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Subconscious   /səbkˈɑnʃəs/   Listen
Subconscious

adjective
1.
Just below the level of consciousness.



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"Subconscious" Quotes from Famous Books



... this carefully concealed appeal to their subconscious natures. As the crowd of eager faces bent close to catch, the details of his scheme, the burning eyes of the leader were suddenly half closed. Silence followed and they watched the two pin points ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon

... proceeded, "I was seized with the terrific, unreasoning fear that I dare say always besets a malefactor. I had but one thought, to get away, and leave the murder to be discovered by some one else. In a sort of subconscious effort at caution, I took my pistol, lest it prove incriminating evidence against me, but in my mad frenzy of fear, I gave no thought to the gold bag or the newspaper. I came home, secreted the will and the revolver, and ever since I have had ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells

... ten-dollar bill from fifteen hundred dollars was spectacular enough to soothe even so bruised an ego as Bud Moore carried into the judge's office. There is an anger which carries a person to the extreme of self-sacrifice, in the subconscious hope of exciting pity for one so hardly used. Bud was boiling with such an anger, and it demanded that he should all but give Marie the shirt off his back, since she had demanded so much—and ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower

... minutest detail, and, mark this well, this true and accurate picture is in no wise dependent upon whether the photographer is observant or not. It will remain upon the plate and may be reproduced under proper conditions. Such is the subconscious memory, and it is generated automatically by each of us during every moment of time, independently of our volition, in ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel

... easy for one to say just what he owes to all these things. Natural influences work indirectly as well as directly; they work upon the subconscious, as well as upon the conscious, self. That I am a saner, healthier, more contented man, with truer standards of life, for all my loiterings in the fields and ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs

... idea of his that dreams in general imply a subconscious state coexisting constantly with the actual realm of thought, but penetrated by our consciousness only when the will is least active, or during sleep. With ordinary mortals sleep and consciousness are so nearly incompatible that the notion of actual mental achievement during sleep ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various

... this, in subconscious depths, a chord of fear seemed to have been struck in her as well—the fear of stony faces, drooped lids, and stretched, pointing fingers. For that night she started up, with a cry, from dreaming that not Annie Johns ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson

... Dr. O'Connor said, "but you would never know you knew it. To elucidate: in a normal person—like you, for instance, or even like myself—the state of having one's mind read merely results in a vague, almost subconscious feeling of irritation, something that could easily be attributed to minor worries, or fluctuations in one's hormonal balance. The hormonal ...
— That Sweet Little Old Lady • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA Mark Phillips)

... ship's bell roused him from the subconscious struggle into which he had allowed himself to be drawn. Ordinarily he had no sympathy with himself when he fell into one of these mental spasms, as he called them. Without knowing it, he was a little proud of a certain dispassionate tolerance which ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood

... a watch, feeling the passage of time and largely estimating it by subconscious processes. By what he considered must be six o'clock, he began looking for a camping-place. The trail, at a bend, plunged out across the river. Not having found a likely spot, they held on for the opposite bank a mile away. But midway they encountered ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... he kept close to the rim of her skirt, which was as high as he could see, and he wished to be taken up and carried again. He was in a half-stupor; it was his desire to remain in that condition, and his propulsion was almost wholly subconscious, though surprisingly ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington

... In only a subconscious sort of way was Howland cognizant of anything more that happened that night. When he came back into a full sense of his existence he found himself in his bed at the hotel. A lamp was burning low on the table. A glance showed him that the room was empty. He raised his ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood

... The direction and character of these hands are determined by the subconscious mind of the medium; but also ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington

... suggestion. I suppose none of us doubts that there is such a thing as the power of suggestion and that it can produce very great results indeed, and that it is par excellence a hidden power; it works behind the scenes, it works through what we know as the subconscious mind, and consequently its activity is not immediately recognisable, or the source from which it comes. Now there is in some aspects, its usefulness, its benefit, but in other aspects there is a source of danger, ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... side of him—the side that is nearest to practice—has somehow or other held intercourse with the inner meaning of that "truism" which he repeats so glibly, and has rejected it as antagonistic to the traditional assumptions on which he bases his life. Or perhaps this work of subconscious criticism and rejection has been and is being done for him, either by the spirit of the age to which he belongs or by the genius of the land ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... torn off the mask from subconscious mind, revealing the true nature of the change that war had wrought in her. She who had resented Feller's part—what a part she had been playing! Every word, every shade of expression, every telling pause of abstraction after Westerling confessed ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer

... your Inspiration, by getting into touch with your Subconscious. Have you ever read my little book, 'Pipe-Lines to ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley

... odd and outlandish. The critic's imagination boggles at the idea of an epic written in such scripts. In that case his is not the scientific imagination; he is checked merely by the unfamiliar. Or his sense of unlikelihood may be a subconscious survival of Wolf's opinion, formed by him at a time when the existence of the many scripts of ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang

... put a difficult question, but one I think that can be answered. There is no such thing as a spirit, an identity that survives death. But there is such a thing as the subconscious self, which is part of the animating principle of the universe, and, if only its knowledge can be unsealed, knows all that has passed and all that is passing in that universe. One day perhaps you will read the works of my compatriot, Hegel, and there you ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard

... if the original cause of his attachment for Tarzan was still at all clear in the mind of the panther, though doubtless some subconscious suggestion, superinduced by this primary reason and aided and abetted by the habit of the past few days, did much to compel the beast to tolerate treatment at his hands that would have sent it at the throat of any ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... calls him a fool or acts with him as if possibly he might have moments of being fooled about himself, the man's whole nature like a spring snaps his mind back into self-defense, and instead of being grateful and thoughtful as a rational or second-thought person always is, he lets his subconscious self take hold of him, tumtum him along into showing everybody ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee

... in the world of space and time, and thus is solved the great problem of enabling the Universal to act upon the plane of the particular without being hampered by those limitations which the merely generic law of manifestation imposes upon it. It is just here that subconscious mind performs the function of a "bridge" between the finite and the infinite as noted in my "Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science" (page 31), and it is for this reason that a recognition of its susceptibility to impression ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... her complaints. They would lose their way, never find the city, die of thirst, freezing, heat or hunger. Interspersed and entwined with these were fears from her past that still floated, submerged in the timeless ocean of her subconscious. Some Brion could understand, though he tried not to listen. Fears of losing credits, not getting the highest grade, falling behind, a woman alone in a world of men, leaving school, being lost, trampled among the nameless hordes ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison

... lying, guarded night, and day, in a field just out of the city, on the Pacific side, and Leroy was impatiently keeping his eyes on the guards most of the time. There was a subconscious notion in the minds of all the boys that there were enemies about, and that the aeroplane would never be fully out of danger until she was well over the ocean on her way south. Gates had arrived only that morning, and now the lads were eager to ...
— Boy Scouts in an Airship • G. Harvey Ralphson

... Peter reaped the advantage of his lifelong training as an intriguer. In the midst of all his fright and his despair, Peter's subconscious mind was working, thinking of schemes. "Maybe Angell was framing something up on you! Maybe he was fixing some plan of his own, and I come along and spoiled it; I sprung it too soon. But I tell you it's straight ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair

... lines was dangerous in the highest degree. Any one seen there was a target for both English and German rifles. But Tom did not think of this, indeed the thought of danger was at that time utterly absent from him. Just as at times the mind has subconscious powers, so there are times when the body is so much under the influence of excitement that ordinary laws do not seem to operate. At that time Tom seemed to be living hours in seconds, because he ...
— Tommy • Joseph Hocking

... explains by saying (earlier than Freud) that all dreams not caused by physical conditions are wish-dreams, and as he always satisfies his sexual needs at once, with a friend or by masturbation, his sexual needs have no opportunity of affecting his subconscious life. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... distorted loop of the curtain haunted his subconscious mind, so that with imaginary fingers he was adjusting its curves, even while his mind pulled and twisted the elements of his problem—then, again, he thought, this thief—had he shrunk from murder, or merely ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming

... rapidly through the streets, seeing no one, avoiding being knocked down by a kind of subconscious attention and alertness of mind, his brain struggling ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten

... Jean and Gregg it was the subconscious knowledge of the fulfillment of this universal dream that kept them happy during all the lean months on Kon Klayu. They had shared elemental things; together they had hunted food that they might live, battled against storms, endured ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby

... "Hypnopedic technique—establishing facts in the subconscious of a sleeping patient. Otherwise, it would be too terrific a shock for you when you awakened. That was proved when they first tried reviving space-struck men, ...
— The Stars, My Brothers • Edmond Hamilton

... elsewhere, and here, too, the male was smaller than the female. Being seized and slain and devoured by his lady love even in the very transports of husbandly affection, it had been bitten in on his subconscious sensibilities that diminutiveness was life-saving, and natural selection had made him inferior in size to his cannibal mate. He had a very shrinking attitude in her presence, as Socrates must have affected ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... the diagram (fig. 3) shows the changes in the shape of the thorax in normal subconscious automatic breathing, and the changes in the voluntary conscious breathing of vocalisation. It will be observed that there are marked differences: when voluntary control is exercised, the expansion of the chest is greater in all directions; moreover, by voluntary ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott

... thereto had broken down; since he had been out of office, and his days and nights were no longer absorbed in the detail of administration and Parliamentary leadership, he had been the defenceless prey of grief; yearning and pity and agonized regret, rising from the deep subconscious self, had overpowered his first recoil and determination; and in the absence of all other passionate hope, the one desire and dream which still lived warm and throbbing at his heart was the dream that still in some crowd, or loneliness, he might again, before it was too late, see Kitty's face and ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... that very moment Thora was learning the mystery of "falling in love"; and there is hardly a more vital thing in life than this act. For it is something taking place in the subconscious self; it is a revolution, and a growth. It happened that after dinner, Conall wished to hear Ian sing again that loveliest of all metrical Collects, "Lord of All Power and Might," and Thora went with Ian to do her part as accompanist on the piano. As they sang Conall ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... the fine things are, of a truth, to be discovered even tho they get into the work by accident, as it were, and even tho they may be the result of an intention which was either unconscious on the artist's part, or subconscious. ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews

... to oneself vigorously, earnestly—seems to arouse the sleeping forces in the subconscious self more effectually than thinking the ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... sheets with my face hidden in the pillow, I cried inconsolably for a long time. That aching sensation in my throat would not wash away with tears. Vaguely I heard the doctor explaining to father how my present condition was due "to severe nervous strain, and the subconscious effort of the constitution to combat it." I knew it was nothing of the sort, but just the plain fact that Johnny Montgomery, seen once dancing at a ball, and ever after to me the model of all romantic ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain

... celebrations of an individual are often a mixture of joy and sadness, of laughter and of tears. In warm and imaginative youth there is no sadness and there are no tears, because that cognizance of the common end which is woven into the very warp and woof of existence is then buried deep in our subconscious natures, or if it impresses itself at all, is too volatile and fleeting to be remembered. But as the years fall away and there is one less spring to flower and green, the serious man "tangled for the present in some parcels ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various

... distant rattle caught his subconscious ear: the rattle of wheels on rough cobble-stones. Immediately the crowd began to cheer and to shout; some sang the "Ca ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy

... it is out of the question—I'm afraid I'm not so deeply interested in Lady Chepstow as, perhaps, I ought to be," said Cleek, noticing in a dim subconscious way that the robin had flown on to the church door and perched there, and was in full song now. "Besides, she does not know of me what you do. Perhaps, if she did.... Oh, well, it doesn't matter. Thank you for coming to say good-bye, Miss Lorne. It was kind of you. Now I must ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew

... existence would be conscious of the inequalities of her education. Of this she said nothing to the child, but listened and remembered. Occasionally she reminded the girl that they might not go to Topeka, but even as she warned she was quickening the subconscious mind to aid in recording any fact which might be advantageous when she herself got there, and her love for the child grew. The girl was part of the scheme. In a week she had ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger

... surface only. The subconscious mind of the rough rider was preoccupied with a sense of a vague groping. The thought of violet perfume associated itself with something else in addition to the darkness of his uncle's living-room, but he did not find himself able to localize the nebulous memory. Where was it his nostrils ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine

... such scenes how the talk runs into artificial prose. But it can't be helped. It's the subconscious smell of the footlights' smoke that's in all of us. Stir the depths of your cook's soul sufficiently and ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... it be conscious or subconscious with the artist, is a necessary factor of the noblest art. Many of us remember the Court of Honor at the World's Columbian Exposition, at Chicago fifteen years ago. The sculpture was good and the architecture better. In chasteness and symmetry of general design, in spaciousness ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton

... sense of fear," he said, "but a sort of subconscious knowledge that the odds were against me if I went on, and yet a conscious determination to go on at all costs and find ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... row. Are we, because we are, human beings, born with the power of innate perception of the beautiful in the abstract so that an inspiration can arise through no external stimuli of sensation or experience,—no association with the outward? Or was there present in the above instance, some kind of subconscious, instantaneous, composite image, of all the mountain lakes this man had ever seen blended as kind of overtones with the various traits of nobility of many of his friends embodied in one personality? Do all inspirational images, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives

... there is in each of us a capacity to comprehend the impressions and emotions which have been experienced by mankind from the beginning. Each individual has a subconscious memory of the green earth and murmuring waters, and blindness and deafness cannot rob him of this gift from past generations. This inherited capacity is a sort of sixth sense—a soul-sense which sees, hears, feels, all ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller

... Keats it's the chloric-ether. If he hasn't, it's the identical bacillus, or Hertzian wave of tuberculosis, plus Fanny Brand and the professional status which, in conjunction with the main-stream of subconscious thought common to all mankind, has thrown ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling

... the Forest lived and breathed in safety, secure from mutilation. No terror of the axe could haunt the peace of its vast subconscious life, no terror of devastating Man afflict it with the dread of premature death. It knew itself supreme; it spread and preened itself without concealment. It set no spires to carry warnings, for no wind brought messages of alarm as it bulged ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood

... he said, "and his Conscious Mind is in abeyance. But his Subconscious Mind is still awake. It functions. It has its opportunity to utter itself. The Snore is the Voice of the Soul! And not only the Soul of the individual but of the Soul of the race. All the experiences of man, in his ascent ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis

... little that way, too,—just a very little. Oh, I could go into the business and fake it of course,—like all the others—or most of them. But you are the real thing. Why," she exclaimed in vexation, "didn't I know it as soon as I laid eyes on you? I certainly was subconscious of something. Why you could do anything you pleased with the power you have if you'd care to learn the business. There's money in it—take ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers

... It is loyalty to life as it has been poured into you by your forefathers, to those ideals which your race has conceived and given to the world. "Viva Italia!" "Vive la France!" is a prayer of the deepest, purest sort that the Italian or the Frenchman can breathe. Without these subconscious devotions and loyalties the human animal would be a forlorn complex of mind and sense. Those amorphous beings who, thanks to our modern economic wealth, have become "citizens of the world," who wander physically and intellectually from land to land, who taste of this ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick

... begin consciously to consider the matter I am likely to go wrong. Thus many, many times I have back-tracked in the dark over ground I had traversed but once before, and have caught myself turning out for bushes or trees I could not see, but which my subconscious memory recalled. This would happen only when I would think of something besides the way home. As soon as I took charge, I groped as badly as the next man. It is a curious and sometimes valuable extra, but by no means ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White

... clerk down the stairway, and out into the street. There, something in the air—the balm of advancing spring; a faint chill, the Parthian shot of retreating winter; some psychic apprehension of the rising sap; the slight northing of the sun; or some subconscious clutch at knowledge of minute alterations in the landscape—apprised Mr. Brassfield's strangely circumscribed mind of the maladjustment with time resulting from the reign of Amidon. But however bewildered Florian's mentality might become at such things, ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick

... breathe religion, were written in an environment which was anything but religious. With curses of ward-mates ringing in my ears, some subconscious part of me seemed to force me to write at its dictation. I was far from being in a pious frame of mind myself, and the quality of my thought surprised ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... he muttered. He had a sort of subconscious feeling that it was imperative to keep engaging ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse

... one day—and I thought it so profound—that there are two kinds of cads—the conscious and the subconscious." She paused again, to be sure of doing justice to Cecil's profundity. Through the window she saw Cecil himself, turning over the pages of a novel. It was a new one from Smith's library. Her mother must have ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster

... flying like a bird, without alighting for more than a moment's swaying poise, as the notes flit from strings to voice, and from voice to wood and wind, is more than a mere heightening of speech: it partakes of the nature of thought, but it is more than thought; it is the whole expression of the subconscious life, saying more of himself than any person of the drama has ever ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons

... a noble characteristic of personal magnetism that, while issuing in and from the subconscious self, its real instruments are the everyday body, the everyday mind, the everyday self, as its real field is the everyday, objective world, big with opportunity, adequate to the splendid development of any ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock

... understood. Ives broke over things that scuttled and crawled. Subjectively real phenomena, all of them. Whatever basic terrors hide in you and in me will come to face us, no matter how improbable they might be. And you want me to tell you what they are. No, skipper. Better leave them in your subconscious, where you've buried them." ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn

... Judgment Trumpet had sounded, France was changed in the twinkling of an eye. And added to that subconscious terror that lurked in every American soul of another revolution—a terror that was dispelled after the third day when France reached out her long arm and mobilized her people into a strong component whole with but one heart, was an inexplainable ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various

... to be strictly informative. It was, however, produced with the attitude and the technique and the fine professionalism of specialists in the area of subconscious selling. So it put its audience—the vast majority of it—into the exact mood of people who surrender themselves to mildly lulling make-believe. When Captain Moggs told of the finding of the ship, her authoritative manner and self-importance made ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster

... warrant the observation—I mean when you stood the boys off me after I'd spoiled their supper, and the other time when you decided on my account not to stay on at the copper-mine. Still, I want to say that while I seem to know I will not make another journey on the gold trail, I've had a subconscious feeling of certainty since sunrise yesterday that the lake lies just ahead of us. I know nothing definite that justifies it, but we'll probably find out to-morrow. There's just another thing. If I leave my bones up here my ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss

... was so sickly and irritable that I could do nothing to cheer his spirits. He continually brooded over the case he had been investigating, and I should have known at that time there was a dangerous neurotic compulsion stirring in his subconscious mind. ...
— The Homicidal Diary • Earl Peirce

... somehow was never able to sleep well in the neighbourhood of the Black Kloof. I suppose that Zikali's constant talk about ghosts, with his hints and innuendoes concerning those who were dead, always affected my nerves till, in a subconscious way, I began to believe that such things existed and were hanging about me. Many people are open to the power of suggestion, and I am afraid that ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... big faith, the faith that plays with mountains. Hidden behind the curtain, an indulgent onlooker might have smiled, but tears would have wet his eyes before the smile could have broadened into laughter. Tante Jeanne, indeed, had heard that the subconscious mind was held to account for the apparent intelligence that occasionally betrayed itself in the laboriously spelled replies; she even made use of the word from time to time to baffle Zizi's too importunate inquiries. But after le subconscient ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood

... window, and studied the heavens. But if he sought for any answer to the many impassioned questions which were thronging his heart and mind at that moment, he looked in vain. For himself the struggles of the last year had been to a great degree subconscious. He had been like a sick man who, ignorant of the real gravity of his condition, fights death daily without a thought of the unequal strife, or the suspense of his physicians. He had abandoned himself to study, immersed himself in ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes

... from her work, and Harry found himself looking into the legless man's face. The features at once attracted and repelled him, and these sensations mingled with them feelings of wonder. Some subconscious knowledge told the young man authoritatively that he was looking on a master work. Barbara noticed this, and her heart warmed, and her ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris

... ether. "This primary substance is of exquisite fineness and is so sensitive that the slightest vibration... registers an indelible impression upon it."[7] If this be so, then here is the story of all that has ever been, and all that is. In our own subconscious minds we know full well that there is such a perfect and complete record as to constitute an individual Judgment Book within of unimpeachable accuracy, and there seems to be nothing intrinsically unreasonable in the idea that there should be something of the kind ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt

... But all the same, it would have been true. His preparatory schoolmaster said of him once: "There is some danger of his becoming the school buffoon." At his prep, the boys were too closely looked after and kept down for any one person to become pre-eminent at anything. And so a subconscious love of notoriety drove Gordon on to play the fool for a whole ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh

... then he contrasted it with the Ansells' house, to which their resolute ill-taste had given unity. He was extremely sensitive to the inside of a house, holding it an organism that expressed the thoughts, conscious and subconscious, of its inmates. He was equally sensitive to places. He would compare Cambridge with Sawston, and either with a third type of existence, to which, for want of a better name, he ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster

... of your soul to your body. That is infinitely mysterious, is it not? An emotion rises in your soul, and a flush of blood marks it. That is the subconscious mechanism of your body. But to say that, does not explain it. It is only a label. You follow me? Yes? Or still more mysterious is your conscious power. You will to raise your hand, and it obeys. Muscular action? Oh yes; but that is but another label." He turned his eyes, suddenly ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson

... centuries, and gets no further. It can get no further, for it can do nothing for the inner life which is the sole reality. We must return to Nature and a purified intuition, to a greater reliance upon what is now subconscious, back to that sweet, grave guidance of the Universe which we've discarded with the primitive state—a spiritual intelligence, ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood

... tea-leaves, must still plod patiently along a path thickly strewn with new knowledge. The powers of clairvoyance, for instance, cannot be forced or hurried; such arbitrary laws as time have no meaning for the subconscious self, therefore the need for hurry does ...
— Telling Fortunes By Tea Leaves • Cicely Kent

... to environment. 2. Enregistered reactions. 3. Simple reflex actions. 4. Compound reflex actions. 5. Tropisms. 6. Enregistered rhythms. 7. Simple instincts. 8. Chain instincts. 9. Instinctive activities influenced by intelligence. 10. Subconscious cerebration at a ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson

... A Research into the Subconscious Nature of Man and Society. By BORIS SIDIS, M.A., Ph.D., Associate in Psychology at the Pathological Institute of the New York State Hospitals. With an Introduction by Prof. William James, of Harvard University. ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... in my subconscious mind proved my salvation. I must have been sleeping some hours. I was dreaming of Marguerite. I saw her standing in an open meadow flooded with sunlight; and heard her voice as if from afar. I walked towards her and as the words ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings

... needed to prepare for this principal problem is on the one side a preparatory clearing up of some fundamental conceptions, especially of those two which have played the chief role in the whole discussion, namely the subconscious and suggestion. And on the other side, we may consider at first some fundamental discriminations which steadily influence the inquiries and controversies in the field. I think of the difference between normal and abnormal mental states, between psychical and physical ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg

... do it. If by hypnotism the conscious mind were put to sleep, and the subconscious mind awakened, then was the thing accomplished, then would all the dungeon doors of the brain be thrown wide, then would the ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... mattered when. It could have no possible bearing on the emergency. He really gave it little thought; the mental processes recounted were mostly subconscious, if none the less real. His objective attention was wholly preoccupied with the knowledge that Calendar's cab was drawing perilously near. And he was debating whether or not they should alight at once and ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance

... wonderful at any time, but how much more subtly charming to have it fastened on you as you lay, comfy and subconscious in his strong and doubtless aching arms. Such peace, peace, dear, would have benumbed Napoleon; but I need few other interests—my universe begins at his head ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr

... around a little yourself before you call in the police. Somnambulism is a queer thing. It's a question whether we are most ourselves sleeping or waking. Ever think of that? Live a saintly life all day, prayers and matins and all that, and the subconscious mind hikes you out of bed at night to steal undermuslins! Subliminal theft, so to ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... eyes one morning with the subconscious feeling that something portentous was impending though he was still too drowsy to ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart

... perceive, after a greater or less length of time, shadowy images of persons or scenes in the substance that fixes his attention. It was so with Dr. Dee, and not having any understanding of the laws of subconscious mental action he soon came to the conclusion that the shadowy figures he saw in the crystal were veritable spirits. From this it was an easy step to imagine that they really talked to him and sought to convey to him a knowledge of the great secrets ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce

... refrain. Sometimes he sang, too (also off key), and you heard his genial roar all over the house. The louder he roared, and the more doleful the tune, the happier his frame of mind. Milly Brewster knew this. She had never known that she knew it. Neither had he. It was just one of those subconscious bits of marital knowledge that ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber

... races have been exploring the natural world and perfecting the mechanical arts, the Hindoo students have been exploring the subconscious and its strange powers. What Myers and Lodge and Janet and Charcot and Freud and Jung are telling us today they had hints of a long time ago; and doubtless they have hints of other things, upon which our scientists ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair

... if she had struck him, and amazement left him silent a moment. In a dim, subconscious way he seemed to notice that the name she mentioned was that of the man he was bidden to arrest. Then, with ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini

... maintaining the healthiness and vigour of Mother Juliana's mind, we may seem to be implicitly treating her revelation, not as coming from a Divine source, but simply as an expression of her own habitual line of thought—as a sort of pouring forth of the contents of her subconscious memory. Our direct intention, however, is to show how very unlikely it is antecedently that one so clear-headed and intelligent should be the victim of the common and obvious illusions of the hysterical visionary. For her book contains ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... the climbers' law held the others rigid. That command implied danger. It called for an instant tightening of every muscle to withstand the strain of a slip. Even Bower, a man on the very brink of committing a fiendish crime, yielded to a subconscious acceptance of the law, and kept ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy

... hammock and looked up at the sky. She thought about Jim Priest's words and tried to understand what he meant. Sadness crept over her and tears came into her eyes. Although she did not know what the old man meant by the words about the sap and the tree, she did, in a detached subconscious way, understand something of the import of the words, and she was grateful for the thoughtfulness that had led to his telling the others to stop trying to tease her at the table. The half worn-out old farm hand, with the bristly beard and ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson

... would sit in a mournful row along the shore, watching the proceedings with concerned brown eyes. They themselves, individually and collectively, exhibited an unfeigned distaste for every form of aquatic sport which, Brett wickedly suggested, might be due to some subconscious atavistic emotion relative to the Red Sea episode. When they had suffered their adored mistress's temerity in silence for as long as canine toleration could be expected to endure, one or other of them would lift up his voice in ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler

... psychological self-satisfaction, but he had a kind heart, an adventurous spirit, and a hatred for the wrong and injustice which seemed just now to be creeping about the world; but all this, again thank God, was entirely subconscious. He ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole

... wild when dim ancestors had run with the pack and at the same time developed the pack and themselves. When Michael was asleep, then it was that pack-memories sometimes arose to the surface of his subconscious mind. These dreams were real while they lasted, but when he was awake he remembered them little if at all. But asleep, or singing with Steward, he sensed and yearned for the lost pack and was impelled to seek the ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London

... its balance! We have never seen anything more beautiful than this planet upon which we are born,—though there is a sub-consciousness in us which prophesies of yet greater beauty awaiting higher vision. The subconscious self! That is the scientist's new name for the Soul,—but the Soul is a better term. Now my subconscious self—my Soul,—is lamenting the fact that it must leave life when it has just begun to learn how to live! I should like to be here and see what Mary ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli

... light. They were scorching her; already she could smell the odor of her burning hair. One movement the girl made to protect her head, then in a flash her hands were covering her eyes again. She wanted to run, and yet some subconscious idea restrained her. Running would only make the flames leap faster and higher. And surely in an instant some one must come to her assistance; for her own low cry had been echoed by a ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook

... competed for his invitations. His manner was entirely serious; it probably deceived even himself. George's manner corresponded, instinctively, chivalrously; but George was not deceived—at any rate in the subconscious depth of ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... Germans were all innocent and merely led astray, they would be none the less guilty in the mass. This is the guilt that counts, that alone is actual and real, because it lays bare, underneath their superficial innocence, the subconscious criminality of all. ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck

... by that swift and sudden process in which the long subconscious growth of the mind sometimes comes to fruitage. He said in later years that before he entered the Bureau's service, while sailing on a troop-ship to Texas, he saw as in a dream his school much as it afterward became. Twice afterward the vision came to him. Stationed at Hampton in 1866, ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... same thing in regard to the mental plane, a sort of subconscious wave of reminiscence. In Callice's case it was in all probability the memory of some sacrificial rite ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins

... Major Vandyke?" I heard myself say; and even as the question came, I wondered why I should have thought of it in that connection. But somehow it would out, and only my subconscious self, far down in ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... would certainly have hit somebody with it. As it was he simply upset the pile. It fell away from Polly, and he had an impression of somebody squeaking as it went down. It was the sort of impression one disregards. The collapse of the pile of goods just sufficed to end his subconscious efforts to get something to hit somebody with, and his whole attention focussed itself upon the struggle in the window. For a splendid instant Parsons towered up over the active backs that clustered about the shop window ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... of Penelope Wells. Here was a case fated to be written about in many languages and discussed before learned societies. A Boston psychologist was even to devote a chapter of his great work "Mysteries of the Subconscious Mind" to the hallucinations of ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett

... imaginative mind, for the four or five hundred men who are gathered here typify, if they do not yet represent, the four or five hundred millions who make up the country. You see as it were the nation in profile, a ponderous, slow-moving mass, quickly responsive to curious subconscious influences—suddenly angry and suddenly calm again because Reason has after all always been the great goddess which is perpetually worshipped. All are scholarly and deliberate in their movements. When the Speaker calls the House in order and the debate commences, deep silence comes ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... meaning as soon as they are 'psychanalyzed.' All the mistakes in answering the second time, for example, have a reason, if we can only get at it. They are not arbitrary answers, but betray the inmost subconscious thoughts, those things marked, split off from consciousness and repressed into the unconscious. Associations, like dreams, never lie. You may try to conceal the emotions and ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve

... the rising land of the foothills. It almost seemed as though she were drawn thither by some magnetic influence. She had formed no definite decision to travel that way. Perhaps it was the result of a subconscious realization of the monotony of the rolling tawny grass-land on the flat. The distant view of grazing cattle failed to break it. The occasional station shack and corral. The hills rose up in sharp contrast and great variety. There were the woodland bluffs. There ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum

... of hers and fling it to the sea? Why could she not turn it toward the man who loved her? Why, why? Why should God make her so unhappy? Why such injustice? Why this twisted interlacing of lives? And yet, amid all these futile seekings, with subconscious deftness her hands went on with their appointed work. Never again would the splendor of her beauty burn as it ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath

... was about thirty feet from Jean Jacques standing there above him, with the set face and the dark malicious, half-insane eyes. Even in his fear and ghastly anxiety, the subconscious mind of George Masson was saying, "He looks like the Baron of Beaugard—like the Baron of Beaugard that killed the man ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... kindred chord in him which responded to nothing else. America might be his ideal home, but his real home was England, and thus he found himself, in the end, with no home at all outside of the boundaries of his domestic circle. A subconscious perception of this predicament, combined with his gradually failing health, led him to say, in a moment of frank self-communion, "Since this earthly life is to come to an end, I do not try to be contented, but weary of it ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... excitement. Even when it is not consciously felt, it is felt sub-consciously, and we ought to be glad to have it aroused, in order that we may see it and free ourselves, not only from the particular fear for the time being, but from the subconscious impression ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call

... Christian Science, Mind Cure, and Faith Cure.[53:1] Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the first-named system, avows that Christian Healing places no faith in hygiene or medicines, but reposes all trust in mind, divinely directed.[54:1] She declares that the subconscious mind of an individual is the only agent which can produce an effect upon his body.[54:2] There is undoubtedly much that is good in the doctrines of the Christian Scientists; but a fatal mistake therein is their contempt for skilled medical advice in sickness. God has ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence

... speak at once, yet in those fleeting moments Mary had a strange sense of a question asked and answered. It was as if he were calling upon her for something she was not ready to give—as if he were drawing from her some subconscious admission, swaying her by a force that was compelling, to ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey

... of the young man's faultless coat, registered upon Banneker's subconscious memory as it had fallen at his feet, recalled ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... five minutes that he looked into the girl's eyes. He has since leaned to the opinion that it was nearer five minutes, because even the news-woman stared at him and the passing street boys had already begun to collect. Some subconscious realisation of this finally enabled him to drag his eyes away, very much as one drags himself awake when he must, and to realise the picture he presented—a dazed man confronting an extraordinarily lovely girl with her fist full of banknotes on a Broadway kerbstone. An interested cabby caught ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell

... table of test-tubes and picked up one containing mercury. What prompted this action he did not know. Perhaps it was his fascination for the elusive metal. Perhaps it was some subconscious feeling. At any rate, he held it aloft and gazed at it in the light. As he did so a strange thing happened. Reflected in its surface on the glass, yet distorted like a convex mirror, he could see the door of the closet open just a crack ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey

... life should consist of, the existence of the Puritan girl must have been darkened from early infancy by such a creed. Only the indomitable desire of the human being to survive, and the capacity of the human spirit under the pressure of daily duties to thrust back into the subconscious mind its dread or terror, could enable man or woman to withstand the physical and mental strain of the theories hurled down so sternly and so confidently from the colonial pulpit. Cotton Mather in his Diary records this incident when his daughter was but four years old: "I took my little daughter ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday

... to wander from the point at issue. I told Clara somewhat shortly that I had posted the letter, although naturally I did not remember doing so. A man who has hundreds of petty details to deal with every day, as I have, develops an automatic memory—a subconscious mechanism which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 19, 1917 • Various

... another, registered the thought that here was a clew to this boy's character. Trust him, and he would be faithful. Distrust him, and you wouldn't be anywhere. It did not come to her in words that way, but rather as a subconscious fact that was incorporated into her soul, and gave her a solid and sure feeling about her boy. She had seen all that in ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill

... we say) struggles against this sweet enchantment of autumn, but Nature is too strong for us. Why is it that all these strikes occur just at this time of year? The old hibernating instinct again, perhaps. The workman has a subconscious yearning to scratch together a nice soft heap of manila envelopes and lie down on that couch for a six months' ear-pounding. There are all sorts of excuses that one can make to one's self for waving farewell to toil. Only last Sunday we saw this ad ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley

... great change. A revolution has taken place in it which seems likely to provoke a revolution equally profound in the wider limits of our common life. From a preoccupation with the conscious it has turned to the Unconscious (or subconscious), to the vast area of mental activity which exists outside the circle of our awareness. In doing so it has grasped at the very roots of life itself, has groped down to the depths where the "life-force," the elan vital, touches our individual ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks

... to day activities, living on their own largely self-sufficient farms. The idea of working for another, at regular hours, without personal liberty, ignoring or suppressing one's own agenda and inclinations over an entire lifetime is quite new and not at all healthy. It takes continual subconscious applications of mental and psychic energies to protect ourselves against the stresses of modern life, energies that we don't know we're expending. This is also highly enervating. Thus to remain healthy we ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon

... subconscious attraction than from impulse Iskender trudged for hours across the wide coast plain till he reached the sandhills and beheld the house of the missionaries. It was then towards midnight, and the moon was rising. ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall

... in his neck, and of the choking, foul atmosphere of the enclosure, accurately described as the Pit, he had gone forth into the street with a subconscious notion in his head that the special doll was more than human, was half divine. And he had said afterwards, with immense satisfaction, at Bursley: "Yes, I saw Rose Euclid ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett

... that she could make when there were men about, was wonderful to see. I noticed it the very day I was born, and when I first caught sight of that piquante little glance that now and then she cast in my direction out of the tail of her eye, I began rummaging about in the back of my subconscious mind for the precise words with which to ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs

... character of the German nation and of the pacific intentions of its Government, and continued to ground their policy in war time on this generous estimate, which even when upset by subsequent experience still seems to linger on in a subconscious but not inoperative state. At first their preparations to meet the emergency hardly went beyond the expedients to which they would have resorted for any ordinary campaign. In this they resembled a sea-captain who should ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon

... indignation by injustice, but always kept his temper under control. He had a lucid mind which reasoned from cause to effect with machine-like accuracy. His intuitions were amazingly keen and accurate. In other words, his subconscious reasoning powers were very highly developed. Consequently his judgments of men and events were almost infallible. Although practically devoid of personal vanity, he was a very proud and independent man, ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe

... Tall, handsome, but lost, apparently, to shame. Swaggering criss-cross down the road, laughing senselessly and shouting songs. Slave to appetite. Controlled by his brutal passions. When spoken to in this state, assumes manner of gentleman. Subconscious self—study in heredity.—Let a strong influence enter his life—handsome noble ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock

... The subconscious popular instinct against Darwinism was not a mere offense at the grotesque notion of visiting one's grandfather in a cage in the Regent's Park. Men go in for drink, practical jokes and many other grotesque things; ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton

... fastened a correct picture on the sensitive diaphragm of a good memory, leaving an impression neither distorted nor "out of focus." His eye did not "pick up," for sundry reasons, the defects of the objects of observation, nor did it work with the uncanny joy of subconscious exaggeration met with so frequently in modern writing, nor did he indulge in that predilection for ugly detail sported by ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius

... conscious of a slight internal shiver, which he could not explain, unless it might be due to a subconscious premonition of ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett

... a subconscious personality take in all this and in further symptoms? Is there a subconsciousness, ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson

... that she, Pauline, had been too willful and headstrong with Harry? If so, was it possible that the keen edge of his adoration was wearing dull? Pauline had just succeeded in stamping these unpleasant questions deep down into the subconscious parts of her mind when the young man whisked up ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard



Words linked to "Subconscious" :   psyche, head, mind, nous, brain, subconsciousness, unconscious



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