"Percipient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... confined to animals; we see that certain plants have acquired a habit that is strikingly like death-feigning. We are apt to regard the plants as being non-sentient, yet there is an abundance of evidence in favor of the doctrine that vegetable life is, to a certain extent, percipient. Darwin has shown conclusively that plant life is as subject to the great law of evolution as animal life; he has also demonstrated, in his observations of insectivorous plants—the sun-dew (Drosera rotundifolia) especially—that these plants recognize at once ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... Characteristics, that the effect which follows is not always of a pleasurable kind; it may even be disagreeable. What we contend for is simply its reality; the character of the perception, like that of every other truth, depending on the individual character of the percipient. The common truth of existence in a living person, for instance, may be to us either a matter of interest or indifference, nay, even of disgust. So also may it be with what is true in Art. Temperament, ignorance, cultivation, vulgarity, and refinement have all, in a greater ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... the exercise of the powers of the mind, but they do not prove that the machine is the mind. Without the eye there can be no sensations of vision, and without the brain there could be no recollected visible ideas; but neither the optic nerve nor the brain can be considered as the percipient principle—they are but the instruments of a power which has nothing in common with them. What may be said of the nervous system may be applied to a different part of the frame; stop the motion of the heart, and sensibility ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... Mohammedan tenets which make Mans soul his percipient Ego, an entity, a unity, the Soofi considers it a fancy, opposed to body, which is a fact; at most a state of things, not a thing; a consensus of faculties whereof our frames are but the phenomena. This is not contrary to Genesitic legend. ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... is not only a percipient being; he is also a being of will, and as such he comes into a relationship with the world which can be a source of rich experience. If one observes this relationship, one is bound to notice that it is based on the self-evident assumption that one possesses ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... woman is seen to enter a locked bath-room, where she is not found on inquiry. A woman had been murdered there some years before. The percipient, General Sir Arthur Becher, had seen other uncanny visions. A little boy, wakened out of sleep, said he saw ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... same sense if I am replaced by a photographic plate. We may call the two places the active and passive places respectively.* Thus in the case of a perception or photograph of a star, the active place is the place where the star is, while the passive place is the place where the percipient or ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... Maxwell, especially when we have to do with a so-to-speak personal incident, possesses an importance on which it is needless to insist. We have here, therefore, several days beforehand, the very clear prevision of an event which, moreover, in no way concerns the percipient: a curious detail, but one which is not uncommon in these cases. The mistake in reading Leutschland for Deutschland, which would have been quite natural in real life, adds a note of probability and authenticity to the phenomenon. As for the final act, the foundering of the vessel in the ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... a bird call, giving a pure tone of high pitch (inaudible), and the percipient is a high-pressure flame issuing from a burner so oriented that the direct waves are without influence upon the flame (see Nature, xxxviii., 208; Proc. Roy. Inst., January, 1888). But the waves reflected from the muslin arrive in the effective direction, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... substance independent of spatial dimensions and relations, said to be present only so far and where its effects and manifestations are present, what does it matter whether it reports itself by an effect outside or inside the percipient—whether it be a "vision sensible to feeling, as to sight," or but "a false creation proceeding from a heat-oppressed brain"? Is not this very distinction of outside and inside in the matter of perceptions open to no slight ambiguity? The savage, familiar with the electric ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... as they are perceived; at least in relation to the percipient. 'The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.' But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life's dark veil from before the scene ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... limbs of an animal. Without a stomach, the sun-dew poured forth a digestive fluid as effective in extracting and fitting the nutritious matter of the insect for its own purposes as that of an animal. Without sensory nerve-endings, there was a percipient power in the sun-dew which recognised instinctively and at once the non-nutritious nature of various objects, and which responded to the most delicate chemical stimuli ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... JESSIMINA MANKLETOW, and already may have concluded that I was long since up to the hilt in the tender passion. In this deduction, however, they would have manufactured a stentorian cry from an extreme paucity of wool; the actual fact being that, although percipient of the well-proportionate symmetry of her person and the ladylike liveliness of her deportment, I did never regard her except with eyes of strictly platonic philandering and ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... the conjunction of our Promethean with our culinary fire raises up new powers and species of food to the human frame, and indeed performs by machinery a part of the work of assimilation, enriching the sense of taste with a world of profound objects, and making it the refined participator, percipient, and stimulus of the most exquisite operations of digestion. Man, then, as the universal eater, enters from his own faculties into the natural viands, and gives them a social form, and thereby a thousand new aromas, answering to as many possible ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various |
