"Perceptive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was actually all alone in the heart of the country, she did not permit such a thought to trouble her peace. The grave tranquillity of the old house was already beginning to exert its influence on her always quick and perceptive mind,—the dear remembrance of her father whom she had idolised, and whose sudden death had been the one awful shock of her life, came back to her now with a fresh and tender pathos. Little incidents of her childhood and ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... poetry into many of his descriptions of the wilderness. He also was born and bred among the mountains, and though he had neither the poetical nor the philosophical genius of Wordsworth, and was inferior far in the perceptive, the reflective, and the imaginative faculties, still he could see, and feel, and paint too, in water colours and on air canvass, and is one of the Masters." Hear next Wilson's great rival in criticism, Hazlitt. They were, on many points bitter enemies, on two they were always at ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... soul or spirit? Im Thurn, speaking of the Guiana Indians, says that for them "the whole world swarms with beings." Surely this could not be taken to indicate an untutored mind—unless indeed a mind untutored in the nonsense of the Schools—but rather a very directly perceptive mind. And again what more reasonable (seeing that these people themselves were in the animal stage of evolution) than that they should pay great reverence to some ideal animal—first cousin or ancestor—who played an important part in their tribal existence, and make of this animal a totem emblem ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... long experience." In the measured utterances of Mr. Asquith we recognise the speech of a man to whom all that is old and good is familiar, and in whom the art of finished expression has become a habit. No more elegantly balanced, no more delicately perceptive mind than his has appeared of recent times in our midst, and there is something in the equipoise of his own genius which points Mr. Asquith out as a judge peculiarly well fitted to sit in judgment upon rival ages. ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... having violated certain laws of the divine Adrastia, are condemned to be scourged by the Furies, in order that they may be excited by a dissonance as corporeal through seditions, destructions, and plagues, as it is spiritual, through the forfeiture of harmony between the perceptive and enjoying powers; but it is aglow kindled by the intellectual sun in the soul, and a divine impetus which lends it wings, with which, drawing nearer and nearer to the intellectual sun, and ridding itself ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... need not trace the tale;—nor the one weakness of his so mighty love; nor the inferiority of his perceptive intellect to that even of the second woman character in the play, the Emilia who dies in wild testimony ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... and is so far valid as to excuse, if not to justify, such works as the present. The novel, as soon as it is legibly written, exists, for what it is worth. The page of black and white is the sole intermediary between the creative and the perceptive brain. Even the act of printing merely widens the possible appeal: it does not alter its nature. But the drama, before it can make its proper appeal at all, must be run through a highly complex piece of mechanism—the theatre—the ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... perceived also that the joy and ecstasy came as from the heart, diffusing most softly through all the inmost fibers, and from these into the bundles of fibers, with such an inmost sense of delight that the fiber seemed to be nothing but joy and ecstasy, and everything perceptive and sensitive therefrom seemed in like manner to be alive with happiness. Compared with these joys the joy of bodily pleasures is like a gross and pungent dust compared with a pure and most gentle aura. ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... do from the nasal side, of necessity make the vessels that pass to the temporal part of the retina longest and of less caliber. These vessels and their terminals are first to suffer marked diminution in size; death of the perceptive elements supplied with nutrition by these vessels follows. For this reason the nasal part of the field of vision is more often the first to disappear. In congestive (inflammatory) glaucoma, the typical field of vision shows most marked contraction ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... may be drawn upon the blackboard, which the pupils will eagerly copy; and though this exercise may not be valuable in a high degree, as preparation for the systematic study of drawing, yet it trains the perceptive and reflective faculties in a manner that is pleasant to the great majority of children. It is also in the power of the teacher, at any point in the exercises, and with reference both to variety and usefulness, ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... The third and innermost coat of the eyeball is the retina. This is the perceptive coat, without which it would be impossible to see, and upon which the images of external objects are received. It lines nearly the whole of the inner surface of the posterior chamber, resting on the inner surface of the choroid. It is with the retina, ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... something more than uncommonly queer about this stranger, an unearthliness of which he was confusedly perceptive, but she was not without a curious kind of prettiness, and her pale gold hair was beautiful. The doomed lad saw the moon ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... slightly fiendish readiness to defer to my minutest directions, and perhaps, I should say, a fell determination not to presume." Telegraphies of slight perceptive nods and raised eyebrows, in touch with shoulder shrugs not insisted on, expressed mutual understanding between the two young ladies. "Of course, I may be wrong," said Gwen. "But when I interviewed Mrs. Masham last thing last night, it was borne in upon me, Heaven knows how, that she had been in ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... earlier days of his illness; but his clear and decided answers to their questions convinced them that memory had to some extent returned. As a matter of fact it was not memory that had returned, but a sharpening of his perceptive faculties, awakening him to the fact that he stood in danger of being taken for an idiot or a madman if he did not frame some answer to the questions which the doctors asked him. This new acuteness was ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... testify against this system of principles, because it has a direct tendency to destroy the just and necessary distinction that ought to be maintained between the perceptive and providential will of God, and necessarily jumbles and confounds these together, in such a manner, as a man is left at an utter uncertainty to know when he is accepted and approven of God in his conduct, ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... channels for two months or more before Hazel became actively aware that a subtle change was growing manifest in the ordinary manner of Mr. Andrew Bush. She shrugged her shoulders at the idea at first. But she was a woman; moreover, a woman of intelligence, her perceptive ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... regards material goods? Copplestone had the faculty of seeing things at a glance, and refined and cultivated as the atmosphere of Mrs. Greyle's parlour was, it had taken no more than a glance from his perceptive eyes to see that he was there confronted with what folk call genteel poverty. Mrs. Greyle's almost nun-like attire of black had done duty for a long time; the carpet was threadbare; there was an absence of those little touches of comfort with which refined women of even modest ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... Scriptural woman, humbly wakeful to the surpassing splendour of the high fortune which had befallen her in being so selected, and obedient at a sign. But she was, it appeared that she was, a maid of scaly vision, not perceptive of the blessedness of her lot. She could have been very little perceptive, for she did not understand his casual allusion to Beauchamp's readiness to overcome 'a natural repugnance,' for the purpose of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was a childish laugh. His limbs were regaining the strength of adolescence, but more perceptive sensations remained unroused. He spent whole afternoons in gazing out on the Paradou, pouting like a child that sees nought but whiteness and hears but the vibration of sounds. He still retained the ignorance ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... stratagem perpetrated by a creature so low in the scale of animal life, and living amid surroundings so free from ordinary dangers, that, at first, I was loath to credit the evidence of my own perceptive powers; and it was only after long-continued observation that I was finally convinced that it was really an instance ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... Mr. President! You're going to have to make a speech pretty soon; you'll need a bracer!" He handed the second one to the physician. "Here you go, Doc! Congratulations! It isn't everyone who's got a President in the family!" Then his perceptive brain noticed something in the doctor's expression. "Hey," he said, more softly, "what's the trouble? You look as though you ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... in which these external forces acted upon the more nimble and lively existences, more particularly on living creatures. For every body was continually sending forth emanations or images resembling itself sufficiently in form and structure to affect perceptive bodies with an apprehension of that form and structure. These images travelled by a process of successive transmission, similar to that by which wave-motions are propagated in water. They were, in other words, not movements of the particles ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... however fine the quality of mind required to produce it, a rudimentary appreciative sense will commonly suffice for its apprehension. The chances are, when any foreigner fails to catch the point of an American joke or story, that it is due to something other than a lack of perceptive capability. ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... would ask those Europeans who believe in the immortality of the soul what, in their opinion, survives death. The brain, the nerves and the sense organs obviously decay: the soul, you may say, is not a product of them, but when they are destroyed or even injured, perceptive and intellectual processes are inhibited and apparently rendered impossible. Must not that which lives for ever be, as the Hindus think, independent of thought and ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... of all, that the Deity does not, like other objects, come within the direct cognizance of our perceptive faculties. We have an organization, by means of which we are enabled to perceive various objects around us; and, by travelling to other lands, we can obtain a knowledge of many things of which we had before been ignorant. We perceive also what is going on within us. The telescope and the microscope ...
— Thoughts on a Revelation • Samuel John Jerram
... effect, its cause is the antecedent process; or, taking it as a cause, its effect is the consequent process. This follows from the conception of causation as essentially motion; for that motion takes time is (from the way our perceptive powers grow) an ultimate intuition. But, for the same reason, there is no interval of time between cause and effect; since all the time is ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... demand what at present we must consider as a too early initiation into the ancient languages, no longer the exclusive keys to knowledge. But Milton realized that there was a natural development to the imitative and perceptive powers of man, and he knew that a mere tasking of the verbal memory blighted the diviner faculties of comparison and judgment. We hold that the ideal system of education, to which through coming centuries men can only approximate, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... the chief modern inheritor of that great Roman civilization which found us painted savages, and made us into citizens of the world. The French mind, it is admitted, and admitted most readily by the most intelligent men, is quick and delicate and perceptive, surer and clearer in its operation than the average European mind. Yet the Germans, infatuated with a belief in their own numbers and their own brute strength, have dared to express contempt for the genius of France. A contempt ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... Its passionate exaggeration, however, was quickening, and there is, of course, something to be said for it. The artistic view of life is often higher than the ordinary religious view; at least it does not deal in condemnations and exclusions; it is more reasonable, more catholic, more finely perceptive. ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... as the best epitome we have of the first volume of 'Capital,' and as such, is invaluable to the beginner in economics. It places him squarely on his feet at the threshold of his inquiry; that is, in a position where his perceptive faculties cannot be deceived and his reasoning power vitiated by the very use of his eyesight; whereas, by the very nature of his capitalist surroundings, he now stands on his head ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... have been a wonderful theme for discourse in Buckingham Crescent—so happy an exercise for the votaries of that temple of analysis that he repeatedly spoke of their experience of it as crying aloud for Mrs. Brook. The questions it set in motion for the perceptive mind were exactly those that, as he said, most made them feel themselves. Vanderbank's plea for his morning had been a pile of letters to work off, and Mitchy—then coming down, as he announced from the first, ready for anything—had ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... and the psychological evolution of the delusions, etc.,—may be attributed to the essential ear-marks of the degenerative character; that is, to the exaggerated auto-suggestibility, the great instability of the existing conditions and mental pictures, the disharmony between the perceptive and imaginative capacities and the preponderance of a lively fantastic coloring to the dry thinking of these individuals. They do not form disease processes of a definite characteristic form, but episodic psychotic manifestations on a degenerative soil, ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... it, all this has been but a prelude to the play. Were it not so I should not now stand in such pressing want of the services of a confidential agent,—that is, of an experienced man of the world, who has been endowed by nature with phenomenal perceptive faculties, and in whose capacity and honour I can place the ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... excitement of the events had no doubt left my perceptive powers in a state of erethism. I remember that dinner table with extraordinary vividness even now. My dear wife's sweet anxious face peering at me from under the pink lamp shade, the white cloth with its silver and glass table furniture—for in those days even philosophical writers ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... and characteristic weakness. She had loved every stage of innocence and ignorance and adorable silliness he had passed through and he had grown closer to her through the medium of each, because nothing in life was so clear as her lovely wiseness and fine perceptive ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... way he was not wholly unsuccessful, since by dint of steady gazing he heightened his perceptive powers, whether it were for Notre Dame, the Sistine Madonna, or the Alps, each of which he took with the same seriousness. What eluded him was precisely that human element which was the primary object of his quest. He learned ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... essentials, with combined moisture. The base and lower trunk somewhat resembles the Western juniper (J. occidentalis). It is to be noted in general that trees of such broad, outwardly sweeping, or expanded bases seldom blow over, and to the perceptive and artistic eye their significant character is one of firmness and stability. One hundred to two hundred feet high, six to nine feet in diameter (rarely larger) the shaft is often clear of limbs 80 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... reasons for rejecting this version of the story. Her perceptive faculties, always well developed, were strung to high tension in Maloja. The social pinpricks inflicted there had rendered her more alert, more cautious, than was her wont. She was quite sure, for instance, judging ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... perceptive faculty of undergraduates, it ought to be said that the classmates and contemporaries of Richard Harding Davis knew perfectly well, while he and they were young together, that in him Lehigh had a son so marked in his individuality, so ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... off the great-coat and pressing her hands upon her bosom to indicate herself. Then Dic, in a flood of perceptive light and returning consciousness, caught the priceless Christmas gift to his ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... lying in his stall, he seemed at first in no wise different from other dogs: he took food when offered to him, was fat, sleek and very quiet. When I approached him he took no notice of me, but when the assistant caught him by the tail he instantly became the embodiment of fury. He had not sufficient perceptive power to recognize the point of assault, so that his keeper, standing behind him, was not in danger. With flashing eyes and hair all erect the dog howled and barked furiously, incessantly snapping ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... have supposed, but a wonderful acuteness of the nerves of the face, and more particularly of the nerves of the eye-lids. These phenomena may, I think, be explained in this way. When one of the superior senses is absent, the perceptive force that has watched at the eye, or listened at the ear, is now transferred to other nerves of sensation. In other words, a deaf person is all eyes, and extremely alive to tangible percussions, as will be seen in the case of Dr. Kitto and others. The ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... day in pursuit of other interests—were nonplussed by her complete absorption in the joys and sanctities of home. Yet, in course of time, her patent simplicity and sincerity had disarmed prejudice. The least perceptive could not choose but see that she was genuinely, intrinsically different, not merely in the matter of iridescent silks and saris, but in the very colour ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... have written than any of his own books? But to think of Mr. Punch without JOHN LEECH is, as the Irishman said, unthinkable. From the third volume, when LEECH got really into his stride, until his lamented early death in 1864, LEECH'S genius was at the service of his young friend: his quick perceptive kindly eyes ever vigilant for humorous incident, his ears alert for humorous sayings, and his hand translating all into pictorial drama and by a sure and benign instinct seizing always upon ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various
... driven in upon his own resources. The three American writers whose personal endowment was perhaps the finest—Poe, Hawthorne, and Emerson—had all a certain starved and abstract quality. They could not retail the genteel tradition; they were too keen, too perceptive, and too independent for that. But life offered them little digestible material, nor were they naturally voracious. They were fastidious, and under the circumstances they were starved. Emerson, to be sure, fed on books. ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... numbers of small vessels, and especially fishing boats, how much life and property is risked unnecessarily by every unforeseen storm? Even animals, birds, and insects have a presaging instinct, perhaps a bodily feeling, that warns them; but man often neglects his perceptive and reasoning powers; neither himself observes, nor attends to the observations of others, unless special inclination or circumstances stimulate attention to the subject. Agriculturists, it is true, use weather-glasses: the sportsman knows their value for indicating a good or bad scenting ...
— Barometer and Weather Guide • Robert Fitzroy
... 1. By what test is the health of the perceptive faculty to be determined? 19 Sec. 2. And in what sense may the terms Right and Wrong be attached to its conclusions? 20 Sec. 3. What power we have over impressions of sense. 21 Sec. 4. Depends on acuteness of attention. 21 Sec. 5. Ultimate ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... many-item'd Union—are not only constantly visible here in these mighty channels of men, but they form the rule and average. To-day, I should say—defiant of cynics and pessimists, and with a full knowledge of all their exceptions—an appreciative and perceptive study of the current humanity of New York gives the directest proof yet of successful Democracy, and of the solution of that paradox, the eligibility of the free and fully developed individual with the paramount aggregate. In old age, lame and sick, pondering for years on many a doubt and danger ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... it here as usual, though with an audience so finely perceptive that the labour is much diminished. I have got together in a very short space the conclusion of "Oliver Twist" that you suggested, and am trying it daily with the object of rising from that blank state of horror into a fierce and passionate rush ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... was his reputation as a manufacturer, he was almost equally renowned as one of the most munificent and discriminating patrons of Art. Possessing, naturally, a most refined taste, and having very acute perceptive powers, he instinctively recognised the true in the work of young artists; and when he saw tokens of more than common ability, he fostered the budding talent in a very generous spirit. So much was thought of his judgment, that the ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... could have pleased Sylvie more. Madame Vinet endured her airs, and bent before them like one accustomed to subjection. On the poor woman's rounded brow and delicately timid cheek and in her slow and gentle glance, were the traces of deep reflection, of those perceptive thoughts which women who are accustomed to suffer bury in ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... emotion, succeeded perfectly, because he never has had steadiness, patience, sanity enough to comply with the conditions under which alone can expression be perfectly given to the finest perceptions and emotions. The Greek has the same perceptive, emotional temperament as the Celt; but he adds to this temperament the sense of MEASURE; hence his admirable success in the plastic arts, in which the Celtic genius, with its chafing against the despotism of fact, its perpetual straining after mere emotion, has accomplished ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... well-balanced sentence, paragraph, or poem. To cite the very simplest example, if I read, "on the one hand ... on the other hand," I have a feeling of balanced tensions precisely analogous to what I experience when I look at a vase. Structure is not a purely intellectual or perceptive affair; it is also motor and organic, and that means emotional. It is felt with the body as well as understood by the mind. I have used the case of symmetry to bring out this truth, but I might have used other types of unification, each of which has its unique feeling ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... the animal kingdom sexual selection seems to have done nothing; such animals are often affixed for life to the same spot, or have the sexes combined in the same individual, or, what is still more important, their perceptive and intellectual faculties are not sufficiently advanced to allow of the feelings of love and jealousy, or of the exertion of choice. When, however, we come to the Arthropoda and Vertebrata, even to the lowest classes in these two great ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... was wrong, really, to consider them unintelligent animals. There are other sorts of intelligence than human, and other sorts of communication, and other sorts of culture. The Baron IV colonists had never understood the queer perceptive sense that the Dusties seemed to possess, any more than they knew how many Dusties there were, or what they ate, or where on the planet they lived. All they knew was that when they landed on Baron ...
— Image of the Gods • Alan Edward Nourse
... what they can't do! I don't deny that you may be correct in the broad, vulgar sense, but that is not enough for me. I expect you to grasp the inner meaning. Now the real answer to this question is that there can be no answer! To a perceptive mind it would be impossible to reply without further information. It entirely depends on how the paper is cut out, and the amount of waste incurred ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the powers of perception, and greatly aids the exercise of the perceptive faculties. By "paying attention" to something seen or heard, one is enabled to observe the details of the thing seen or heard, and where the inattentive mind acquires say three impressions the attentive mind absorbs three ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... perceptive powers of which we can form no conception, and may thus discern the approach of particular events as distinctly an we can now calculate the ebb and flow of the tides, or the eclipses of the ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... light we can get concerning the intellect. What are its functions and limitations? Is it safe as a guide? According to the phrenological classification, the intellectual faculties are divided into three classes; viz.: the perceptive, literary and reasoning faculties. The perceptive faculties bring us into relationship with the external world, and through them we learn about the color, size, form, weight, etc., of material objects. If the phrenologists are right, then neither those who claim that the mind ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... group of human beings," Stryker quoted his Handbook, "can be resolved by any other group, regardless of ideology or conditioning, because the basic perceptive abilities of both must be the same ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... physical science can investigate, except the conduct and utterances of the hysterical, the epileptic, the hypnotised and other subjects who are occasionally said to display an abnormal extension of the perceptive faculties, for example, by way of clairvoyance. To the unscientific intelligence it seems conceivable that if Home, for example, could have been kept in some such establishment as the Salpetriere for a year, and could have been scrutinised and made the ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... you to it; but never try to be a prophet; go on quietly with your hard camp-work, and the spirit will come to you in the camp, as it did to Eldad and Medad, if you are appointed to have it; but try above all things to be quickly perceptive of the noble spirit in others, and to discern in an instant between its true utterance and the diseased mimicries of it. In a general way, remember it is a far better thing to find out other great men, than to become one yourself: for you can but become one at ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... spirits and harmonizes the mind, dispels lassitude and relieves fatigue, awakens thought and prevents drowsiness, lightens or refreshes the body, and clears the perceptive faculties.—CONFUCIUS. ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... maxims, we will leave it at that. He united every quality of the moral and intellectual pill-doctor. He lived in an artificial and highly intellectualised society. He was a contemporary and friend of great wits. He haunted salons, and was graciously received by perceptive ladies, who never made a boredom of virtue. He mingled in a chaos of political intrigue, and was involved in burlesque rebellion. He was intimate with something below the face-value of public men, and ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... The perceptive critical taste is, so to speak, the female analogue to the male quality of productive talent or genius. Not capable of begetting great work itself, it consists in a capacity of reception, that is to say, of recognizing ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... memory or understanding of the subject read or thought of will be increased. Very many people think and commit to memory by this method of concentrating attention; they probably do not belong to the quick, perceptive, imaginative class, but rather to those who have power of application and who have educated their minds by close voluntary attention. Galton found a large proportion of the Fellows of the Royal Society ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... painter or the poet whom it brings into sympathy with you across the gulf of time. He tells you what are the thoughts which some fragment of natural scenery, or some incident of human life, excited in a mind greatly wiser and more perceptive than your own. A dramatist or a novelist professes to describe different actors on his little scene, but he is really setting forth the varying phases of his own mind. And so Dandie Dinmont, or the Antiquary, or Balfour of Burley, is merely the conductor through which ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... common observation that the growth of the higher perceptive faculty is strangely concomitant with adversity. The intuitive person is a person who has suffered. When conditions press sufficiently hard, a new table of distribution may be the only means for survival. Thus we proceed to make a virtue of necessity ...
— The Fourth Dimensional Reaches of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition • Cora Lenore Williams
... day, he hears of worldly things; but with Rosa he hears of heavenly things. Her heart feeds upon his thoughts, and assimilates them into new and graceful forms of feminine beauty, and Paul sits and listens, full of love and wonder, to his own thoughts, reproduced by the vivid perceptive powers of his wife. For instance, this morning Paul was reading in the Bible, as he always does to Rosa, before he leaves for his business, and he paused on the words, "then Abraham gave up the ghost, and died in a good old age, and full of years, and was ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... the sense-perceptive and judicial processes by which your mind acquires its knowledge of the outside world. You come now to a study of the phenomenon of memory, the instrument by which your mind retains and makes use of its knowledge, the agency that has power to resurrect the buried past or power to enfold ...
— The Trained Memory • Warren Hilton
... harmony with Christianity, that is to say, prove the revelations by dialectics, Albertus Magnus and, authoritatively, his pupil, Thomas Aquinas (1226-1274), strictly distinguished, by the use of Aristotelian weapons, the rational or perceptive truths from the supernatural verities or the subjects of faith. This distinction, made in order to safeguard dogma, quickly revealed its double-face. The handmaiden philosophy rebelled against her mistress theology, ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... Therefore whenever my reasoning faculties obtruded themselves, I knapp'd 'em o' the coxcombs with a stick, and cry'd 'Down, wantons, down.' Briefly, I kept my ratiocinative gear strictly quiescent, with only the perceptive apparatus unrestrained, thus observing all things through the hallowed haze of a mental sabbath. There is a positive felicity in this attitude of soul, comparing most favorably with the ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... perceptive or sceptical observers were needed than those who frequented the hotel Graslin, to detect the barbaric grandeur, the plebeian force of the People which lay deep-hidden in her soul. If sometimes her friends surprised her in a torpor of meditation either gloomy or merely pensive, they knew she bore ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... explanation will show its reasonableness. For if, as we have seen, there is an expenditure of mental energy in the mere act of listening to verbal articulations, or in that silent repetition of them which goes on in reading—if the perceptive faculties must be in active exercise to identify every syllable—then, any mode of so combining words as to present a regular recurrence of certain traits which the mind can anticipate, will diminish that strain upon ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... untiring activity, extraordinary energy and courage, as well as great tact and varied knowledge. The man who would follow it successfully must possess the boldness of a gambler, the sang-froid of a duelist, the keen perceptive powers and patience of a detective, and the resources and quick wit of ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... though intuitive and perceptive as to form, "gaining God by first leap" as all true art must do, leaves the impression, when regarded as a whole, of an articulated system. It is a view of man's life and destiny that can be maintained, not only during the impassioned moods of poetry, but in the very ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... I cannot imagine, but he certainly had retained a quickness of apprehension which made him half-unconsciously adapt himself to Aunt Emmy and her little habits in a way that astonished me. It was she who showed herself less perceptive as regarded him. But this she never divined. She had got it rooted into her small, graceful head that he would naturally wish to converse principally about his farm. And, in spite of scant encouragement, she continually "showed an interest," as she herself expressed ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... the outer-earthly. To see land and water curving upward in the distance until it seemed to stand on edge where it melted into the distant sky, and to feel that seas and mountains hung suspended directly above one's head required such a complete reversal of the perceptive and reasoning faculties as almost to ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... instrument, according to Kant, is the human mind. Space and Time and the Perceptive Faculties are the parts of the instrument. Everything that reaches the senses must submit to the laws of Space and Time, that is, to the Laws of Mathematics, because Space and Time are forms of the mind itself, and, like ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... was the newest product of the Atomic Age, half soldier, half scientist—shrewd and perceptive, an ...
— Warning from the Stars • Ron Cocking
... The sense of sight; (2) the sense of hearing; (3) the sense of smell; (4) the sense of taste; (5) the sense of touch; (6) Mano-vijnyana (lit., mind-knowledge), or the perceptive faculty; (7) Klista-mano-vijnyana (lit., soiled-mind-knowledge), or an introspective faculty; (8) Alaya-vijnyana (lit., receptacle-knowledge), ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... oases of light shed by the street lamps at the successive crossings. Then he strolled back the way he had come. He was a shadow of a man, sliding noiselessly and without undue movement through the semi-darkness. Also he was very alert, like a wild animal in the jungle, keenly perceptive and receptive. The movement of another in the darkness about him would need to have been more shadowy than he to have ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... temerity, the bounds which had been prescribed to thee? Why didst thou endeavour to try thy strength with and against Him who is not to be reached? Did not God create you in such a manner, that you were as much elevated above the devils as above the beasts of the earth? Did he not grant you the perceptive faculty of good and evil? Were not your will and choice free? We wretches are without choice, without will; we are the slaves of evil and of imperious necessity; constrained and condemned to all eternity to wish nothing ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... gude forehead—vara gude indeed. Causative organs large, perceptive ditto. Imagination superabundant—mun be heeded. Benevolence, conscientiousness, ditto, ditto. Caution—no that large—might be developed," with a quiet chuckle, "under a gude Scot's education. Just turn your head into profile, laddie. Hum, hum. Back o' the head a'thegither defective. ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... the idiot are trained to take note of their appropriate objects, the various perceptive faculties are next to be exercised. The greatest possible number of facts are to be gathered up through the medium of these faculties into the storehouse of memory, from whence eventually the higher faculties of mind may draw the material of general ideas. It ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... five-kopeck piece, and he crossed himself three times and flung it into the rye. Good heavens! I am carrying away such a mass of memories that if I could gather them together into a whole it would make a good nugget of gold! I don't understand why clever, perceptive people crowd into Petersburg and Moscow and don't come here. Is there more truth and freedom in the Nevsky and in the big damp houses than here? Really, the idea of artists, scientific men, and journalists all living crowded together ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... evident that it is all-important what kind of training the little girl receives in the first years of her school life, while she is yet in the intuitional or perceptive stage? A failure to properly train her attention here, and the whole of her after-work is invalidated. Her school work becomes, in its progress, tiresome, and hence disagreeable, from the constant necessity of repetition, a necessity arising from the ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... suffering that Tarzan's sorrowful thoughts induced had the effect of numbing his keen, perceptive faculties, so that the advancing savages were almost upon him before he became aware that he was no ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... history, might no longer be termed human. At each moment it has its fixed and determinate entelechy, the ideal of that being's life, based on his instincts, summed up in his character, brought to a focus in his reflection, and shared by all who have attained or may inherit his organisation. His perceptive and reasoning faculties are parts of human nature, as embodied in him; all objects of belief or desire, with all standards of justice and duty which he can possibly acknowledge, are transcripts of it, conditioned by it, and justifiable only as expressions ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... drank in the cool green wonder of it all with a keenly perceptive enjoyment; drew into his lungs deep draughts of the strong, clean mountain air; watched the frail curtain of mist swaying, lifting, spreading to a pearl-white film, till, through a sudden rent, the red gold of sunset burned, deepening ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... sat upright again, her own face, as she lifted it, would have struck a perceptive onlooker as being, as it were, the face of another girl. It was tear-stained and wild, but this was not the cause of its change. The soft, bird eyes were different—suddenly, amazingly older than they had been when she had ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... is clear from his writings, though afterwards he joined anger to desire, as if anger were nothing but a desire and passion for revenge. However, he always considered the emotional and unreasoning part of the soul as distinct from the reasoning, not that it is altogether unreasoning as the perceptive, or nutritive, or vegetative portions of the soul, for these are always deaf and disobedient to reason, and in a certain sense are off-shoots from the flesh, and altogether attached to the body; but the emotional, though it is destitute of any reason of its own, yet is naturally inclined to listen ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... blackmailers, gamblers, roues, murderers, receivers and decent congenital idiots of all sorts. The characterisation is adroitly done and the workmanship avoids that slovenliness which makes nineteen out of twenty books of this kind a weariness of spirit to the perceptive. I wonder if Maisie with such a father and mother would have been such a darling. Perhaps Professor ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... been the impossible one of a man with wings? Yet we know that there is a higher being, higher life with more exalted beauties; but clear reflection must also teach us that its form remains imperceptible and unimaginable as long as our perceptive faculty and our knowledge have not, in a manner at present quite inconceivable, increased in a higher sphere, and that therefore all their awarded shapes, though formed by Dantesque phantasy, ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... the spiritual nature of Thought, which has its source in the capacities whereby we perceive, remember, and comprehend that significant sounds or words are the commuted representatives of the objects of intelligence. The perceptive organs of many animals are more exquisitely endowed than man, and their local memory more retentive; yet they are wholly incapable of comprehending language or calculating numbers;—capacities by which the Creator has exclusively ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... matter to produce these impressions. Destroy, then, if it were possible, this sense of touch, and our absolute perception of objects is entirely lost—the connection between the outer world and the perceptive faculties of the mind is dissolved forever. The truth of this position is seen in the fact that in a swoon, when all the senses are benumbed, the mind is utterly unconscious of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... here to consider is the part which heredity has played in forming the perceptive faculty of the individual prior to its own experience. We have already seen that heredity plays an important part in forming memory of ancestral experiences, and thus it is that many animals come into the world with their power of perception already largely developed. The wealth ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... greater intensity. In other words, the larger image made the stronger impression. Now in external perception the stronger impression tends to hold the attention more securely; that is, it is more effective in producing those adjustments of the sensory organs which perceptive attention implies. So here what was noticed as the superior brightness and distinctness of the larger image may be supposed to imply some advantage in the latter in securing those adjustments of the mental attitude which were favorable to the ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... Destructiveness, Combativeness, Secretiveness, Acquisitiveness, Constructiveness, Cautiousness, Approbativeness, Self-Esteem, Firmness, Religion, Benevolence, Hope, Marvellousness, Poetry, Ideality, Imitation, Wit or Mirthfulness, Eventuality, Individuality, Perceptive Organs, Time, Comparative Sagacity, Causality, Tune, Constructiveness, Language—Comments on the Organology ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... in a watch or a brain, the more trouble they are to take care of. The movements of exaltation which belong to genius are egotistic by their very nature. A calm, clear mind, not subject to the spasms and crises which are so often met with in creative or intensely perceptive natures, is the best basis for love or friendship.—Observe, I am talking about MINDS. I won't say, the more intellect, the less capacity for loving; for that would do wrong to the understanding and reason;—but, on the other hand, that the brain often runs away with the heart's best ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... rule Artemus Ward succeeded in pleasing every one in his audience, especially those who understood the character of the man and the drift of his lecture; but there were not wanting at any of his lectures a few obtuse-minded, slowly-perceptive, drowsy-headed dullards, who had not the remotest idea what the entertainer was talking about, nor why those around him indulged in laughter. Artemus was quick to detect these little spots upon the sunny face of his auditory. He would pick them out, address ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... resultant impression of the philosopher, but it is on the resultant impression itself that we react. Expertness in philosophy is measured by the definiteness of our summarizing reactions, by the immediate perceptive epithet with which the expert hits such complex objects off. But great expertness is not necessary for the epithet to come. Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own. But almost everyone has his ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... people downstairs was not intimate enough, nor were those people themselves perceptive enough for any realisation of what was ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... colour and shape. The "infidel" will probably be unable to refrain from insulting the memory of the ecstatic saint by the remark, that Tertullian's known views about the corporeality of the soul may have had something to do with the remarkable perceptive powers of the Montanist medium, in whose revelations of the spiritual world he took ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... When the perceptive faculties were thus trained, books were made to take the place of object lessons; reading and writing were taught by long and patient endeavor; the elements of arithmetic, of Scripture history, and of geography were communicated; and mechanical ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... I have named, only that I sat for half an hour on the edge of the base of one of the marble columns of the beautiful nave and enjoyed a perfect revel of—what shall I call it?—taste, intelligence, fancy, perceptive emotion? The place proved so endlessly suggestive that perception became a throbbing confusion of images, and I departed with a sense of knowing a good deal that is not set down in Murray. I have seated myself more than once ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... since the police had been coming and going over it, I was unable to see how my companion could hope to learn anything from it. Still I had had such extraordinary evidence of the quickness of his perceptive faculties, that I had no doubt that he could see a great deal which ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... but I have not quite decided upon my own opinion. I should say, I am not quite sure that I do not think him a very great man; for my opinion is, of course, as far as possible from settling the matter. He has very keen perceptive power; but what astonishes me is, that his eyes are not large and deep. He seems to see everything very accurately; and how he can do so with his small eyes, I cannot tell. They are not keen eyes, either, but quite ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... or devitalised on the other, just remains refreshingly and believably human. Mr. MARRIOTT'S story is not a yarn, but a brocade of intricate design and exquisite colouring. Let justice be done and The Unpetitioned Heavens fall to a wide circle of perceptive readers. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 4, 1914 • Various
... sanguine, magnificent, grand. Bourne thunders and lightens. Phelps is one great, clear, infallible argument—demonstration itself. Jocelyn is full of heavenly-mindedness, and feels and speaks and acts with a zeal according to knowledge. Follen is chaste, profound, and elaborately polished. Goodell is perceptive, analytical, expert, and solid. Child (David L.) is generously indignant, courageous, and demonstrative; his lady combines strength with beauty, argumentation with persuasiveness, greatness with humility. ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... verbal) shape, has its appropriate accompaniment of emotional changes: the ease or difficulty of understanding producing feelings of victory or defeat which we shall deal with later. And although the various perceptive activities remain unnoticed in themselves (so long as easy and uninterrupted), we become aware of a lapse, a gap, whenever our mind's eye (if not our bodily one!) neglects to sweep from side to side of ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... ordered that it should be celebrated in advance, because the armistice ended on the 10th. The rejoicings of Saint-Napoleon's day then took place in the cantonments. This was the last time that the French army celebrated the birthday of its Emperor! There was not much enthusiasm, for even the least perceptive of officers was aware that we were on the brink of a catastrophe, and the worries of the commanders affected the morale of their subalterns. However each one prepared to do his duty, though with little hope of success, in view of the ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... the matter of our knowledge and its form. The matter is what is given by the perceptive faculties taken in the elementary state. The form is the totality of the relations set up between these materials in order to constitute a systematic knowledge. Can the form, without matter, be an object of knowledge? Yes, without doubt, provided that this knowledge is not like a thing we possess ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... with what we call "suggestion," it may be observed that our perceptive activities are divided into (a) ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... most unaffected grace in the world, congratulated them, and was glad to see them. Yet her engaging face, being an open as well as a perceptive one, was not without her husband's ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens |
