later. In 1906, the actor manager, August Folk, produced "Countess Julie" in Stockholm, seventeen years after it had been written. To Strindberg's ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... "Hampton's Magazine" in 1909 and 1910. Since that date she has published several books in different fields of literature: "The Son of Mary Bethel", a novel, putting the character of Christ in modern setting; "Stories from the New Testament, for Children"; "Letters of a Living Dead Man", psychic communications which have attracted much attention; and in poetry, "The Frozen Grail, and Other Poems", 1910; "The Book of Love", 1912; and "Songs of a Vagrom Angel", 1916. Mrs. Barker's poem, "The Frozen Grail", addressed ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... Countess. But the Countess was a mere psychic instrument, it seemed, and had to be told, first of the question—he produced it with a suspicion that she might doubt his honesty—and then of the astounding answer. Thus enlightened, she protested that there could be no doubt ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... with his princeliest smile, "the true Art cannot fail. To find the true psychic and potential branch sometimes requires time. We have not succeeded, I admit, with the cards, the crystal, the stars, the magic formulae of Zarazin, nor the Oracle of Po. But we have at last discovered the ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... read palms," she repeated, holding Elspeth by her firm tone; "a little more reading up, a bit of experience, and she'll work wonders. She doesn't know it, but she's psychic—of course this is going to be fun; not real. Just a lure. We'll have Joan in a long white robe—a girl I know can design it. We'll have a filmy veil over the lower part of her face—mystery, you know. Look at her eyes, Elspeth, aren't they great? ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... calomel, salol, and salicylic acid, have been recommended, and mild, antiseptic mouth washes are advisable. Antipyretics are of doubtful value, as better results are obtained, if the temperature is high, by copious cold-water injections. An ice pack applied to the head is beneficial in case of marked psychic disturbance. One-ounce doses of chloral hydrate per rectum should be given if the patient is violent or if muscular spasms are severe. If the temperature becomes subnormal, the animal should be warmly blanketed, and if much weakness ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... chap. It is the story of a broken halo. Perhaps I'll tell it you some day. Meanwhile, this being Christmas Eve and not Ash Wednesday, I'll make no more confessions. Don't you want to hear the result of my psychic investigations, ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... the Church and frowns on the practice of mediumship and clairvoyance. The law denies the possibility of spirit intercourse and forbids the exercise of supernormal faculties in exploring the untrodden realms of the future. Prosecutions are instituted under the old Witchcraft and Vagrancy Acts, and psychic practitioners are fined or sent to prison in the hope of stemming the tide of inquiry. The law and the spirit were ever at variance. But it is difficult to understand why those who mourn, and who ask questions, should be deprived of the comfort which they may find through visits ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... did it myself or not. I do know that I was growing nervous, standing there like a psychic fool with all your ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... Poe was able actually to improve the language of inspiration, whilst transmitting uninjured the poetic conception. Those stanzas in Grey's 'Elegy' which convey from him to us the psychic wave of poetic impulse, may have been hundreds of times altered in their wording, through seven years of tentative effort; and it is possible that he succeeded in retaining the original feeling—the poem is certainly artistic. But the feeling conveyed by Grey is commonplace enough, ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... physical, intellectual, and moral elements, of habits and views, of emotions and impressions nursed into being and perfection by the hereditary instinct active for thousands of years, this historical consciousness is a remarkably puzzling and complex psychic phenomenon. By our common memory of a great, stirring past and heroic deeds on the battle-fields of the spirit, by the exalted historical mission allotted to us, by our thorn-strewn pilgrim's path, our martyrdom ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... had an impulse to hasten off to Branchville. In the brief time of lying unconscious on the floor when Wicks struck him down, he had felt some strange psychic sense take possession of his being, long enough for the room that Hardy had occupied in Hickwood to come into vision, as if through ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... Neo-Platonism. It was Plato distilled through the psychic alembic of Hypatia. Just why the human mind harks back and likes to confirm itself by building on another, it would be interesting to inquire. To explain Moses; to supply a key to the Scriptures; to found a new School of Philosophy on ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... possession of any child, I often say to my classes in education, is made up of their eyes, their ears, their noses, their tongues, and their finger tips—simply because thru them is poured the nourishment that sustains psychic life and ministers to the development of ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... very seldom discuss with him any of the strange happenings in which she was so absorbed. And yet, now and again, almost as if in spite of herself, she would ask him if he would care to come to a seance, or invite him to witness an exceptionally remarkable manifestation at some psychic ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... significant—"during three weeks of total sleeplessness." These are conditions which would be likely to reduce his body to the state of weakness and sensitiveness which seems often antecedent to psychic experience. He has given an account of the incident in Sartor (Book ii. chap, vii.), when, he says, "there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me for ever. I was strong, of unknown strength; ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... he did return; but his long confinement had turned his brain, and he could never remember the spot where he had deposited his treasure years before. Some time ago a lady, a Miss B., who was decidedly psychic, was invited to Kilman Castle in the hope that she would be able to locate the whereabouts of this treasure. In this respect she failed, unfortunately, but gave, nevertheless, a curious example of her power. ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... that, but we apply to the phenomena we are investigating the laws common to other phenomena. These phenomena seem supernatural only because their causes are attributed to the medium himself. But that is where the mistake lies. The phenomena are not caused by the medium, but by psychic energy acting through a medium, and that is a very different thing. The whole matter lies in the law ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... personages who preside over the institutions and occupations of mankind. Let us call this psychotheism. With the mental, moral, and social characteristics in these gods are associated the powers of nature; and they differ from nature-gods chiefly in that they have more distinct psychic characteristics. ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... Psychic or Mental Epilepsy is a trance-state often occurring after attacks of grand or petit mal, in which the patient performs unusual acts. The epileptic feature is the patient's inability to recall these actions. The ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... an interest may be promised by the recent indications of a range of our forces, both physical and psychic, far wider than previous experience has indicated. This leads us to invite attention to some unusual psychic phenomena evinced by persons of exceptional sensibilities not yet as well understood, or even as carefully investigated, as perhaps they deserve to be. The ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... aroused, cannot be resisted till their force is spent. This consciousness has been felt in varying degree in every generation, and the progress of humanity can never be explained unless it be taken into account. Sometimes, in the inevitable {43} reaction after the psychic stress of such experiences, men have resented, doubted, or denied the validity of their own consciousness; sometimes they have regarded it as possessing a value exceeding all else in life. Usually those who have it attract the hostility of their contemporaries, scarcely tempered ...
— Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity • Kirsopp Lake
... to discount the effects of muscular fatigue, and to discover how far there is really impairment of nervous tissue and functions. Experimental studies do show that "nervous fatigue is an undoubted fact"[2] and that "we cannot deny fatigue to the psychic centers"[3] which, like any other part of the organism are subject to deterioration by fatigue toxins. Most students report, however, a higher degree of resistance to fatigue in the nerve fibers than in the muscles, and a like high ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... the average doctor would even admit that they existed. Their study led them to a pretty thoroughgoing consideration of the power of suggestion upon bodily states, and eventually to formulate, as they have been able, both the laws of suggestion and the secret of its power. Telepathy and psychic phenomena generally have also offered a rich field to the student of the abnormal and psychology has broadened its investigations to include all these conditions. That is to say, the border-land phenomena of consciousness ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... other churches, see Meyer, Aberglaube des Mittelalters, Basel, 1884, chap. iv. For the effect of "the vivid belief in supernatural action which attaches itself to the tombs of the saints," etc., as "a psychic agent of great value," see Littre, Medecine et Medecins, p. 131. For the Jansenist miracles at Paris, see La Verite des Miracles operes par l'Intercession de M. de Paris, par Montgeron, Utrecht, 1737, and especially the cases of Mary Anne Couronneau, Philippe Sargent, and ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... will publish shortly the long-delayed work of Kegan Van Roon, the celebrated American traveller, Orientalist and psychic investigator, dealing with his recent inquiries in China. It will be remembered that Mr. Van Roon undertook to motor from Canton to Siberia last winter, but met with unforeseen difficulties in the ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... asked, sipping his beer. He felt dimly that that imitation of love which must immediately take place demanded some sort of psychic propinquity, a more intimate acquaintance, and on that account, despite his impatience, began the usual conversation, which is carried on by almost all men—when alone with prostitutes, and which compels the latter to lie almost mechanically, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... for travelling to this country), and a dazed, utterly unpractical and uninterested habit of mind, which alternated with his brilliance of speech and to a less degree of thought, was probably a reversion to the psychic state which his ...
— The Garden of Bright Waters - One Hundred and Twenty Asiatic Love Poems • Translated by Edward Powys Mathers
... unfrequented street, from whence the lointain bruissement du Paris nocturne might be heard by the pensive traveller if he were not too intent on diabolising. Now, he has found out that Lucifer was chez lui everywhere. Je vise Satan et ses dogmes. All his psychic faculties have concentrated into a transcendental apparatus for scenting devildom, and he mournfully comes forward to tell us, with a variation of Fludd's utterance; Diabolus, in quam, diabolus ubique repertus est, et omnia diabolus et diabolus. "Let it suffice to say that the demonologists ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... doubt that some amulets have influence," remarked St Aubyn. "If a piece of amber, for example, has been highly magnetised by a 'sensitive,' as very psychic persons are called, it is quite possible that, worn next the skin, a certain amount of magnetic fluid may be transmitted to the wearer, producing a distinct effect upon his vitality. There's nothing occult about that. The most thoroughgoing materialist might acknowledge it. ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... being sure. Even if we recognise to the full the lamentable resurgence of outworn superstitions and stupidities, which again pass current among us for an unhappy moment, if we detect the questionable or manifestly evil consequences of certain uses made or alleged of psychic influence, yet still we are not always in a position to say, with certainty, what is true in tales of healing which we hear in our own day. There are certain of the statements concerning Jesus' healing power and action which ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... the social and psychic as well as the physical phenomena of human life have what we may call an organismal mainspring, and become more intelligible when traced back to these. No one, for instance, can appreciate the social significance of sex, or account for the existing ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... and some races. You read books—I read people. I wanted to warn you, and I do so. This has been lucky in a way, this meeting. Please don't treat what I've said lightly. Your plans are in danger and you also." Was the psychic and fortune-telling instinct of the Romany alive in her and working involuntarily, doing that faithfully which her people did so faithlessly? The darkness which comes from intense feeling had gathered underneath her eyes, and gave them a look of pensiveness not ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... meanwhile was the social center, demonstrating that mysterious psychic force known as being the "life of the party." She advanced upon a tall sallow woman in mourning, challenging, "Now Mis' Mealer, why don't you just set and take a little comfort, it won't cost you nothing? Ain't that ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... adaptation to illumine the whole and raise its potencies. To explain psychologically, on the contrary, means to investigate how man arrives at the apprehension and appropriation of a spiritual content and especially of a spiritual life, with what psychic aids is the spiritual content worked out, how the interest of man for all this is to be raised, and how his energy for the enterprise is to be won. Here one has to proceed from an initial point hardly discernible, and ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... memory a detailed, three-dimensional, full-color image of Dr. O'Connor's office in his mind. It was perfect in detail; he checked it over mentally and then, by a special effort of will, he gave himself the psychic push ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the terrors that I had to face. More than once I seemed to feel most curiously that I was in no real sense a part of the proceedings, nor actually involved in them, but that I was playing the part of a spectator—a spectator, moreover, on a psychic rather than on a material plane. Many of my sensations that night were too vague for definite description and analysis, but the main feeling that will stay with me to the end of my days is the awful horror ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... looked at him with soft violet eyes—and it was as though some psychic bathhouse attendant had poured ice water down his spine. For he had seen that look before, that liquid introspective look in the velvet eyes of cattle. He shivered. For a moment he had been thinking of ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... is a complete cessation or more or less marked diminution of all spontaneous or reactive movements. This includes such voluntary muscle reflexes as contain a psychic component. For instance, there is, often, an interference with swallowing (letting saliva collect and drooling), winking, and even with the inhibitory processes used in holding urine and feces (soiling and wetting). Often there is no reaction to pin pricks or feinting ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... preceding explanation, however, has the advantage of being in harmony with the general theory of evolution, which, whether true or not, so well explains the most complicated facts that for the present it must be accepted. For the rest, if it is not possible to appraise the psychic faculties possessed by the ancestors of existing animals we may at least observe certain facts which put us on the ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... A celebrated Psychic, Mrs. Piper, uttered, in the year 1899 words which were recorded by Dr. Hodgson at the time. She was speaking in trance upon the future of spiritual religion, and she said: "In the next century this will be astonishingly perceptible to the minds of men. ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... perceive, remember, will, and infer; and that a great part of the thinking of which we are aware is determined by that of which we are not conscious. It has indeed been demonstrated that our unconscious psychic life far outruns our conscious. This seems perfectly natural to anyone who considers ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... as the diastolic was below 105, such pressures are certainly a subject for investigation, and if the systolic pressure is persistently above 150, insurance companies dislike to take the risk. However, it should be again urged in making insurance examinations that psychic disturbance or mental tensity very readily raises the systolic pressure. MacKenzie believes that a diastolic pressure over 100 under the age of 40 is abnormal, and anything over the 110 mark above that ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... of the desert. All fine words, but hopeless to explain that which has lured more than one white woman out into the golden wilderness to the wrecking of her soul; and which has nothing whatever to do with the pseudo-psychic waves which trick us into such ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... very thoroughly—large, small; thick, thin; long, short; dark, light; rough, smooth; heavy, light; hot, cold; and the names of many colors and geometrical forms. Such words do not relate to any particular object, but to a psychic acquisition on the part of the child. In fact, the name is given after a long exercise, in which the child, concentrating his attention on different qualities of objects, has made comparisons, reasoned, and formed judgments, until he has acquired a power of discrimination which he did not ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori
... absurd one. There was never an ideal state in the past, but there will be in the future. The Genesis allegory simply typifies the first awakening of consciousness of good and evil—of two wills in a mind hitherto only animal-psychic. ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... 42 inches, varying with respiration; sometimes wears glasses, but usually operates undisguised; dislikes the works of Rabindranath Tagore; corn on little toe of right foot; superstitious, especially with regard to psychic phenomena; eyes, blue; does not use drugs nor read his verses to women's clubs; ruddy complexion; no photograph in possession of police; garrulous and argumentative; prominent cheek bones; avoids Bohemian society, so-called, and ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... "I know he's a machine. Snookums isn't a he any more—he's an it. He has no personality of his own, he only has what I fed into him. Even his voice is mine. He's not even a psychic mirror, because he doesn't reflect my personality, but a puppet imitation of it, distorted and warped by the thousands upon thousands of cold facts and mathematical relationships and logical postulates. And none of these added anything to him, as a personality. How ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... mind that hope is the pioneer's preserving arm. I do not mean to discredit the validity of hope and optimism. I can honestly lay claim to both. America was builded on a dream of fair lands: a dream that has come true. In the infinitely harder problems of social and psychic health, the dream persists. We believe in our Star. And we do not believe in our experience. America is filled with poverty, with social disease, with oppression and with physical degeneration. But ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... for men. It would be equally unjust and unreasonable to expect men to confine their activities within limits which are more and more becoming adjusted to feminine preferences and feminine capacities. We are now learning to realise that the tertiary physical, and psychic sexual differences—those distinctions which are only found on the average, but on the average are constant[2]—are very profound and very subtle. A man is a man throughout, a woman is a woman throughout, and that difference is manifest in all the energies ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... exclusive characteristic; and further, it must be understood that it contains by survival many elements from an earlier condition in which hecastotheism prevailed, that is, that the form of philosophy known as animism was generally accepted, and that psychic life, with feeling, thought, and will, was attributed to inanimate things. But more than this, zootheism is not a permanent state of philosophy, but only a stepping-stone to something higher. That something higher ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... have in store. Every soul within that enclosure was a rabid partisan, bound up in the fortune of the fray; and if the concentrated desire of forty thousand minds could avail aught, the home team should certainly have felt the psychic urge. ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... is still open is sufficiently demonstrated by the readiness with which, in hypnotic experiments, seemingly insensible subjects respond to the suggestions of the operator. Here, therefore, we find our clue to the solution of the mystery of Lurancy Vennum. A victim of a psychic catastrophe, the cause of which must be left to conjecture in the absence of knowledge of her previous history, she was placed in precisely the position of the adventurous Mr. Tout and of the inert subjects of the hypnotist's ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... nexus, which expresses itself in astronomic phenomena, and chemic, biologic, psychic, sociologic: that it is everywhere striving to localize positiveness: that to this attempt in various fields of phenomena—which are only quasi-different—we give different names. We speak of the "system" of the planets, and not of their "government": but in considering a store, for instance, and ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... certain organism may be made so by prolonged hunger, or fatigue, by the influence of narcotics, by reduction of the body temperature, by loss of blood. In man prolonged fatigue, cold, the use of alcohol to excess and even psychic depression increases susceptibility. It has been shown that such conditions are accompanied by a diminution in the power of the ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... itself, nourished by a love larger than its own, it has a dim vision of the Infinite Being as essentially real and essentially spiritual. A living faith in this infinite spiritual reality is the fountain-head not only of religion, but of noble life. All wavering here is a symptom of psychic paralysis. When the infinite reality becomes questionable, then all things become material and vile. The world becomes a world of sight and sound, of taste and touch. The soul is poured through the senses and dissipated; ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... ghosts," declared Diana. "You've got to have the psychic faculty. Some people can feel they're there, even when they ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... Strange explained, was no place for psychic discussions. If Dave cared to come to his room, where the surroundings were favorable to thought transference, and where Phil's spirit control could have a chance to make itself felt, they would interrogate the "Unseen Forces" ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... beginning of the art of therapeutics, mental healing has been a large factor in the cure. This was not recognized, of course, for only in the last century has the psychic element been admitted to any extent as a therapeutic agent. We can read back now, however, and see what a large element this really was. The cruder the art, the more powerful was the mental influence. The ways of primitive therapeutics are completely ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... that I am not taking up the question of the psychic, or entering into it at all. I shall keep myself to the two points of view which have helped me, as an individual, to overcome, to some degree, the fear of death, considering them in reverse order from that in which I have mentioned them. ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... the mind. If anyone desired to remember a name, a series of numbers, a song or a speech, it could be done by this method, and conversely memories could be effaced, habits removed, and desires eradicated—a sort of psychic surgery was, in fact, in general use. Indignities, humbling experiences, were thus forgotten, amorous widows would obliterate their previous husbands, angry lovers release themselves from their slavery. To graft desires, however, was still impossible, and the ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... the eyes and the lips, or is there some inscrutable and psychic power? At all events, who will explain how it ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... not born of science, nor even of super-science, whatever that may be. It is not of science at all. It is of another sphere, despite all that the psychic researchers have tried ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... Rebellion; Stupidity of Colleges; Cremation; Col. Henry S. Olcott; Jesse Shepard; Prohibition; Longevity; Increase of insanity; Extraordinary Fasting; Spiritual Papers Cranioscopy (Continued) Practical Utility of Anthropology in its Psychic Department ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... get deeper. But with his wife it happened quite otherwise; this case was the first which he witnessed, but the same thing happened many times afterwards. With her there would be a strange flash of recognition; it was a sort of intuition, perhaps a psychic thing—who could tell? By some unknown process in soul-chemistry, she would divine things about a person that he might have been a life-time in ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... not think the former was the case; and if it is possible to get such results unconsciously, that phenomenon is quite as curious as the spiritualistic explanation. In fact I am not sure that the psychological is not more difficult than the pneumatological theory. My own notion is that the "Psychic Force" people are clearly on the right track, though their cause, as at present elaborated, is not yet equal to ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... they may have travelled. From my dull and commonplace and "respectable" surroundings, the Jinn bore me at once to the land of my pre-direction, Arabia, a region so familiar to my mind that even at first sight, it seemed a reminiscence of some by gone metem-psychic life in the distant Past. Again I stood under the diaphanous skies, in air glorious as aether, whose every breath raises men's spirits like sparkling wine. Once more I saw the evening star hanging like a solitaire from the pure front of the western firmament; and the after glow transfiguring and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... surprising. As for these manifestations, there is not the least doubt of their origin. They do not come from the other world; they are born and die upon this earth; and they arise solely and incontestably from our own actual living mystery. They are, moreover, of all psychic manifestations, those which are easiest to examine and verify, seeing that they can be repeated almost indefinitely and that a number of excellent and well-known mediums are always ready to reproduce them in the presence of any one interested ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... were to ask us one minute before we have decided what we are going to do, we should not know what we were going to decide. So long as we are undecided, we cannot foresee what we are going to decide; for under the conditions in which we live that part of the psychic process takes place outside of our consciousness. And since we do not know its causes, we cannot tell what will be its effects. Only after we have come to a certain decision can we imagine that it was due to our voluntary action. But shortly before ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... help out occasionally in Y.M.C.A. activities, and to do some visiting among the poor French families and refugees in Boulogne, close to which city our hospital was located. I could also visit other Units, and give lantern shows, which had, I thought, special value when psychic treatment was badly needed. Shell-shock was but very imperfectly understood at the beginning of the war. The football matches and athletic sports did not need the asset of being an antidote to shell-shock to attract my patronage. Never in my life had I realized quite so keenly what ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... have been and often are efficient psychic remedies for functional affections, in direct proportion to the user's faith in them. A certain sense of mystery seems essential. Given that, and plenty of confidence, and it matters not whether the inscriptions are biblical verses, unintelligible ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... for psychic treatment on scientific principles, of faulty mental disorders, not of organic nature, is well under way. That the American profession takes an active interest in this movement is shown by the exhaustive paper on psycho-therapy by Dr. E. W. Taylor, ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... grotesque, and he came away with an encouraging message from his father, who had failed to identify himself satisfactorily, but declared that everything was "on a higher plane" in his present state of being, and that all life was "continuous and progressive." Mrs. Horner spoke of herself as a "psychic"; but otherwise she seemed oddly unpretentious and matter-of-fact; and Eugene had no doubt at all of her sincerity. He was sure that she was not an intentional fraud, and though he departed in a state of annoyance with himself, he came ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... telepathy I may bring before the reader two cases which I personally investigated, the percipient in the first case being a gentleman who belonged to a circle which regularly met for the study of psychic phenomena, and of which circle I ...
— Telepathy - Genuine and Fraudulent • W. W. Baggally
... personality that could emanate from Homer Crawford, possibly unbeknownst to himself, flooded over the huge Californian. The others in the room could feel it. Elmer Allen cleared his throat; Isobel held her elbows to her sides, in a feminine protest against naked male psychic strength. ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... scientific ardor did I study her development, noting how the cat traits at certain periods (corresponding to the Feast of Bast) proclaimed themselves above the human traits, whilst at other times the psychic-felinism sank into a sort of sub-conscious quietude, leaving the subject almost a normal woman. Of the physical reflections which were the visible evidence of her hybrid mentality I have already spoken at length (this refers ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... introduced a new word into the vocabulary of science. Fechner explained it by saying, "I mean by psychophysics an exact theory of the relation between spirit and body, and, in a general way, between the physical and the psychic worlds." The title became famous and the brunt of many a controversy. So also did another phrase which Fechner introduced in the course of his book—the phrase "physiological psychology." In making that happy collocation ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... said that one of the last sentiments to be developed in human nature is "the sense of responsibility, which is one of the highest and most complex psychic qualities." How to develop this sentiment of responsibility is one of the most pressing problems of education. And the problem is especially pressing in those departments of education that train for social service. To ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... do everything in my power for your friends. Are you well-bred folk as well bred as we, Republican bourgeois, with the coarse hands (though you once told me mine were psychic hands when the mania of palmistry had not yet been succeeded by that of the Reconciliation between Church and State), I wonder, that you should apologize, you whose father fed me and housed me and clothed me in my exile, for giving me the horrid trouble of ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... centers in Europe: four Foci through which psychic impulses from the Oversoul pour through into this world. A Mediterranean point, perhaps in Italy; a Teutonic point in Sweden; a Celtic point in Wales-Ireland (formerly a single island, before England rose out of ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the kind who goes about seeing ghosts. I'm too plain and matter-of-fact by half, and, though I often hear mysterious taps on the panels of my bedroom, I prosaically set it down to rats and mice. Now, you're a psychic sort of a fellow, the seventh son of a seventh son; if he wants to make himself visible, perhaps you may get a sight of him; I'm afraid it's more than ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... Agatha hesitated, with a glance towards the cabin. Cleggett instantly divined her thought; for brief as was their acquaintance, there was an almost psychic accord between his mind and hers, and he felt himself already answering to her unspoken wish as ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... that in what we have tried to indicate as the only possible starting-point for adventurous criticism, there has been a constant assumption of a common ground between sensitive people; a common sensual and psychic language, so to speak, to which appeals may be made, and through which intelligent tokens may be exchanged. This common ground is not necessarily—one is reluctant to introduce metaphysical speculation—any hidden "law of beauty" or ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... as living a purely physical life, in these material bodies of ours. In reality, we have gone far indeed from pure physical life; for ages, our life has been psychical, we have been centred and immersed in the psychic nature. Some of the schools of India say that the psychic nature is, as it were, a looking-glass, wherein are mirrored the things seen by the physical eyes, and heard by the physical ears. But this is a magic mirror; the images remain, and take a certain life of their own. Thus ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... or an almighty State or an almighty anything, a huge misty symbol which demands everything you've got and gives in return only a feeling of belonging." Dalgetty's voice was harsh. "In short, you can't stand on your own psychic feet. You can't face the truth that man is a lonely creature and that his purpose must come ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... of you much attracted me We could fall back upon phenomena And make a pretty story out of psychic Balances, but not to be too broad In my discourtesy, nor prudish neither (Since, really, I can hardly quite suppose With all your ghostliness you follow me), I feel no such attraction. Or if one Bows to my sympathy for the briefest ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... the difficulty is to find the typical farmer's mind that north, south, east, and west will be accepted as standard. In our science there is perhaps at present no place where generalization needs to move with greater caution than in the statement of the farmer's psychic characteristics. It is human to crave simplicity, and we are never free from the danger of forcing concrete facts into general statements that do violence ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves
... into the atoms or corpuscles one thing, and it comes out another; it goes in as inorganic force, and it comes out as organic and psychic. The change or transformation takes place in those invisible laboratories of the infinitesimal atoms. It helps my mental processes to give that change a name—vitality—and to recognize it as a ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... and many other constitutional disorders are well recognized agencies which induce sclerosis in body tissues, so there can be little doubt that these conditions produce pathological sclerosis of the meshwork of the iris angle. Psychic disturbances, congested portal or renal system, hard mental or muscular work, etc., etc., induce increased pressure of the general circulation, and ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... sister of Hilaire Belloc, is ingenious in a different direction. Her story of What Timmy Did was one that attracted especial attention from those periodicals and persons interested in psychic matters. Here was a woman whose husband had died from poison—self-administered, the coroner decided—and here was little Timmy, who knew that something was wrong. Animals also knew it; and then one day Timmy saw at her heels a shadow man, ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... on the Irish coast, fifty miles from a police barrack, offered cheap as an appropriate basis of observation to psychic enthusiasts anxious to study the ways ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various
... impression that she will—they never fail me. You know I've a singularly magnetic organisation. A great spiritualist in Boston once told me I only needed developing to exhibit extraordinary powers. But I hadn't the time or the patience to go in thoroughly for psychic development. Besides it's really a ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... Still, as a matter of precaution, he drew the cigar-box which contained Ma-Mee's hand from his pocket, and pushed it as far away from him as he could. It was a most unlucky act. Perhaps the cigar-box grated on the floor, or perhaps the fact of his touching the relic put him into psychic communication with all these spirits. At any rate, he became aware that the eyes of that dreadful magician were fixed upon him, and that a bone had a better chance of escaping the search of a Rontgen ray than he of hiding himself ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... the Quartre d'Arts revue and the Baronne G., Paris's smartest and most up-to-date lady novelist. The Baronne had been married four times. Her latest hobby was libel actions. Archibald Forester, renowned as an explorer of the psychic borderland, and wearing green tabs and a crown upon his shoulder-strap, discussed matters Alpine with an Italian artillery officer. On the whole the atmosphere was distinctly Savage that day. Flamby accepted a cigarette from Don and sat for awhile, pensive. ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... organism at our disposal, our body, and so, too, with spirit and matter in general. Spirit and Matter are not to be regarded as independent or as ranged against one another from all eternity. Matter is a product of Spirit or Consciousness, the underlying psychic force. "For want of a better word," says Bergson, "we have called it Consciousness. But we do not mean the narrowed consciousness that functions in each of us." [Footnote: Creative Evolution, p. 250 (Fr. p. 258).] It is rather super-Consciousness than a consciousness ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... crossed Trent's lips. "You're almost psychic, honey. Fact is, I was calling to tell you ...
— The Monster • S. M. Tenneshaw
... gift of vision, I have not the psychic ear, And the realms that are called Elysian I neither see nor hear; Yet oft when the shadows darken And the daylight hides its face, The soul of me seems to hearken For the truths that speak ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... as sinister a sea—since westward the dawn would barely yet have broke—the Forest Queen must be steaming along the Andalusian coast, making for Gibraltar and the Straits upon her homeward voyage. And by some psychic alchemy, an influence more potent and tangible than that of ordinary thought, her apprehension fled out, annihilating distance, bridging intervening space. For, just as certainly as Damaris' fair body leaned from the open window, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... mind of the race as the result of the conditions out of which it has come, is by itself incapable of rendering this service to civilization. It is in the mind of woman that the winning peoples of the world will find the psychic center of Power in the future."—"The ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... hardly taken it when I felt an odd sort of psychic feeling—a sort of drowsiness. I remember, in a dim way, going to bed, and then I remember nothing till I ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock |
