"Psychical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Spirituality is the Self-realisation of the One; psychism is the manifestation of the powers of consciousness through organised matter. Each word of that definition has its own value. We are far too apt, in our ordinary thought and talking, to limit the words "psychical," "psychic," or "psychism" in a quite illegitimate way, and the popular use of the term is illegitimate. It is generally used amongst us to mean unusual manifestations of the powers of consciousness, whereas, properly speaking, the word ought to cover every outer manifestation ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... an armful of the publications of "The Society for Psychical Research" before him, was busied with the arguments of the spiritists and their bearings on ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... absolutely. Their minds had the same index of refraction, so that thoughts flashed back and forth between them effortlessly and without distortion. He thought of her so often and wished for her so much during the first two days of his solitude that it seemed almost a case for the psychical research people when he ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... by his kind permission, a beautiful instance of what he well calls "Psychical Distance" from the ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... life and action. So long as he maintains a rational self-control, and the healthy order of his life be not disturbed, they may continue quiescent; but if his brain loses its equipoise, or is hurt or impaired, then a diseased psychical condition may be induced and the latent evil forces be ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... will see how difficult it is for us to move as rapidly with the times as you would have us do. You must remember that it would be quite possible for Holy Mother Church to rise at once to the high scientific and psychical position you wish her to adopt, if it were not for the mass of the ignorant, with whom one must have patience! You are a man in the prime of life—you are zealous—eager for improvement,—yes!—all ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... have you to say concerning the operations of the Society for Psychical Research? Do not its facts and conclusions prove, if not immortality, at least the continuity of life beyond the grave? Are the ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... importance attached to a possible future state: he looks upon this as a psychical stimulant, a day dream, whose revulsion and reaction disorder waking life. The condition may appear humble and prosaic to those exalted by the fumes of Fancy, by a spiritual dram-drinking, which, like the physical, ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... outdoor life, and the pleasing tingling of adventure. But woman is a creature wedded to comfort. She also has a strange instinctive desire to be entirely alone every once in a while, probably because her experiences, while not less numerous than man's, are mainly psychical, and she needs occasionally time to get "thought up to date." So Miss Caldwell began to ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... this refuge turn to spiritualism and psychical research in a futile effort to find a satisfactory solution of the problem of the Hereafter. Again and again we see the unrest of the ever-questioning soul depicted in the drama and the literature of the ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... fruits effective enough for commemoration in the pages of biography, such religious geniuses have often shown symptoms of nervous instability. Even more perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of exalted emotional sensibility. Often they have led a discordant inner life, and had melancholy during a part of their career. They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... co-operation versus autocratic rule: Are the administrative advantages of the latter consonant with the good will and continual psychical development furthered by ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... not be a great pity if there were never such a gymnasium as parental resistance for lovers to exercise their hearts in? Shall we not, then, thank old Wieck for his fine lessons in psychical culture? His daughter Marie, by the way, Clara's half-sister, has only this year (1903) published a defence of the old man in answer to the first ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... should assume the existence of an "Unseen World" entirely spiritual in constitution, and in which material conditions like those of the visible world should have neither place nor meaning. Such a world would not consist of ethers or gases or ghosts, but of purely psychical relations akin to such as constitute thoughts and feelings when our minds are least solicited by sense-perceptions. In thus marking off the "Unseen World" from the objective universe of which we have knowledge, our line of demarcation would ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... of psychical societies, signed by men with any number of capital letters after their names: cool-headed scientists, university professors, psychologists, grave students all, who were constantly finding new and wonderful mediums, and achieving communication with the disembodied. He could tell them a few ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... who is not without his spirit of ragging, told several whoppers, which he later confessed came from the Society of Psychical Research records. And I huskily recounted Uncle Carlton's story of the neurasthenic lady patient who went into a doctor's office and there beheld a skull standing on his polished rosewood desk. Then, as she sat staring at it, this skull started to move slowly toward ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... to admit (for the benefit of the Society for Psychical Research) that Stephen still dreamed of her. He would go about his work absently all the morning with the dream still in his head, and the girl so vividly near him that he could not believe her to be travelling in England, as Miss Russell said. Puss ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... notable features of the scientific tendencies of the present day is the extraordinary interest taken in the investigation of those peculiar physical and psychical conditions attending the states now known collectively under the name of hypnotism, varying from lethargy, catalepsy, etc., to somnambulism. Until quite recently these investigations have been frowned upon and tabooed in scientific circles, and ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... was the senior partner in the firm of Bessel, Hart, and Brown, of St. Paul's Churchyard, and for many years he was well known among those interested in psychical research as a liberal-minded and conscientious investigator. He was an unmarried man, and instead of living in the suburbs, after the fashion of his class, he occupied rooms in the Albany, near Piccadilly. He was particularly interested in the ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... of my own case have been declined on various pretexts by every medical journal to which I have offered them. There was, perhaps, some reason in this, because many of the medical facts which they record are not altogether new, and because the psychical deductions to which they have led me are not in themselves of medical interest. I ought to add, that a good deal of what is here related is not of any scientific value whatsoever; but as one or two people on whose judgment ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... psychical quality that is eternal and unchangeable; because the soul is the seat of the cosmic difference we call sex. In man or woman that is the ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... Nerado made certain that they had no more opportunities to escape. All the way back to far-distant Nevia the space-ship sped, where at once, in manacles, the Terrestrials were taken to the College of Science, there to undergo the physical and psychical examinations which Nerado ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... bone of contention between political parties: the Channel tunnel is no nearer completion: and then as now, when other topics are exhausted, the "Spectator" can fill up its columns with Thought Transference and Psychical Research. ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... Phineas' arguments, that in the end Myrtella consented to act as deus ex machina for the new psychical venture, on condition that Chick should be properly clothed, and fed, and made to go ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... they are extravagant, or against some of his notions that they are fantastic, I answer that this book attempts to describe a man and not one of these calculable little super men who, of late, have been taking up so much more of your attention than they deserve. Students who engage in psychical research, as it is called, often confess themselves puzzled by the behaviour of ghosts, it appears to them wayward and trivial. How much more likely are ghosts to be puzzled by the actions of real men? And we are surely ghosts if we keep nothing of the blood which sent our ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... and even become popular. Man has in this, as in so many other things, a large range of possible accommodation, but he has at the same time habits the continuance of which are necessary for the healthy working of the nervous system. The psychical element in the matter of food-habit is important in all higher animals, but most of all in man. The digestive organs are controlled by the nervous system, and the brain acts upon the latter in such a ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... concealment and usually centering around the sexual processes, while common to both sexes is more peculiarly feminine, so that it may almost be regarded as the chief secondary sexual character of women on the psychical side. The woman who is lacking in this kind of fear is lacking, also, in sexual attractiveness to the normal and average man. The apparent exceptions seem to prove the rule, for it will generally be found that the women ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... foster-mother, Angela, foretell the tragedy in almost every detail, save that, in her vision, she cannot see the face of Francesca's lover. Mr. Phillips, I take it, is here reinforcing ancient tradition by a reference to modern "psychical research." He trusts to our conceiving such clairvoyance to be not wholly impossible, and giving it what may be called provisional credence. Whether the device be artistic or not we need not here consider. I merely point to it as ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... THE ARENA for January and February, 1891, Mr. Wallace dwelt, partly with criticism, and partly with praise, on the work already done by the Society for Psychical Research. To his criticisms I make no demur; they are legitimate and interesting; and indeed where Mr. Wallace's opinions diverge from those which I have myself set forth, I am disposed to think that we are but looking on "the two sides of the shield,"—a ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... kind, to this day, use the number four in contempt, rather than three or five, is a mystery of what one might call the psychical side of the Italian language. ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... time especially is being called to various forms of psychic phenomena measurably through the efforts of the Society for Psychical Research in investigating and sifting the evidence for the stories of apparitions, hallucinations, forewarnings, etc., but more because so many who have heretofore scoffed at and doubted such stories, or who have been foiled in their efforts to obtain for themselves any satisfactory evidence that ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... What is the psychical theory connected with so singular a belief? [14] I think it might be this: The Soul, within its own body, always remains viewless, yet may reflect itself in the eyes of another, as in the mirror of a necromancer. Vainly you gaze into the eyes of the beloved to discern ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... saloon is only the first step downward; a class of so-called lawyers, politicians and agents of bribery and blackmail; a long line of soothsayers, clairvoyants, lottery agents and joint keepers, besides gamblers, sweaters, promoters of "medical institutes," magnetic, psychical and magic "healers" and other types of unhanged, but more or less pendable, scoundrels that feed upon the life-blood of the weak and foolish. The other cities of California have had a similar experience. ...
— California and the Californians • David Starr Jordan
... Clairaudience, Inspiration, Trance, and Physical Mediumship; Prayer, Mind, and Magnetic Healing; and all classes of Psychical Effects. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... Englishman is not a great believer in devils or spirits of evil: though he does in some instances believe in ghosts, and is inclined to the practice of what in former ages was called necromancy—the attempt to establish an illicit connexion with the spirits of the departed—under the modern name of psychical research. There are, no doubt, some forms of psychical research which are genuinely scientific and legitimate. It is probable enough that there exists a considerable area of what may be called borderland phenomena to which scientific methods of inquiry may be found applicable, and which it is ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... primitive arts and products, anthropologists have devoted their attention mainly to the physical characters of the human races; it must, I think, be admitted that the study of these yields in importance to the study of their psychical characters. The general conclusions to which the first set of inquiries may lead, cannot so much affect our views respecting the highest classes of phenomena as can the general conclusions to which the second ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... Science of the Soul, and the Phenomena of Nervation, as revealed by Mesmerism, considered Physiologically and Philosophically; including Notes of Mesmeric and Psychical Experience. By JOSEPH WILCOX HADDOCK, M.D. Second and enlarged Edition, illustrated by Engravings of the Brain ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 82, May 24, 1851 • Various
... page 148. "The ribbon of light." Still to be seen (and heard) spinning from one marae to another on Tahiti; or so I have it upon evidence that would rejoice the Psychical Society. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is written, The first man, Adam, was made a living soul" (which is a quotation from Genesis 2:7—"and man became a living soul"), "but the last Adam," says Paul (meaning Christ), "became a life-making spirit." But, continues Paul, the soul-man (psychical man) comes first; the spiritual-man afterwards, according to a regular order. "The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second is the Lord from heaven." And then he adds,—and this is the key to the whole ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... I have no doubt that this lady has been subject to a good deal of pestering and annoyance. She has written to the Editor of The Evening News denying all knowledge of the supposed miracle. The Psychical Research Society's expert confesses that no real evidence has been proffered to her Society on the matter. And then, to my amazement, she accepts as fact the proposition that some men on the battlefield ...
— The Angels of Mons • Arthur Machen
... But my psychical character perplexed them much more than my zooelogical. It seems that these islanders had been accustomed to call themselves, in their own tongue, "rational animals with sentiments of justice and piety,"—all which, be it remembered, is expressed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... as Calvinistic proportions. As for the dogs, of course there were many, and during their lives they were intimate and valued family friends, and their deaths were household tragedies. One of them, a large yellow animal of several good breeds and valuable rather because of psychical than physical traits, was named "Susan" by his small owners, in commemoration of another retainer, a white cow; the fact that the cow and the dog were not of the same sex being treated with indifference. Much the most individual of the dogs and the one with the strongest character ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... all, 'Learn of Me'. And soon after Caesarea Philippi He insists to the people: 'Whosoever shall be ashamed of Me in this generation, of him also shall the Son of Man be ashamed, when He cometh in the glory of the Father' (Mark viii. 38). The most numerous cures, physical, psychical, moral, certainly performed by Him, appear as the spontaneous effect of a unique degree and kind of spiritual authority; and the sinlessness attributed to Him throughout by the apostolic community (2 Cor. v. 21; Heb. iv. 15; John viii. 46; 1 John ii. 29) ...
— Progress and History • Various
... wonderful and, at bottom, entirely mysterious controlling power which it exercises over the whole organism, physical and mental, being recognised more and more. Thought could not be kept back from a subject so profoundly suggestive. Besides the physical life dealt with by Mr. Darwin, there is a psychical life presenting similar gradations, and asking equally for a solution. How are the different grades and orders of Mind to be accounted for? What is the principle of growth of that mysterious power which on our planet culminates in Reason? These are questions which, though ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... elementary knowledge of the beliefs and practices of the true Indian Yogi, who seeks to attain supernatural powers by rigid asceticism, and who has really some insight into secret mental phenomena, being in this line of discovery the forerunner of the English Psychical Society. ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... have followed mainly physical race lines, yet no mere physical distinctions would really define or explain the deeper differences—the cohesiveness and continuity of these groups. The deeper differences are spiritual, psychical, differences—undoubtedly based on the physical, but infinitely transcending them. The forces that bind together the Teuton nations are, then, first, their race identity and common blood; secondly, ...
— The Conservation of Races - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 2 • W. E. Burghardt Du Bois
... change my residence. Hilda's movements and mine, indeed, coincided curiously. The moment I learned she was going anywhere, I discovered in a flash that I happened to be going there too. I commend this strange case of parallel thought and action to the consideration of the Society for Psychical Research. ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... say "Your case is a very usual one," so that she did not feel ashamed of being like that. He reduced it all, dispassionately and yet not unsympathetically, and with clear scientific precision, to terms of psychical and physical laws. He trained his patient to use her mind and her will, as well as to remember her dreams and to be shocked at nothing that ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... Blocksby's, when I and Tarras, Wentworth and the attendant recognised him, and Miss Breton did not, is thus part of the History of the Unexplained. Allen might have appealed to precedents in the annals of the Psychical Society, where they exist in scores, and are technically styled "collective hallucinations." But neither a jury, nor a judge, perhaps, would accept the testimony of experts in Psychical Research if offered in a criminal trial, ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... little creature would disappear, and it was always gone by earliest daylight. Nocturnal bears in search of pork are not uncommon. But even though your interest meets nothing but the bats and the woods shadows and the stars, that few moments of the sleeping world forces is a psychical experience to be gained in no other way. You cannot know the night by sitting up; she will sit up with you. Only by coming into her presence from the borders of sleep can you meet her face to ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... psychical aspects of the case, one thing was certain, that the influence of Kinnaird—Kinnaird alone of all those who had entered into relations with the lady—was useful at this time to come between her and the distressing symptoms that would have resulted from the mania of self-starvation. ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... the sum total of the universe, the epitome of things created; and at the same time he was the power which gave them life and intelligence and preserved them from perishing by perpetual procreation. It was his might that kept the multiform structure of the material and psychical world in perennial harmony. All that lived—Nature and its Soul as much as Man and his Soul—were inseparably dependent on him. If he—if Serapis were to fall, the order of the universe must be destroyed; and with him: The Synthesis of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the danger begins. Sepia's eyes, I confess, were not lords of the deepest light—for she was not true; but neither was theirs a surface light, generated of merely physical causes: through them, concentrating her will upon their utterance, she could establish a psychical contact with almost any man she chose. Their power was an evil, selfish shadow of original, universal love. By them she could produce at once, in the man on whom she turned their play, a sense as it were of some primordial, ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... One authority maintains that, although the Russian epics possess a family likeness to the heroic legends of other Aryan races, the Russians forgot them, and later on, appropriated them again from Ural-Altaic sources, adding a few historical and geographical names, and psychical characteristics. But this view as to the wholesale appropriation of Oriental myths has not been established, and the authorities who combat it demonstrate that the heroes are thoroughly Russian, and that the pictures of manners and ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... would not be a persona grata to the Society for Psychical Research. As he is violent in his enmities, so is he gullible in marvels. His impeachment of Adriano Lemmi must be ruled completely out of court; his thaumaturgic experiences are paltry trickeries; his account of Albert Pike ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... pianist made, not born. But musicians and those with cultured musical palates discerned a certain acid quality in his playing. His gloomy visage, the reflex of a disordered soul, caused Baudelaire to declare that he had added one more shiver to his extensive psychical collection. In Paris the Countess X.—charming, titled soubrette—said, "Have you heard Racah play the piano? He is a damned soul out ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... the Vampire climb the stairs From vaults below the church; And hark! the Pirate's spectre swears! O Psychical Research, Canst THOU not hear what meets my ear, The viewless wheels that come? The wild Banshie that wails to thee? The ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... principles—luckily a Venetian and no pseudo-Roman,—his imagination became more intense in its glow, gloomier but grander, than it had been in middle age—his horizon altogether vaster. To a grand if sometimes too unruffled placidity succeeded a physical and psychical perturbation which belonged both to the man in advanced years and to the particular moment in the century. Even in his treatment of classic myth, of the nude in goddess and woman, there was, as we shall see presently, ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... Great Lover Heaven Doubts There's Wisdom in Women He Wonders Whether to Praise or to Blame Her A Memory (From a sonnet-sequence) One Day Waikiki Hauntings Sonnet (Suggested by some of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research) Clouds Mutability ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... amatory verse. But the philosophical terms were so numerous that I found myself at a loss as to his meaning at times. His treatment of the subject was quite different; for whereas (he explained) speech was a physical attribute and destined to give place to some other method of affinity, love was psychical in its essence, and hence immortal. But he maintained that moderation should control spirit no less than matter, and that either undue exaltation or a lack of sentiment were inconsistent with the noblest ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... astronomer, Correspondent of the Institute of France, Member of the Royal College of Science, Demonstrator of Astronomical Physics, author of the pamphlet, "Star-Gazers," and the brochure, "An investigation into the psychical condition of those who see stars," C.B.F.R.S. and popular member of the Colley Cibber Club in ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... a while she had gone down to the country with Mrs. More and her daughters; and now she was back once more, in a kind of psychical convalescence, at her aunt's new house on ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... whose flesh and eyes had the sinister newness of Adam's. Even before they came close enough to speak, Northwood was aware that while they seemed of Adam's breed, they were yet unlike him. The difference was psychical rather than physical; they lacked the aura of hate and horror that surrounded Adam. The woman drew Adam's head down and kissed him affectionately ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... once, as my attention has already been called to the question you ask; and it is that I do not see my way to leaving London for Oxford. My reasons for arriving at this conclusion are various. I am getting old, and you should have a man in full vigour. I doubt whether the psychical atmosphere of Oxford would suit me, and still more, whether I should suit it after a life spent in the absolute freedom of London. And last, but by no means least, for a man with five children to launch into the world, the change would involve a most ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... than enough! I had my ghost—a first-hand, authenticated article. I would write to the Society for Psychical Research—I would paralyze the Empire with the news! But I would, first of all, put eighty miles of assessed crop land between myself and that dak-bungalow before nightfall. The Society might send their regular agent to investigate ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... that gave rise to the music, they aim to make its meaning understood so that the song can be intelligently sung. In arranging these words, care has been taken never to forget or to change the natural and the psychical environment ...
— Indian Games and Dances with Native Songs • Alice C. Fletcher
... the poor dear fellow's brain giving way before my very eyes. He couldn't have stood the strain of three dreams. It WAS odd, wasn't it? All three of us dreaming the same thing at the same moment. We must never tell dear Seppy. But I shall send an account of it to the Psychical Society, with stars instead ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... could never arrive at matter. The fallacy was that both schools innocently supposed there was an existing world to discover, and each thought it possible that its view should describe that world as it really was. What now is M. Bergson's solution? That no articulated world, either material or psychical, exists at all, but only a tendency or enduring effort to evolve images of both sorts; or rather to evolve images which in their finer texture and vibration are images of matter, but which grouped and foreshortened in various ways are images of minds. The idea of nature ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... readers who then offered spontaneous tribute to that series of sonnets, and still treasured it as a work of all but faultless symmetry, built up by aid of a blended inspiration caught equally from Shakspeare and from Dante, with a superadded psychical quality peculiar to its author, there were many, even amongst the friendliest in sympathy, who heard of the completed sequence with a sense of doubt. Such is the silent and unreasoning and all but irrevocable edict of all popular criticism against ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... the symbolic potency, which belongs to legendary beings. That there remains a discrepancy between the boy-page and the music made for him, can be conceded without danger to my theory; for the music made for Cherubino is meant to interpret his psychical condition, and is independent of his ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... sensitiveness of the lower class of animals. Nor need we hesitate to recognize the fine gradations from simple sensitiveness and volition to the higher instinctive and to the other psychical manifestations of the higher brute animals. The gradation is undoubted, however ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... of an importance which demands some attention from us in a work for parents. In the language of Dr. Vogel, 'the effects of this malady are unpleasant, for the psychical development in particular suffers. The repeated punishments which these children undergo blunt their sense of honor considerably; they become cowardly and deceitful, and have no personal spirit. If great and expensive cleanliness is not practised, the bed, and ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... however, to the animal world—which is parasitic, indeed, upon the vegetable world—we find that in what we may call the main line of ascent there has been, along with increasing anatomical complexity, the far greater emergence of mind. In its earliest manifestations, sentience, consciousness, the psychical in general, and the capacity for it, must be regarded merely as phenomena of the physical organism; the capacity to feel, as no more than a property of the living body; and such mind as there is exists for the body. ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... Scandinavian immigrants to the States, factory-workers, he had run away to sea at the age of fourteen, with the call of the ocean ringing in his ears from the Viking inheritance that was his. But on this was superposed the fierce desire for success that formed the psychical atmosphere of the new American environment. As a boy in the smoke-blackened factory town, he had breathed in the longing to make money—big money—to use men to his own ends, to be ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... There the gentle priests talked business; here they worshipped; and of their psalter and litany, their faith and ceremonial practices, enough that the new substitute for religion was only a reembodiment of an old philosophy with the narrowest psychical idea for creed; namely, that the principle of Present Life was all there was in man worth culture ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... as a joke, and began to laugh. There was nothing hysterical in this perfunctory tribute to the lesser tradition and it immediately restored her courage. Moreover, the curiosity she felt for all phases of life, psychical and physical, and her naive delight in everything that savored of experience, caused her to stare down upon the city now tossing and heaving like the sea in a hurricane, with an almost ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... the end! With agonising shriek He turned and fled, the spectral perspiration Dewing his brow and coursing down his cheek; Fled, and was lost to man's investigation (For full discussion of his little tricks See Psychical Research Reports, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... the average Chinaman is probably different in complexion, and, indeed, in all his physical and psychical proportions, from the average Englishman. Does that render their association upon terms of equality in a World State impossible? What the average Chinaman or Englishman may be, is of no importance whatever to our plan of a World State. It is ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... strictly normal one. When the germs planted by Darwin, and that promised so much, were forced into growth by a feverish, hot-house heat, and began to sprout into sterile weeds, their small vitality was plain to our eyes. So long as the waves run too high under the pressure of a psychical storm, it is almost useless to protest against it, for every ear is too much deafened by the noise all round to hear the voice of individuals. It is best to leave things to go their own way, deeper and deeper into the mire, till they come to a stand-still there of their own ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... Theological Seminary; National Death Rates; Religious Mediaevalism in America; Craniology and Crime; Morphiomania in France; Montana Bachelors; Relief for Children; The Land and the People; Christianity in Japan; The Hell Fire Business; Sam Jones and Boston Theology; Psychometry; The American Psychical Society; Progress of Spiritualism; The Folly of Competition; Insanities of War; The Sinaloa Colony; Medical Despotism; Mind in Nature Physiological Discoveries in the College of Therapeutics Business Department, College ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... storage. On the other hand, learning means something which the individual does when he studies. It is an active, personally conducted affair. The dualism here is between knowledge as something external, or, as it is often called, objective, and knowing as something purely internal, subjective, psychical. There is, on one side, a body of truth, ready-made, and, on the other, a ready-made mind equipped with a faculty of knowing—if it only wills to exercise it, which it is often strangely loath to do. The separation, often touched upon, between subject matter and method ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... powers, demoniacal and Divine. With the rise of scientific thought the whole of this expressive mythology was transferred to psychology; to-day there is but a small minority among educated persons who doubt that the dream is the dreamer's own psychical act. ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... disproportion are not lacking. The study of the physical antedates the study of the mental always. In the history of the individual as well as of nations, knowledge of the psychical has dragged far behind mastery of tangible objects. We come in contact with our physical environment and adjust ourselves to it long before we begin to study the *acts by which we have been able ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... and the "something" would doubtless bear fruit; for this elderly spinster aunt, with a mania for psychical research, had brains as well as will power, and by hook or by crook she usually managed to accomplish her ends. The revelation was made soon after tea, when she sidled close up to him as they paced slowly along the sea-front ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... forms than human, and that such other forms may be determined by the dominating thought and wish of the owner. For this Double, or astral body as you call it, is really the seat of the passions, emotions and desires in the psychical economy. It is the Passion Body; and, in projecting itself, it can often assume a form that gives expression to the overmastering desire that moulds it; for it is composed of such tenuous matter that it lends itself readily to the ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... he had found upon the dead men around him. It seemed incredible that such a thing could have happened, but on making inquiries concerning his division, the number of which I have forgotten, it proved to be perfectly true. Surely this case presents physiological and psychical ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... posteriori confirmation. I am quite unable to distinguish anything in my sense of right and wrong which I cannot easily conceive to have been brought about during the evolution of my intelligence from lower forms of psychical life. On the contrary, everything that I can find in my sense of right and wrong is precisely what I should expect to find on the supposition of this sense having been moulded by the progressive requirements of social development. Read in the ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... of the chief conditions of general Progress, is a hypothesis which may or may not be true. And if it is true, there remains the further hypothesis of man's moral and social "perfectibility," which rests on much less impressive evidence. There is nothing to show that he may not reach, in his psychical and social development, a stage at which the conditions of his life will be still far from satisfactory, and beyond which he will find it impossible to progress. This is a question of fact which no willing on man's ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... rationalistic interpretations. Cerinthus placed a boundless chasm between God and the world, and filled it up with different orders of spirits as intermediate beings. Basilides supposed an angel was set over the entire earthly course of the world. Valentine announced the distinction between a psychical and pneumatical Christianity. Ptolemaeus maintained that the creation of the world did not proceed from the supreme God. Bardesanes sought to trace the vestiges of truth among people of every nation. Carpocrates maintained that all existence ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... for the supernatural was neither a theatrical pose nor a passing folly excited by the fashionable craze for psychical research, but a genuine and enduring interest, inherited, it may be, from his ancestor, the learned, eccentric savant, Dr. Bulwer, who studied the Black Art and dabbled in astrology and palmistry. He was a member of the society of Rosicrucians, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... psychical function of humor is to delicately cut the surface tension of consciousness and disarrange its structure that it may begin again from a new and strengthened base. It permits our mental forces to reform ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... as by some enchanter's wand, the—shall I speak it?—the Clothes fly-off the whole dramatic corps; and Dukes, Grandees, Bishops, Generals, Anointed Presence itself, every mother's son of them, stand straddling there, not a shirt on them; and I know not whether to laugh or weep. This physical or psychical infirmity, in which perhaps I am not singular, I have, after hesitation, thought right to publish, for the solace of ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... "Nothing is to be gained," she said severely, "by speaking with levity of serious subjects. And, after all, whatever your personal views may be, psychical research is ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... It is really an essay in philosophy dealing with the question of the immortality of the soul; and it has an especial interest for English readers owing to the fact that much in it that seems to be pure fantasy is based on researches undertaken by the British Society for Psychical Research. The plot and the characters are of secondary importance; they are only used for the purpose of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... whether, given the impossibility of the animal behaving differently, we should say that this impossibility was absolute or only happened to occur on this occasion; whether perchance the action of some psychical factor unknown to Neumann between the animal and himself may not have been omitted; and whether such factor was not in operation when the animal was working with its late mistress, etc., etc. In this connexion I feel it incumbent upon me to recall that I myself saw Rolf on two or three occasions ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... nations and the Semites. But while race differences have followed mainly physical race lines, yet no mere physical distinctions would really define or explain the deeper differencesthe cohesiveness and continuity of these groups. The deeper differences are spiritual, psychical, differences undoubtedly based on the physical, but infinitely transcending them. The forces that bind together the Teuton nations are, then, first, their race identity and common blood; secondly, and more important, a common ...
— The Conservation of Races • W.E. Burghardt Du Bois
... each intent upon some point in the future that kept them from pleasure in the present. The little Canuck was the only one who suffered himself a contemporaneous consolation. His early faith had so far lapsed from him that he could hospitably entertain the wild psychical conjectures of Whitwell without an accusing sense of heresy, and he found the winter of northern New England so mild after that of Lower Canada that he experienced a high degree of animal comfort in it, and looked forward to nothing better. To be well fed, well housed, and well ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... very slightly removed from the class of Blind Tom. A trained alienist, one acquainted with the difference between the eccentricities which frequently accompany greatness and the unconscious physical and psychical evidences of idiocy which so clearly agree with the antics of the chimpanzee or the droll Capuchin monkeys, might find in the performer to whom I refer a subject for some very interesting, not to say startling ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... him about psychical research and the modern interest in spiritualism. "I don't think much of that!" he replied. Then, in a lower key, "It was not through animism and necromancy that the Jews came to believe in immortality." How did they reach that belief? "By thinking things out, and asking the question, Shall ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... individual, and endeavors to place clearly before his mind its similarities and differences with other groups. Taking objective facts as his guides, such as laws, arts, institutions and language, he seeks from these to understand the mental life, the psychical welfare of the people, and beyond this to reach the ideals which they cherished and the ideas which were the impulses of their activities. Events and incidents, such as are recorded in national annals, have for him their main, if not only value, as indications of the ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... psychically analogous to the condensation of moisture in the air. It is a natural phenomenon known to babes like Beth, but ill-observed, and not at all explained, because man has gone such a little way beyond the bogey of the supernatural in psychical matters that he is still befogged, and makes up opinions on the subject like a divine when miracles are in question, instead of searching for information like an honest philosopher, whose glory it is, not to prove himself right, but ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... a projection into some physical plane of her busy sub-consciousness. I mean, simply, that instead of materialising as a story, her preoccupation induced a set of actual and surprising circumstances. Why couldn't it? Let Sir Oliver Lodge or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Society for Psychical Research, anybody who knows about that ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... charts, sailed for France, where he published a book and received great applause from the French nation, who called him the greatest discoverer of the present century." Spirit-writing one has heard of, but not even the Psychical Research Society has recorded the case of a dead man copying hydrographical charts. A similar disregard of the fact that Baudin died before the return of his ships occurs in J.E. Tenison Woods' History of Exploration in Australia (1865) ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... my word!" said in quiet, incisive tones the voice of Henry Scott (of the Psychical Research Society). "I hardly dared to hope for so complete a triumph! My good friends, it is one a.m. As the clock struck twelve you sank into hypnotic trance; on the point of its striking one, you emerged. The hour of interval was telescoped in your waking ...
— The Tale Of Mr. Peter Brown - Chelsea Justice - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • V. Sackville West
... similar experiments will similarly fail to-day or to-morrow, I reply that this view is based on a false interpretation of the statement that 'history repeats itself'. A psychological or sociological experiment is not the same when fundamental changes have taken place in the psychical and social conditions. We have already recognized that the nineteenth century has seen a series of vital changes in the economic and spiritual structure of civilization. The evidence of 1815 cannot, therefore, be ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... replace the native, inexperienced and physiological plasticity of youth with some product of experience which shall be able to revise habits in the interest of new situations. The adaptability of the experienced person must be psychical and acquired. It must be in the realm of appreciation, attitude, choice, self-direction—a realm ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... Notes," in which Mr. W. J. Prowse collected the papers of the old Prophet, is, indeed, not an "edition de looks," as the aged Seer says, with his simple humour. From the Paradise of Fiction, however (and the Paradise of Touts), Nicholas has communicated, perhaps to the Psychical Society, the following Epistle. His friendly mention of a brother journalist speaks well for the Old Man's head ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... of the Far East, that mysterious thing, will prevent the other—we have been told all this, I repeat, and told it ad nauseam. Japan as it is to-day refutes these prophecies, these dogmatic pronouncements, psychical and ethnological. The Japanese race, when regarded from what I deem to be the only correct standpoint for forming a sound judgment as to the position it holds among the races of the world, namely, in respect of the size and convolution of the brain, occupies in my opinion a high, a ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... friend here informs me, sir, you are so fortunate as to possess a son of distinguished abilities, and who is at present labouring under some of those precursory indications of incipient disease of the cerebro-psychical organs, of which I have been, I may say, somewhat successful in diagnosing the symptoms. Unless I have been misinformed, he has, for a considerable time, experienced persistent headache of a kephalalgic or true cerebral type, ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... psychical, or mental, or artificial, introducing various more or less capricious changes that are supposed to be emendations; and its operation is, to some extent, ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... A psychical seance of the above disembodied Corps will be held on Friday the 26th March, in the Common Room of the Law Society in Chancery Lane (by kind permission of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 3rd, 1920 • Various
... to invisible influences as man, while their embryos are vastly more so than the parents. If then we recognize the spiritual being in man, and the same spiritual being disembodied as a potential existence,—if, moreover, we recognize the illimitable and incomprehensible psychical power behind the universe, of which man is one expression, we cannot fail to see that the embryonic development of animals from a lower to a higher form is entirely possible and probable; and in the absence of any other practicable method of ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... train of ideas which buzzed in the brains of Poe, Baudelaire, and the symbolists. People who hear painting, see music, enjoy odorous poems, taste symphonies, and write perfumes are now classed by the omnipotent psychical police as decadents, though such notions are as old as literature. Suarez de Mendoza in his L'Audition Coloree has said that the sensation of colour hearing, the faculty of associating tones and colours, is often a consequence of an association of ideas established in youth. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... Psychical Research is added to the volume for convenience and utility. Attracted to this study some years ago by my love of sportsmanlike fair play in science, I have seen enough to convince me of its great importance, and I wish to gain ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... much of a place, and that this is a great lark, and that he enjoys being here immensely," translated Mollie. "Some psychical phenomena!" exclaimed Young Outram, prancing ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... civilized world, it generally starts from the recognition of a great social wrong and from the enthusiasm for a thorough change. But these wrongs, whether they have political or social, economic or moral character, are always the products of both physical and psychical causes. The public thinks first of all of the physical ones. There are railroad accidents: therefore improve the physical technique of the signal system; there is drunkenness: therefore remove the whiskey bottle. The psychical element ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... simply means that in the attack on my brain the higher psychical centres are untouched. I can remember, I can think and reason. When that goes, I go. ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... life—in its relations to the child, the adult, and the community—is considered in connection with the effect on the home of the influences outside it, and the reaction of each on the other. These relations and influences are partly physical and material, partly ethical and psychical. ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... demoniacal and Divine. With the rise of scientific thought the whole of this expressive mythology was transferred to psychology; to-day there is but a small minority among educated persons who doubt that the dream is the dreamer's own psychical act. ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... rather suppose it attached to no matter, nor localized at any point in space, but left swinging IN VACUO, as it were, by the direct creative FIAT of a god. And let us also, to escape entanglement with difficulties about the physical or psychical nature of its 'object' not call it a feeling of fragrance or of any other determinate sort, but limit ourselves to assuming that it is a feeling of Q. What is true of it under this abstract name ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... were much more attractive to me than those of many a splendidly beautiful girl, the immense superiority of whose beauty nobody knew better than I. Why should this have been so? That is one of the mysteries to the solution of which no moral or physical or psychical research has ever brought us an ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... he resumed, with this laudable intention, "that the Society for Psychical Research will be the richer in knowledge for ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... found? A letter of thy name, O God, I have deciphered in the Vedas, another in the Zend-Avesta, another in the Bible, another in the Koran. Ay, even in the Book of the Royal Society and in the Records of the Society for Psychical Research, have I found the diacritical signs which the infant races of this Planet Earth have not yet learned to apply to the consonants of thy name. The lisping infant races of this Earth, when will they learn to pronounce thy name entire? Who shall supply the Vowels which ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... ask papa about them, I don't understand business; but I want to tell you about Sir Rupert. The Society for Psychical Research sent down a Committee to inquire into the credibility of the ghost, and recorded four authentic apparitions in the spare bedroom; and on family evidence accepted at least three events in the Long Gallery. It was just after their report was issued ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... is charitable, teaches ethics as distinct from, but not opposed to, religion, admits men of all creeds and of no creed whatever, and preaches tolerance all round; but it fights indifferentism, apathy, or carelessness on all matters affecting the material, intellectual, and psychical ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... demarcation, wider than that between the animals which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves; and I may add the expression of my belief that the attempt to draw a psychical distinction is equally futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life.* At the same time, no one is more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of the gulf between civilized man and the brutes; ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... vehicle for expressing the latent powers that are ready for manifestation. This process will continue until the germ can express most perfectly all the powers that are coiled up in its invisible form. As the doctrine of Reincarnation is in agreement with all the physical laws, so it is based upon psychical, moral and ethical laws. As on the objective plane the law of action and reaction governs the objective phenomena, so on the subjective plane of consciousness, if the mental action or thought be good, the reaction will be good, and the reaction will be evil ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... has been incited to its publication by the commendations of three of the most eminent critics and editors of magazines in the United States, to whom it was submitted in manuscript. In this essay, he discusses his subject from a physio-psychical standpoint, and believes that he has kept intact the canons of ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... "morality"—the conception of "right"—may, perhaps, be considered as somewhat remote from the question of the Genesis of Species; the more so, since Mr. Darwin, at one time, disclaimed any pretension to explain the origin of the higher psychical phenomena of man. His disciples, however, were never equally reticent, and indeed he himself is now not only about to produce a work on man (in which this question must be considered), but he has distinctly announced ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... this connection the writings of William James, the psychologist, the proceedings of the Psychical Research Society, the wonderful results of psycho-therapeusis dealing with the unconscious self, the subliminal 'consciousness,' or as Captain Hadfield prefers to call it, 'heightened personality' in his paper on this subject 'The Mind and the ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... Our psychical research people give us conclusive proof of mental telepathy or telegraphy between finite minds. Thus communications or impressions are conveyed many miles from one mind to another. This phenomenon is easier when one or both of the subjects are in a ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... In this two classes of women are concerned: those who, though they have no desire for the presence or care of children, nevertheless feel that motherhood is an experience necessary to their complete psychical development and understanding of themselves and others, and those who, though unable to find or unwilling to entertain a husband, would like to occupy themselves with the rearing of children. My own experience of discussing this question ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw |
