"Perceptive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 against his error:—"Oh, murderous coxcomb! What should such a fool Do ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... throwing 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 heart without ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... principal intellectual states of the mind—the one receptive, the other plastic; the one by which it takes in truth, the other by which it works it up into shape. By the one it obtains the substance of thought, by the other the form of thought. The one may be called the perceptive state, the other the reflective state. Thus, too, we see that the perceptive faculty may be exercised in two directions, outwardly and inwardly. It is the same intellectual faculty which, through the senses, looks ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... himself; and if it wasn't that the poor devil of a fellah sees what he's doing, and cottons to him, and the dervishes and Arabs feel he's right, he might as well leave. But it's just there he counts. There's something about him, something that's Quaker in him, primitive, silent, and perceptive—if that's a real word—which makes them feel that he's honest, and isn't after anything for himself. Arabs don't talk much; they make each other understand without many words. They think with all their might ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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 ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... succeed and has a perceptive mind to see opportunities, if he relies on no one but himself, and follows this up by hard, persistent work, he will succeed. If he does not he is lacking in some other vital point, but we have never yet read the life of any man ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... first 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 ...
— Thoughts on a Revelation • Samuel John Jerram
... as blank as any perceptive when it comes to reading minds. I was hoping to collect him whole enough to ask questions, but he forced my hand." I looked to where some of the clean-up squad were tucking the corpse into a basket. "It was one of the few times I'd ...
— Stop Look and Dig • George O. Smith
... the time before the War. France is 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 for foreigners is common enough among the vulgar and unthinking ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... respectful. In a crisis they could and would rely on one another utterly. Why should their demeanour be so false an index to their real feelings? He supposed it was just the fault of loose habit. He did not blame her. From mere pride he blamed himself. He knew himself to be cleverer, more perceptive, wilier, than she; and he ought to have been able to muster the diplomatic skill necessary for smooth and felicitous intercourse. Any friction, whether due to her stupidity or not, was a proof of his incompetence ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... a separate tract, published also in 1822: the one above seems, therefore, to be his challenge on the subject. It is on attention, and I think it will hardly support Herbart's thesis. As a specimen of his formula, let t be the time elapsed since the consideration began, [beta] the whole perceptive intensity of the individual, [phi] the whole of his mental force, and z the force given to a notion by attention ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... position, his mixing with the noblest and best society in the land, and his versatility and quick perceptive powers, Mr. Hope-Scott is so thoroughly master of the art of pleasing that a committee cannot fail to be ingratiated by him; and is certainly never offended, as he is gentlemanly and amiable to a fault. His temper is unruffled, and his speeches brimful of quick wit and ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... masculine gravity in its repose, that gave the value of judgment to the reverence with which he met the gaze of this mysterious son of poverty who claimed him as a long-expected friend. The more exquisite quality of Deronda's nature—that keenly perceptive sympathetic emotiveness which ran along with his speculative tendency—was never more thoroughly tested. He felt nothing that could be called belief in the validity of Mordecai's impressions concerning him or in the probability of any greatly ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... positive necessity of woman's superior insight, and natural dispassionate fairness of mind, for the future wisest exercise of the elective franchise and most just administration of the highest judicial office. It may be said that the mother-in-law is the highest development of the supernaturally perceptive and positive woman, since she usually has superior opportunities to study man in all the stages from marriage to madness; but with her whole sex, particularly after certain sour turns in life, inheres an alertness ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... purposes were at work in the three heads grouped so near each other opposite the painter's glowing canvas. Dick perhaps was the least perceptive and therefore the happiest of the party. His sense of well-being, indeed, seemed enhanced by his previous troubles: like a man who comes out of the cold into the glow of a comforting fire, he abandoned himself ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... of the dry and liquid balsam. Of the twenty-six skulls six were from Grand Canary. All were markedly of the type called Caucasian, and some belonged to exceptionally tall men. The shape was dolichocephalic, with sides rather flat than rounded; the perceptive region was well developed, and the reflective, as usual amongst savages and barbarians, was comparatively poor. The facial region ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... the event as 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 filled up ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... 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 of urchinhood—his sense of touch as yet ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... This could only be said or believed by those who do not know what the perceptive faculty of a great artist is, in comparison with that of other men. There is no great painter, no great workman in any art, but he sees more with the glance of a moment than he could learn by the labor of a thousand hours. God ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... reader will conceive himself standing at any point in a river basin, preferably beyond the realms of the torrents, he may with the guidance of the facts previously noted, with a little use of the imagination, behold the vast perceptive which the history of the river valley may unfold to him. He stands on the surface of the soil, that debris of the rocks which is just entering on its way to the ocean. In the same region ten thousand years ago he would have stood upon a surface from one to ten feet higher than the ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... these into 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 ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... 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 blind are all ears and fingers, and certain ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... breakfast. He made no attempt to conceal his devotion; his eyes scarcely left her face, and his voice took a different tone in addressing her. Fortunately for Bluebell's peace of mind, she was not present. Mrs. Rolleston noticed it, and rejoiced; the Colonel was equally perceptive, ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... it hath not a natural tendency to annihilation, nor a power to annihilate itself, nor can be annihilated by any being finitely powerful only, without an immediate act of the omnipotent Creator to annihilate it, it must endlessly abide an active perceptive substance, without either fear or hopes of dying through all eternity, which is, in other words, to be immortal as to the agency of all natural or second causes, that ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... II, some of the possibilities of kinematic synthesis were recognized in the United States, a few perceptive teachers fanned the tinder ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... receptive side, the sensibility, the most prominent. His senses are alert. He handles and examines objects about him. He sees more, and he learns more from the seeing, than he will in later years unless his perceptive powers are definitely trained and observation made a habit. His judgment and his will are weak. He reasons imperfectly. He chooses without appropriate motives. He needs the building up and development given by educational training. Nature points ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... 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, must present to the child the precise ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... of life on the earth she comprehended the male, it is not perhaps singular that, even after the appearance of mankind on the earth, the greater importance of the mother element in human society should have been recognized; nor, as the power to bring forth coupled with perceptive wisdom originally constituted the Creator, that the god-idea should have ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... we have 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 ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... leaves and twigs. Feeling their respective ways, the tender tips of leaves of the one family touch and twist, and the grasp is for life. Though not of such extravagant character as the lawyer vine, the FLAGELLARIA seems to be endowed with perceptive faculty almost amounting to instinct in selecting the shortest way toward the support necessary for its plan of existence, which is to climb not to grovel. It spurns the ground. New shoots spring from old rhizomes in the clearings, and turn towards the nearest tree as though aware of its ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... listened with reverence to the wiles of the ancient Ulysses, and meditated the same. It is Nature's compensation; oppression simply crushes the upper faculties of the head, and crowds everything into the perceptive organs. Cato, thou reasonest well! When I get into any serious scrape, in an enemy's country, may I be lucky enough to have you at my elbow, to pull ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... but which are now set in motion automatically on a mere touch, as it were, from consciousness- -if it were not able to reproduce them the more quickly and easily in proportion to the frequency of the repetitions—if, in fact, there was no power of recollecting earlier performances? Our perceptive faculties must have remained always at their lowest stage if we had been compelled to build up consciously every process from the details of the sensation-causing materials tendered to us by our senses; nor could our voluntary movements ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... saw the soul as corporeal, and described its 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 such ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 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
... warm, poetic imagination, Nature had given him quick perceptive powers, and the faculty of expressing his thoughts without apparent effort, in simple, strong language, as well defined, and sharply cut as a cameo. Beyond this, and better than all, was a tender, sympathetic sensibility; which, if it sometimes ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... the 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 ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... writers who concern themselves exclusively with the aesthetic conception of beauty or with its relation to culture. It is enough to quote two or three testimonies on this point. "The whole sentimental side of our aesthetic sensibility," remarks Santayana, "—without which it would be perceptive and mathematical rather than aesthetic,—is due to our sexual organization remotely stirred.... If anyone were desirous to produce a being with a great susceptibility to beauty, he could not invent an instrument better ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... 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
... 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. Birney is collected, courteous, ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... 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 in furnished rooms has always ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... place to another, I have always made it a point, if possible, to be accompanied by one or more natives, and I have often found great advantage from it. Attached to an exploring party they are frequently invaluable, as their perceptive powers are very great, and enable them both to see and hear anything at a much greater distance than a European. In tracking stray animals, and keeping on indistinct paths, they display a degree of perseverance and skill that is really wonderful. They are ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... merely a Laboratory but a Temple. The power of physical methods applies for the establishment of that truth which can be realised directly through our senses, or through the vast expansion of the perceptive range by means of artificially created organs. We still gather the tremulous message when the note of the audible reaches the unheard. When human sight fails, we continue to explore the region of the invisible. The little that we can see is as ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... Theodore Parker, for instance, was a man of spare body and large brain. He was surrounded by intellectual people, and his disciples were quite sui generis. On the other hand, Spurgeon was a man of strong animal and perceptive powers, and so able to send the Walworth shopkeepers into ecstasies. His ganglions were big, as was the case in all great preachers. Emotion, he said, was more a matter of bowels than of brain. The ganglionic power carried the brain; ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... 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 ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... manner or degree tends to subvert 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 ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... deeper relief. His grey hair and black clothes would melt into the decoration of his room, were the figure not rescued from such oblivion by the British white glaze of his shirt front and—to a sympathetic eye—by the loveable perceptive face of the man. Sometimes he looks at the sofa in front of him, on which sits WEDGECROFT, still in the frock coat of a busy day, depressed and irritable. With his back to them, on a sofa with its back to them, ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... therefore, as art is imitative, its non-artistic emotional capacities are due (with a very few exceptions) to association; for the feelings traceable directly to fatigue or disintegration of the perceptive faculty usually, indeed almost always, prevent the object from affecting us as beautiful. It is quite otherwise when we come to music. Here the coincidence of other emotion resides, I believe, not in ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... Preface was to give a few traces of the life and literary career of our poet. A remarkable poet cannot but have been a remarkable man. Suppose we take a man with native benevolence amounting almost to folly; but little cunning, caution, or veneration; good perceptive, but better reflective faculties; and a dominant love of the beautiful;—and toss him into the focus of civilization in the age of Louis XIV. It is an interesting problem to find out what will become of him. Such is the problem worked out in the life of JEAN DE LA FONTAINE, born on the ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... 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 ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... impulsive, unreasonable kind-heartedness, and an insensibility, even an instinctive opposition, to the approvings or disapprovings of others. Or the child might be stated thus: Nervous and sensitive organization, intellect predominant; in the intellect the perceptive faculties most active, and of these chiefly that which notices and compares exteriors; beside the intellect, a kind-heartedness without balance, and therefore too great; too little caution, and too little love of approbation. Around these features others have grown up, of course; but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... Balaam's ass was that it was more perceptive than its master. Sometimes a child is more perceptive—because more straightforward ...
— The Asses of Balaam • Gordon Randall Garrett
... nature is always the same, never changing and never subservient to the whims or perceptive powers of the individual, there are painters who will aver that they alone see her correctly and that all the world that differs from them is wrong. One man from natural defects may see all her greens or reds stronger or weaker than another in proportion to the condition ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... 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 ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... 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
... 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
... the simple and wonderful pen of Defoe. There had been in the interval many seasons—or at least I am informed so—of sickness more widely spread, and of death more frequent, if not so sudden. But now this new plague, attacking so harshly a man's most perceptive and valued part, drove rich people out of London faster than horses (not being attacked) could fly. Well, used as I was to a good deal of poison in dealing with my colours, I felt no alarm on my own account, but ...
— George Bowring - A Tale Of Cader Idris - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... kaldanes were striving. It would be deaf, and dumb, and blind. A thousand beautiful strangers might sing and dance about it, but it could derive no pleasure from the singing or the dancing since it would possess no perceptive faculties. Already had the kaldanes shut themselves off from most of the gratifications of the senses. Ghek wondered if much was to be gained by denying themselves still further, and with the thought came a question ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... face of the millionaire, on the contrary, is all strength; every line in it tells of concentration and power. The hair is straight and long; the forehead neither lofty nor ample, but powerfully developed in the perceptive and executive organs; the eyes deeper set in the head than those of Daniel Webster, and overhung with immense bushy eyebrows; the nose large, long, and strongly arched, the veritable nose of a man-compeller; the mouth, chin, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... perhaps not to be regretted. Nothing is more diverting to the perceptive playgoer than these little dramatic-simplicities; as when, the great Suez deal having been completed—a fact that it was enormously important to conceal from the Press and the country (and the adventuress)—a telegram ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 12, 1916 • Various
... a vara 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. Firmness ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... interception and concentration of these waves by our perceptive powers, aided with the giant powers of the telescope, that we obtain the information given, or become cognizant of the nature and existence of the varied lights, colours, tints, and shades of ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... activity, which can see what we call poetry in every commonplace, which can read destiny in apparently petty desires, which widens the vision of life by seeing in every action man in relation to the Universe. In art and in life passions are limited by the bounds of our perceptive imagination; by the extent to which we are capable of seeing and feeling things intensely. If we only see or feel ambition as a petty and sordid thing, in a petty and sordid person, we cannot make a tragic ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... to be seen swimming in pairs, male and female. Many sentimental stories were current, especially among the old writers, concerning the conjugal affection and unselfish devotion of the swordfish, but they seem to have originated in the imaginative brain of the naturalist rather than in his perceptive faculties. It is said that when the female fish is taken the male seems devoid of fear, approaches the boat, and allows himself easily to be taken, but if this be true, it appears to be the case only in the height of the breeding season, ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... people onward in their progressive career, have proceeded from a few gifted souls. Sometimes these have been "self-made" men, so-called, whose best powers were evoked by rare opportunities. Oftener, they have been men of thoroughly disciplined minds, of sharpened perceptive faculties, trained to analyze and to generalize; men of well-balanced judgments and power of clear ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 6, June 1896 • Various
... two orders of poets, but no third; and by these two orders I mean the Creative (Shakespeare, Homer, Dante), and Reflective or Perceptive (Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson). But both of these must be first-rate in their range, though their range is different; and with poetry second-rate in quality no one ought to be allowed to trouble mankind. ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... subdivision titles. A moment's thought shows the impossibility of taking care of any large number of combined characteristics so as to provide exactly for each combination, for the reason that the limitations of space and of the perceptive faculties forbid. For a simple illustration, the imaginary classification of books for use by a bookseller may be recurred to. The dealer, it may be assumed, has books on (1) four different subjects, ...
— The Classification of Patents • United States Patent Office
... race,—more reflective, more religious, and with a thirst for knowledge. The pure air and the simple food of the Arabian plains keep him in perfect health; and the necessity of constant watchfulness against his foes, from whom he has no defence of rock, forest, or fortification, quickens his perceptive faculties. But the Arab has also a sense of spiritual things, which appears to have a root in his organization. The Arabs say: "The children of Shem are prophets, the children of Japhet are kings, and the children of Ham are slaves." Having no temples, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... powerful tie of nature and of law. But it was at the other end of the huge building that there dwelt the solitary offspring of this unnatural union, a boy now in the eleventh year of childhood, companionless, physically inactive, mentally over-quick, perceptive, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... steadily into each other's eyes. Dominey watched them, fascinated. Neither betrayed himself by even the fall of an eyelid. Yet Dominey, his perceptive powers at their very keenest in this moment which instinct told him was one of crisis, felt the unspoken, unbetokened recognition which passed between them. Some commonplace remark was uttered and responded to. Dominey read the ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... takes are (1) Perception, (2) Conception, (3) Thinking. Dialectically, they pass over into each other; not that Perception rises into Conception, and Conception into Thinking, but that Thinking goes back into Conception, and this again into Perception. In the development of the young, the Perceptive faculty is most active in the infant, the Conceptive in the child, and the Thinking in the youth; and thus we may distinguish an intuitive, an imaginative, and ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... is found that all these, and the many other artificial breeds or races of animals and plants, have been produced by one method. The breeder—and a skilful one must be a person of much sagacity and natural or acquired perceptive faculty—notes some slight difference, arising he knows not how, in some individuals of his stock. If he wish to perpetuate the difference, to form a breed with the peculiarity in question strongly marked, he selects such male and female individuals as exhibit ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... within his limited comprehension, the Indian often displays a correct and solid judgment; he pursues his object without hesitation or diversion. He is quickly perceptive of simple facts or ideas, but any artificial combination, or mechanical contrivance he is slow to comprehend, especially as he considers every thing beneath his notice which is not necessary to his advantage or enjoyment. ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... 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 ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... without any principle; he would lie unblushingly, and steal deliberately, if he thought he could do so with impunity. He was cautious, acquisitive, imaginative, self-conceited, and destructive. He had strong perceptive faculties, and much invention and versatility, but his "moral sense" was almost entirely wanting. He found that his fellow clerks were not of that "gentlemanly" stamp which his mother thought so admirable, and therefore he despised them. He thought he should like to go into ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... 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 ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... ceased to be conscious of the tragedy beside her. It had passed for the second time into the grasp of an illusion which possessed itself of the whole being and all its perceptive powers. Before her wide, terror-stricken gaze there rose once more the same piteous vision which had tortured her in the crisis of her love for Warkworth. Against the eternal snows which close in the lake the phantom hovered in a ghastly ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... paint a picture and get the colors all right, but if form is deficient his figures will be grotesque in their absurdity; or he may have good sense as to form and color, and get the sizes of his objects all wrong. Mechanical skill depends in a great measure upon these "Perceptive Faculties," as they are called: that is, those portions of the brain that comprehend and give the ideas pertaining to the properties of material objects, such as individuality, form, size, weight, color, etc. The trained eye and hand of the blacksmith are ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... channels are united in one current—life assumes a purpose, a direction—but the waters are yet pure, and mirror on their face the thousand forms and flashing colors of Creation's beauty—as happy boyhood, rapidly perceptive of all loveliness, gives forth, in radiant smiles, the glad impressions ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... 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 ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... away with the pain. Even the remembrance of it may at length fade from the mind, but there is still an effect which does not pass away with the remembrance. Every strong impression which you make upon his perceptive powers must have a very lasting influence, and even the impression itself may, in ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... at his perceptive ease in the exposed aristocratic illusion. "Yes, I guess he has always lived as he likes, the way those of you who have got things fixed for them do, over here; and to have to quit it on ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... occasion to notice Dr. Macleod's acuteness of intellect. If there is anything in phrenology, his perceptive faculties must be very highly developed. Few men are so observant of all that passes around. Wherever he goes, he puts himself en rapport with his society for the time being. He ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... had good physical powers, and, like her worthy father, was somewhat pungent in her remarks and eccentric in her habits. She entered the ranks as a medical practitioner during her father's life. The benefit of his advice so aided her perceptive powers as to make her quite an expert in various ways, and she continued to practise long after his decease, occasionally attending males as well as females. Her knowledge of midwifery caused a large number of ladies to ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... prestige of the knowledge that every scene is trans-terrestrial; and, at the same time, every scene is presented with a physical realism, a visual and audible vividness, which captivates and holds the perceptive faculty; so that the reader finds himself grasped, as it were, in a vice, whose double handle is mortised on one side in the senses, and on the other in ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... 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 ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... The Romance of a Swan's Nest would be of greater interest to girls. As to mental capacities, boys are usually superior in those fields where logical reasoning is demanded, while girls usually surpass boys in those fields involving perceptive powers and verbal memory. For instance, boys succeed better in mathematics, science, and the reflective phases of history; girls succeed better in spelling, in harmonizing colours in art work, in distinguishing ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... knew some things that Hazel did not. Mrs. Ripwinkley, if she had been asleep for five and twenty years, had lost none of her perceptive faculties in the trance. But she did not hamper her child with any doubts; she let her go on her simple way, under the shield of her simplicity, to test this world that she had ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Bradley a feeling of awkwardness to stand beside him and a consciousness of stupidity to listen to their banter, but Ida dismissed Cargill and Birdsell summarily and walked home with Bradley. He was not keenly perceptive enough to see that Ida put Birdsell off with a brusqueness that ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... realms of nature. For the anterior part of the eye - its salt-pole - which has come into being through a spherically directed formative process, seems to be the one through which we exercise the perceptive activity streaming out radially from the eye, whilst the posterior part - the eye's sulphur-pole - which has come into being through radially directed formative action, serves that form of seeing which is more receptive and is carried ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... 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 IV, the ...
— Image of the Gods • Alan Edward Nourse
... coming uninformed and unprepared into the place of worship and of curiosity that 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 again ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... saw this 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 ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... take note here. We have just seen that the sum of the perceptive faculty is expressed in those words of Aristotle's "to take pleasure rightly" or straightly—[Greek: chairein orthos]. Now, it is not possible to do the direct opposite of that,—to take pleasure iniquitously or obliquely—[Greek: chairein adikos] or [Greek: skolios]—more ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... perceptive hostess, came to her husband's rescue by saying with equal rapidity, "Top of the stairs, end of the hall, ...
— What's He Doing in There? • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... has been called ANTHROPOMORPHISM, (from two Greek words Anthropos, "man," and morphe, "form,") and can never be got rid of, because it is part and parcel of our very nature. Man's spiritual longings are infinite, his perceptive faculties are limited. His spirit has wings of flame that would lift him up and bear him even beyond the endlessness of space into pure abstraction; his senses have soles of lead that ever weigh him down, back to the earth, of which he is and to which he must needs cling, to ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... experience has taught him that he can concentrate his attention more perfectly; therefore his 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 were of this ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... influence. The Hili-lites in more than a thousand years had fought only one battle, and that five hundred years before; nor had they found necessary any struggle for food, or against rigorous climate. They were a brainy people, and were almost superhumanly perceptive in every sense organ and in every nerve. But they were wanting in that quality possessed by most European peoples and by Americans, which takes practical cognizance of the fact that prompt action and fearlessness is the true protection against danger. ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... explored in his time? Would he render moonlight better if he believed the moon was a green cheese? Art and Science dwelt together well enough in the minds of Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo. In the large creative mind there is room for both; though the smaller and merely perceptive mind being fixed on one may sometimes not have room for the other. True, the perfect concord of art and science, like that of religion and science, may be still to come, and come, we hope, both concords ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... with her odd poetry and grace and freedom. She comes from New York, it will be remembered, a "pale angular princess," loaded with millions, and all alone in the world save for her small companion, Mrs. Stringham. She is a rare and innocent creature, receptive and perceptive, thrown into the middle of a situation in which she sees everything, excepting only the scheme by which it is proposed to make use of her. Of that she knows nothing as yet; her troubles are purely her own, and gradually, it is hard to say where ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... become the equivalent of 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 ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... to meet it as a bridegroom is supposed to meet his bride. 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
... were greatly too high for me, nor was I by any means an attentive listener; but I picked up enough to know that Uncle Sandy, though a man of slow speech, held stiffly to the Establishment scheme of Knox, and the defence of Presbyterianism; and it did not require any particularly nice perceptive powers to observe that both his antagonists and himself used at times to get pretty warm, and to talk tolerably loud—louder, at least, than was at all necessary in the quiet evening woods. I remember, too, that in urging him to quit the National Church for ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... the 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 endowed with talents and character that he stood quite apart ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... the animal 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, to give the most apparent facts, which to children are the most ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... is clear, 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
... was a perceptive darkening of the sky, followed by a light, preliminary shower. I'd anticipated that, and was considering heading back for the bug ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker
... have taken all the fight out of him. He stood looking at her for a moment—it was one of the strange contradictions of Billy Byrne's personality that he could hold his eyes quite steady and level, meeting the gaze of another unwaveringly—and in that moment something happened to Billy Byrne's perceptive faculties. It was as though scales which had dimmed his mental vision had partially dropped away, for suddenly he saw what he had not before seen—a very beautiful girl, brave and unflinching before the brutal menace ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... 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 ...
— Glaucoma - A Symposium Presented at a Meeting of the Chicago - Ophthalmological Society, November 17, 1913 • Various
... need is the education of our own perceptive powers. Sir John Lubbock has pointed out, in a very striking passage, that the material world may convey itself through other senses than the five which we possess, that there may be innumerable other senses, and that some ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... even when interviews with the highest personages, and upon the gravest affairs, were taking place, Charles would never suffer him to be considered superfluous or intrusive. There seemed to be no secrets which the Emperor held too high for the comprehension or discretion of his page. His perceptive and reflective faculties, naturally of remarkable keenness and depth, thus acquired a precocious and extraordinary development. He was brought up behind the curtain of that great stage where the world's dramas were daily enacted. The machinery and the masks which produced the grand delusions ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... 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 ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... hard at 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 ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... in rules of action, organization, and administration. Military science and art are equally the results of experience in war. Principles of strategy have grown out of the exercise of the highest military mind in weighing the general features of campaigns, and from the perceptive and logical recognition of those elements essential to success. The art of war has grown up as a body of practices, traditions, and rules, naturally resulting from the immense sum of experience in military life and action among ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... begin his palaver! Don't tell me! I may be a simpleton, but I'm not such a simpleton as he thinks for, nor as some other folks think for, either!" (At this point Hilda had to admit that in truth her mother was not completely a simpleton. In her mother was a vein of perceptive shrewdness that occasionally cropped out and made all Hilda's critical philosophy seem school-girlish.) "Do you think I don't know George Cannon? He came here o' purpose to get that rent-collecting. Well, ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... more useful for that purpose. Thus hardly anything is left which 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 ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... of the sensibilities and perceptive faculties becoming blunted by exposure to and familiarity with offensive effluvia. "The General repeatedly called the attention of the officers at Fort George to the filthy state and foul effluvia of their camp, but they perceived no offensive odor; their olfactories had lost ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... by the way side to the study of psychology—the most fascinating of all studies—there is something in which all can interest themselves, but more especially for women, for to me this seems woman's kingdom. With much quicker perceptive faculties than men, they are better able to see the finer more delicate portion of nature's handiwork and mysteries. Unfortunately in small towns if a woman tries to investigate spiritualism, she is immediately called a spiritualist. If she takes an interest in ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... learned of 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 ...
— The Trained Memory • Warren Hilton
... 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 to recognize ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... 822. sensation, impression; consciousness &c. (knowledge) 490. external senses. V. be sensible of &c. adj. ; feel, perceive. render sensible &c. adj.; sharpen, cultivate, tutor. cause sensation, impress; excite an impression, produce an impression. Adj. sensible, sensitive, sensuous; aesthetic, perceptive, sentient; conscious &c. (aware) 490. acute, sharp, keen, vivid, lively, impressive, thin-skinned. Adv. to the quick. Phr. "the touch'd needle trembles to ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... by one 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 ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... There was room enough for a soul to pass easily. But then, again, how was his soul to pass,—to get out, in the first place, of his body? Easily enough. The concentrated effort of will, which could give shape to a fancy, and place it outside the eye, could, by sustained action, separate all the perceptive powers from the senses,—in short, the spirit from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... savage is dull compared with the sense of the civilized man. There is a myth current in civilization to the effect that the barbarian has highly developed perceptive faculties. It has no more foundation than the myth of the wisdom of the owl. A savage sees but few sights, hears but few sounds, tastes but few flavors, smells but few odors; his whole sensuous life is narrow and blunt, and his ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... instant her perceptive powers were quickening. She was aware that he had deliberately avoided the main issue. De Sylva's probable death implied a good deal, but it was the supreme test of her courage that she refrained ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... line of Margery's message. The one tremendous revelation—the knowledge that the dross-creating curse had finally fallen upon the woman whose convictions should have saved her—was blotting out all the subtler perceptive faculties; and for the time the struggle with the submerging wave of disappointment and disheartenment ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... striking and attractive in person, tall, erect, and graceful in figure, with regular features and wavy hair slightly tinged with gray. His sloping forehead, full at the eyebrows, indicated keen perceptive powers. He was suave in address, so suave, indeed, that his enemies often charged him with insincerity and even duplicity, but his gracious manner, exhibited to the plainest woman and most trifling man, won the hearts of the people as quickly as his political favours recruited ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... it was the Captain's steps, coming up the stairs. Perceptive of her impatience, he had left her to herself, till he could bring word. Now she stood, listening to the nearing jingle that accompanied his footsteps, her hands clasped involuntarily against her breast in rigid tension. And when she saw his face through the dusk, saw ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... crooks, demi-mondaines, 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 KARL ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... half-dazed state in which impressions become exceedingly distinct. It may have been a new phase of the poisoning, but the delirious promptings had all passed away and were succeeded by an exceedingly languid and, at the same time, perceptive state of mind. I was a spectator. It did not seem to be any personal concern of mine. But here were three strong men at a great crisis, and it was fascinating to observe them. Challenger bent his heavy brows and stroked his beard before he answered. One could see that he ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 he ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... of lapsed memory, mechanical effects of habit and ordinary suggestion; some belongs to a middle region where a strange manufacture of inner romances perpetually goes on; finally, some of the content appears superiorly and subtly perceptive. But each has to appeal to us by the same channels and to use organs partly trained to their performance by messages from the other levels. Under these conditions what could be more natural to expect than a confusion which Myers' suggestion would then have been the first indispensable step towards ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... sharpened them with a shallow, out-striking light. Without understanding the change, she felt it and was troubled. Loftily majestic as were her form and features, she was feminine to the core,—tender and finely perceptive. The incisive masculine gaze abashed her. She raised one hand deprecatingly, and her lips moved, ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... pushed back his chair, crossed his knees, and sat perfectly still regarding his host, his body suggesting a repose that did not interfere with his perceptive faculties. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to me!" She spoke in her high way. "I'll make them all right. Aunt Maud, moreover," she added, "has her so engaged that she won't notice." Densher felt, with this, that his companion had indeed perceptive flights he couldn't hope to match—had for instance another when she still subjoined: "And Mrs. Stringham's appearing to respond just in ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... expressionless. When, however, he raised his eyes and fixed them upon any one, the effect was much the same as though a search-light suddenly flashed in one's face; but this was only upon rare occasions, and few casual observers would dream of the keen perceptive faculties hidden beneath that ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... of the body which either keep him from or draw him near to the surrounding bodies. The first of these movements are the reflex movements, then are developed those combinations of movements which we called perceptive or suspensive actions in keeping with perceptions. Later came the social acts, the elementary intellectual acts which gave birth to language, the primitive voluntary acts, the immediate beliefs, then the reflected acts, the ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... before the cheery fire, "let us have a little friendly chat. I am not given to beating about the bush, you know, and whatever I have to say I shall say in very plain words. In the first place, I hope you have not so poor an opinion of my perceptive faculties as to suppose that I don't see what is going on between you ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... Mistress Winthrop, and his glance was oddly perceptive. He observed those matters of which Mr. Craske had seemed to make sardonic comment: the erect stiffness of her carriage, the eyes that looked neither to right nor left, and the pallor of her face. He observed, too, the complacent air with which her ladyship advanced beside her husband's ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... 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 Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... 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 ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... a better channel for that play of his mind which had earlier sought expression in the grotesque; oddity of thought he had in plenty, and the sense of oddity was often as far as his humorous faculty reached, for it was perceptive ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... unpack, and needed no assistance beyond that already afforded by the quartermaster's men. Mr. Billings could not help noting that he made no allusion to that part of the letter which spoke of Captain Rayner's offer. It increased his respect for Mr. Hayne's perceptive powers. ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... sufficiently by the world, he was 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. There was a great catholicity ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... is German science which must regain its superiority in unwearying and brilliant research in order to vindicate our birthright. On the one hand, we must extend the theory of the perceptive faculty; on the other, we must increase man's dominion over Nature by exploring her hidden secrets, and thus make human work more useful and remunerative. We must endeavour to find scientific solutions of the great problems which deeply concern mankind. We need not restrict ourselves ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... wisest course,—as it seems to me,—is not to introduce too many appliances as aids to mental activity, but rather to see what the animal subject thinks and does by its own initiative. In the testing of memory and the perceptive faculties, training for performances is the ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... laughed good-humouredly, and Sherringham was struck with the pleasant familiarity he had established with their brave companion. He was knowing and ready and he said in the first entr'acte—they were waiting for the second to go behind—amusing perceptive things. "They teach them to be ladylike and Voisin's always trying to show that. 'See how I walk, see how I sit, see how quiet I am and how I have le geste rare. Now can you say I ain't a lady?' She does it all as if she had ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... as he walked on in—partly in anger, partly in fear. It seemed ridiculous that one glance had not told the guard that he was not a Class Six. The Guesser was quite certain that he didn't look like a Sixer. But then, Fives were not very perceptive people, anyway. ...
— But, I Don't Think • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the pious dead are "the spirits of just men made perfect." All imperfection arising from bodily organization, as well as from our fallen state here, has ceased, and the soul has become a pure spirit, in a spiritual world, engaged in spiritual pursuits. Memory is awake; every perceptive faculty is in perfection; the soul that sees far distant places, in a moment, in sleep,—that holds converse with other, but absent, minds, while the body is sealed in slumber,—not only does not need the present body to make it ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... 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 ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... sight could not follow its interminable windings and would soon abandon the attempt to divide the invisible. It is a volute to which the brain conceives no limits. The trained mind, alone, more discerning than our retina, sees clearly that which defies the perceptive faculties ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... it finds the requisite temperature and other 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 to 100 feet, and although the lower limbs, or even dry branches, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... were let alone. I can quite understand that it is different with children and with uneducated persons: their imagination is at once more erratic than ours (less tied by the logical necessities of details, less perceptive of these), and, at the same time, their imagination is not as thoroughly well stocked, and as ready to ignite almost spontaneously, as is ours. Much reading, travelling, much contemplation of human beings, apart from practical reasons, has given even the ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... 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 ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the existence of consciousness is the reason which brings about the 'shining forth' of jars and other objects, and thus has a similar office as the approximation of the object to the eye or the other organs of sense (which is another condition of perceptive consciousness). After this the existence of consciousness is inferred on the ground that the shining forth of the object is (not permanent, but) occasional only [FOOTNOTE 34:1]. And should this argumentation be objected to on the ground of its implying that consciousness—which is essentially ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut |
