"Hypnotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... crowds of their special characteristics, and at the same time the trend they are to take. Contagion is a phenomenon of which it is easy to establish the presence, but that it is not easy to explain. It must be classed among those phenomena of a hypnotic order, which we shall shortly study. In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest. This is an aptitude very contrary to his nature, and of which ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... sings. Mark the almost hypnotic hold he has over them; not only over pit and gallery but over stalls as well, and the well-groomed loungers who have just dropped in. I defy any sane person to listen to "Watcher, me Old Brown Son!" without chortles of merriment, ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... irrepressible, visionary absorbed with philosophy AS such; to him it was a kind of transcendental business, the profits of which supported his inner man rather than his family. Apparently his deep interest in spiritual physics, rather than metaphysics, gave a kind of hypnotic mellifluous effect to his voice when he sang his oracles; a manner something of a cross between an inside pompous self-assertion and an outside serious benevolence. But he was sincere and kindly intentioned in his eagerness to extend what he could of the better influence ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... at a glance from Stoddard he drew back and concealed his smirk. Then for half an hour with his most telling arguments and the hypnotic spell of his eyes Whitney Stoddard outdid himself to win her over while Rimrock sat by and smiled. He had tried that himself in days gone by and he knew Stoddard was wasting his breath. She had made up her mind and that was the end of it—there would be no Tecolote ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... of the Medical Faculty in Nancy who is a champion of hypnotism has written a book on 'Suggestion and its Application in Therapeutics,' in which a great many hypnotic cures are recorded." ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... Culpepper—blessed if it didn't burn him—carries the scars to this day. Then there was that case in Denver. Ever hear about that? A young girl, nervous patient. Nails driven through the palms of her hands,—tenpenny nails,—under the hypnotic suggestion that she wasn't being hurt. Didn't leave a cicatrice as big ...
— The Faith Healer - A Play in Three Acts • William Vaughn Moody
... "Hypnotic business! Wonder if it will work," whispered Bickley. Then he lifted the syringe and looked inquiringly at the man, who shook his head, and went on ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... life. Magnetic healers have hundreds of victims in every city. Their advertisements in the journals of all sorts are of countless kinds. Some cure at short hand, some miles distant from the patient. They are equaled in numbers by the hypnotists, or hypnotic doctors, who profess to throw their patients into a trance and cure them by suggestion. I heard of one cure in which the guileless American is made to lie in an open grave; this is called "the return to nature." ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... Claire was perplexed. Should she allow him to go out in this hypnotic state? Could she exercise her art in Alderson's presence? While she debated, Mr. Brassfield airily bowed himself ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... undertake to pronounce upon the validity of the theory which is here advanced. The play is an inquiry into the significance and authenticity of miracles. Incidentally the theme is faith-healing, the hypnotic effect of prayer, and ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... had followed every word of the strange archaic Portuguese. The rhythmic sentences seemed to have had an almost hypnotic effect upon us, for neither of us afterwards remembered how and when ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... passions, to whom the images of celestial peace, grown rigid on the sacred walls, called in vain. All before her was silence and void. She was following paths unknown to her, swiftly, securely, as one in an hypnotic trance. She passed through dark and narrow places, through light and broad places, never hesitating, never looking to right or left, all her senses sharpened and concentrated in her hearing, following little sounds of distant whisperings, the faint complaining of one door, the breath ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... fallacy abroad then as there is now that the feminine mind is not mathematical. That the great men whom Hypatia met in each city were first amazed and then abashed by her proficiency in mathematics is quite probable. Some few male professors being in that peculiar baldheaded hypnotic state when feminine charms dazzle and lure, listened in rapture as Hypatia dissolved logarithms and melted calculi, and not understanding a word she said, declared that she was the goddess Minerva, reincarnated. ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... long or closely," said Phadrig, putting his hand down inside his waistcoat and drawing out a wash-leather bag. "As I have told you, it possesses certain qualities which are not to be trifled with. You are, of course, aware that many Eastern gems are credited with hypnotic powers. ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... him still gazing at me fixedly. Some nerve snapped in me under the hypnotic stare. I leapt to my feet and cried, "In the name of God and Democracy and the Dragon's grandmother—in the name of all good things—I charge you to avaunt and haunt this house no more." Whether or no it was the result of ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... grasped it, he was speaking of something else, and she had missed the links. To understand him better she attempted to argue with him, and he told her of the incredible explanation that Charcot, the eminent hypnotist, had had to fall back upon in order to account materialistically for some of his hypnotic experiments, and she was forced to admit that the spiritualistic explanation was ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... Guatemalan, nagual; North America, Manitou, 'medicine') is not that savage's totem. {89a} The nagual, tona, or manitou is selected for each particular savage, at birth or puberty, in various ways: in America, North and Central, by a dream in a fast, or after a dream. ('Post-hypnotic suggestion.') But a savage is born to his kin-totem. A man is born a wolf of the Delawares, his totem is the wolf, he cannot help himself. But after, or in, his medicine fast and sleep, he may choose a dormouse ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... long, however, as the monotonous sounds exerted a hypnotic effect on his senses. Once or twice as he was almost falling asleep, he felt himself clinging desperately to Caradoc's hand, his grip weakening, the fearsome void gaping under him, then he would awake with a start ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... the Czarina and the Monk Rasputin. The latter was a serf in Siberia, and now has a malignant, hypnotic influence in the Russian Court. If he is refused anything, he falls on the floor in a fit and froths at the mouth until he gets what he wants. The Court ladies have to lick his dirty fingers clean, ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... acquiring things that he supposed befitting to his dignity. The first of these matters was a faded fez, in which he stuck a long feather. From that he progressed in worldly wealth. How he got it all, on what credit, or with what hypnotic power, I do not know. Probably he hypothecated his wages, certainly he had ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... capital of experience, no longer renewing her life, and her renderings had lost that quality of the greatest, the living communication with the experience embodied in the music. It was on the stereotyped memories of such communication that she depended, on the half hypnotic possession by the past; filling in vacancies with temperamental caprice or an emotion no longer the ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... than the director of the "Psychological Institute" of the Berlin University, Professor Otto Pfungst. He found that when Hans was put on the witness stand and subjected to rigid cross examinations by strangers, his answers were due partly to telepathy and hypnotic influence! For example, the discovery was made that Hans could not always give the correct answer to a problem in figures unless it was known to ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... on his feet and, after bestowing on the jury a stern hypnotic stare, he plunged into his reply with a really admirable air of conviction and sincerity. "My lord and gentlemen of the jury: The case which is now before this Court is one, as I have already remarked, in which human nature is presented in a highly unfavourable light. But I need ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... the Heads, Warning the people you're about to wreak Upon the human ear your Sunday freak?— Whereat the most betake them to their bed Though some prefer to slumber in the pews And nod assent to your hypnotic views. ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... piety against it, as the contact sufficed to bless them. And the defile continued, continued without end during days and months as it had done for years; and it seemed as if the whole world, all the miseries and sufferings of humanity, came in turn and passed in the same hypnotic, contagious kind of round, through that rocky nook, ever ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... was admitted, on the third day, the gaping Spectators observed that the Youngun had an open Countenance, somewhat like a Channel Cat, a full head of Hair bushing at the nape of the neck, and a hypnotic Eye; so they knew he was destined for the ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... letter of Catherine II. The ewers have long completed the round, no one is eating or drinking any more, no one is even breathing, for fear of interrupting the conversation; all the company are in a hypnotic trance, and—a remarkable effect of levitation—are literally hanging upon the Imperial lips. Suddenly the august nose is silent, and Leonard Astier, who has made a show of resistance in order to improve the effect of his opponent's victory, throws up his arms ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... fervor of passion which would be outrageous if addressed to a woman. Surely he saw her as a woman, queenly and distressed and very proud. He was physically anguished for her, and the man who loved her was the very brother of his bones. There were some words the effect of which were almost hypnotic on him—The Isle of the Blest, The Little Dark Rose, The Poor Old Woman and Caitlin the Daughter of Holohan. The mere repetition of these phrases lifted him to an ecstasy; they had hidden, magical meanings which pricked deeply to his heartstrings and thrilled him to a tempest ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... his stick, banged, reloaded, banged again, reloaded and banged yet again. I took up a stick and presented it—bang! With amazing verisimilitude Beppo rolled over—shot through the heart. Really, for a moment I had a mad apprehension that in some occult way, some freak of hypnotic suggestion, I had actually wrought the child harm. I stood there breathlessly triumphant and wondering whether it was now my business to rush in and scalp the defenceless prisoners. I became aware of a head and ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... that, at all events, is a vera causa, the theory of Survival and Revival seems adequate. Yet there are two circumstances which suggest that all is not such plain sailing. The first is the constantly alleged occurrence of 'spontaneous' and sporadic abnormal phenomena, whether clairvoyance in or out of hypnotic trance, of effects on the mind and the senses apparently produced by some action of a distant mind, of hallucinations coincident with remote events, of physical prodigies that contradict the law of gravitation, or ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... well as Freud, both of whom have made their life's aim the perfection of psychoanalysis, and who for that reason now concern themselves exclusively with it, appreciate all forms of verbal treatment, as well with hypnotism as without it. Hypnotic suggestion and suggestion given when awake was used at an earlier period by both of them with good results, and they still are not averse to using this method where quick comprehension and the immediate subdual of a troublesome symptom ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... it than was dreamed of by philosophers. When the Longfellow party was at Florence in April, 1869, Prince George of Hanover, recently driven from his kingdom by Bismarck, called to see the poet, and finding that he had gone out, was entertained by Mr. Appleton with some remarkable stories of hypnotic and spiritualistic performances. The prince, who was a most amiable looking young German, was evidently very ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... rambling speech in which Clemens went round the table hitting every head at it, and especially visiting Osgood with thanks for his ingenious pretext for our entertainment, he congratulated blaring upon his engineering genius and his hypnotic control of municipal governments. He said that if there was a plan for draining a city at a cost of a million, by seeking the level of the water in the down-hill course of the sewers, blaring would come with ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a test to stick pins into a person's tongue," said Mrs. Quigg. "We newspaper people all know that there are in the hypnotic business what they call 'horses'—that is to say, wretched men and boys, women sometimes, who have trained themselves so that they can hold hot pennies, eat red pepper, and do other 'stunts'—we've had their confessions ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... scepter before which others seem to bow in glad obedience. But whence do they obtain such magic power? What is the secret of that almost hypnotic influence over people which we would ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... shut on her lower lip, she stared at the wide blue sea with wide blue eyes. Something in its restless tossing, in the changing lights that darted back to her from the crests of the waves, seemed to be holding her in an hypnotic trance. Out of the midst of the trance she spoke again, and it was plain to Weldon, as he listened to her low, intent voice, that her thoughts were not upon the sea nor ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... shining with the unmistakably steady ray of a planet. Huge bats fluttered about him, and the great cloud-masses swept across the sky, being part of Saturn's ceaseless whirl. He found he was in a hypnotic or spiritualistic state, for it was not necessary for him to have his eyes open to know where he was. In passing one of the pools they had noticed, he observed that the upper and previously invisible liquid had the bright colour of gold, and about it rested ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... Charcot, and the present day exponents of hypnotism; and the nuns as his helpless "subjects," obeying his every command with the fidelity observable to-day in the patients of the Salpetriere and other centers of hypnotic practice. ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... ten-foot-square plates were activated. One was a solid luminous white; on the other was the image of a boy of twelve or fourteen, seated at a big writing machine. Even allowing for the fact that the boy was in a hypnotic trance, there was an expression of idiocy on his loose-lipped, slack-jawed face, ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... Key that has prompted me to speak, Deacon. Madame has some sort of power—hypnotic power. She employed it on me once, to my cost! Paul Harley, of Chancery Lane, can tell you more about her. The house she's living in temporarily used to belong to a notorious Eurasian, Zani Chada. To make a clean breast of it I daren't thwart her openly; but ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... dead easy, and world without end. The man who puts his doubloons on the negative either never saw a woman until after she was dead, or didn't know what ailed him when under her hypnotic influence. Perhaps he imagined that he had a chronic case of yellow jaundice, was threatened with paresis or had been inadvertently struck by lightning. Perhaps he's under the mystic spell of some "wily Vivien" even now, and laying foolish wagers ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... of the rest. All other national characteristics are imbibed as subtly. What makes a nation is a certain common spirit,—Volksgeist, as the German psychologists have christened it,—and this spirit exercises a hypnotic effect over all that comes within its range, moulding and transforming. There is action and reaction. The nation makes the national spirit, and the national spirit makes the nation. The flag, the constitution, the national anthems, the national prejudices, the language, the proverbs—these ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... conditions of sleeping and waking became reversed, his true life was that which he lived in his slumbers, and his hours of wakefulness appeared to him as so many uneventful and inactive intervals of arrest occurring in an existence of intense and vivid interest which was wholly passed in the hypnotic state. Not that to me there is any such inversion of natural conditions. On the contrary, the priceless insights and illuminations I have acquired by means of my dreams have gone far to elucidate for me many difficulties ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... menacing crowded upon me; but that which proved the culminating horror and which finally awakened me, bathed in cold perspiration, was a dream of two huge green eyes regarding me with a fixed stare, fascinating and hypnotic, against which evil power I fought in my dream with all the strength of ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... I trembled. My secret seemed to be safely planted, but what would the harvest be? I knew I should watch those upper windows with hypnotic zeal, and listen with straining ears for the inevitable squall of a child or the bark of a dog. My brain ran riot with incipient subterfuges, excuses, apologies and lies with which my position was ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... unintelligently half helpful and half obstructive, and he will find still other movements and developments which set quite in the opposite direction, which make neither for sound births nor sound growth, but through the thinnest shams of excuse and purpose, through the most hypnotic and unreal of suggestions and motives, directly and even plainly towards waste, towards sterility, towards futility and death ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... small for both, so I wrapped it tightly round his head and body. He was doubled up with his chin on his knees. This small exertion was quite sufficient to make me lose the tug-of-war in which I was pulling against nature. Just like the subject who, under hypnotic influence, feels his own will and power suddenly going from him, so I felt the entire hopelessness of further struggle against the supernatural forces I was contending with. Falling backwards on the snow, I made a last desperate effort to gaze at the glittering stars ... ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... few references to the originals of the characters in the novel, and to the hypnotic experiments in which Du Maurier was interested in his youth, the book will doubtless be bought. But he must be a dull person who does not find another charm in Mr. Moscheles's artless narrative, mostly about nothing at all, or about ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... or at tea—or in the pubs—and the corners were deserted. Observe how fate makes time and things fit when she wants to do a good turn—or play a practical joke. Harry Chatswood, for instance, didn't know anything about the hypnotic business. ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... and the after-play had been allowed to run its course, Farrel told the Pornsens to go into the next room and shower. They came back soon, looking refreshed. Farrel ordered them to get back into their clothes. Under the power of the hypnotic drug which their chairs had injected into them at the touch of the button, they did so. Then he told them to sit down in the ...
— Where There's Hope • Jerome Bixby
... of my principal experiments in the mysterious force or agency known as hypnotic suggestion. Whether or not it could be employed by a bad man for an unworthy purpose I am ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... came out of his half-hypnotic daze—a daze which had endured but a few seconds. And once more his rallying will-power and senses made him acutely alive to the hideous peril in which ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... the heavy perfume of the flowers, the cadence of the music, even the physical fatigue, reacted in some strange way upon their oversensitive feminine nerves, the monotony of repeated sensation producing some sort of mildly hypnotic effect, a morbid hysterical pleasure the more exquisite because mixed with pain. These were the girls whom one heard declaring that they could dance all night, the girls who could dance ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... garden of blue-and-gold streamers suddenly drifted toward him on an unfelt current. Cully was held, entranced. They flowed before him, their colors dazzling, hypnotic. ...
— Cully • Jack Egan
... this influence is demonstrated in hypnotism. The hypnotic subject is told that he is in the water; he accepts the statement as true and makes swimming motions. He is told that a band is marching down the street, playing "The Star Spangled Banner;" he declares he hears the music, arises ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... journal refers to a new method of raising blisters by hypnotic suggestion. This is said to be an improvement on the old East End system of developing black eyes ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... the Hypnotic State she pushed the Silver Pencil into his Right Hand, and showed him where to sign his Name. He wrote it, while the dim Sub-Consciousness told him that probably he was the Softest Thing the Lady ...
— More Fables • George Ade
... "I rather favour the hypnotic suggestion theory. For the moment you said the name Gerry, I fancied I too knew it as the short for Algernon. Now, that's absurd! No two people ever made Gerry out ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... her life had been prolonged far beyond our mortal span, for hundreds and hundreds of years, indeed; which, as Euclid says, is absurd, and had pretended to supernatural powers, which is still more absurd. Moreover, by a clever use of some hypnotic or mesmeric power, she had feigned to transport me to some place beyond the earth and in the Halls of Hades to show me what is veiled from the eyes of man, and not only me, but the savage warrior Umhlopekazi, commonly called Umslopogaas ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... a little while she listened, but soon the room became blurred to her and she sank farther and farther among the heavy shadows and the old paintings on the wall. The rain beat against the muffled windows drowsily. The fire warmed her brow like some hypnotic hand. Then his voice ceased and she drew her feet beneath her and slept in the chair, looking like a soft ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... spiritual greatness? Heights, where by operating from the vantage ground of the social and political center of the republic, like some chief marshal on the broad field of human events, she could, by the unseen and irresistible power of hypnotic suggestion, inspire, guide and control the causative and law-making forces which so powerfully affect all social and industrial conditions. Was it possible that spiritual unfoldment alone, could confer such ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... dried skin of the right cheek. 'On my honour, I simply can't believe that His Highness, as you call him, ever really went to the other world by any of the orthodox routes. If you could imagine an absolute suspension of all the vital functions induced by the influence of something—some drug or hypnotic process unknown to modern science, brought into action on a human being in the very prime of his vital strength—then, so far as I can see, the results of that influence would be ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... made ill by his own negative thoughts and emotions, he is also under the hypnotic spell of the race mind. "The God of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not." We are all under the spell, more or less, of a huge illusion. The evil, disease, sickness and other imperfections ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... only, Dunning was in a nervous state, the story was a grim one, and he could not help asking himself whether there were not a connecting link between these two cases, in the person of Karswell. It was a difficult concession for a scientific man, but it could be eased by the phrase 'hypnotic suggestion'. In the end he decided that his answer tonight should be guarded; he would talk the situation over with his wife. So he said that he had known Harrington at Cambridge, and believed he had died suddenly in 1889, adding a few details about the man and his published ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... sometimes called cohoba. This powder, says Mr. Safford, is a narcotic snuff "inhaled through the nostrils by means of a bifurcated tube." "All writers unite in declaring that it induced a kind of intoxication or hypnotic state, accompanied by visions which were regarded by the natives as supernatural. While under its influence the necromancers, or priests, were supposed to hold communication with unseen powers, and their incoherent mutterings were regarded as prophecies or revelations of ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... her knitting, discoursed of their afternoon's excursion, with occasional pauses induced by the hypnotic effect of the fresh air; and Effie, kneeling, on the hearth, softly but insistently sought to implant in her terrier's mind some notion of the relation between a vertical ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... physically that we drop off to sleep from the irresistible force of sheer exhaustion. Yet as soon as the healthy man whose mind is at peace, whose nerves are not on edge, finds himself in bed, his eyes close almost with the force of a hypnotic suggestion, and he drops off to sleep. With some of us the suggestion is only powerful in our own bed, that on which it has acted on unnumbered nights. We cannot, as we say, sleep in a strange bed. It is suggestion, not direct will power, that acts. No one can absolutely will himself to ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... sounds—the suggestion of sounds rather than actual vibrations. These were all at first of the minor importance of movement—rustlings, creakings, faint stirrings, fainter breathings. Presently, when I had somewhat recovered from the sort of hypnotic trance to which the darkness and stillness had during the time of waiting reduced me, ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... effect, is unwilling to remain in ignorance of the motives of his own conduct. And just as a man who has been led to perform a certain action by hypnotic suggestion will afterwards invent reasons which would justify it and make it appear logical to himself and others, being unaware all the time of the real cause of his action, so every man—for since "life is a dream" every man is in a condition of hypnotism—seeks to find reasons for his conduct. ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... stung Mary like a lash and roused her from the almost hypnotic state in which, wide-eyed and terrified, she had been watching ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... make a sound—a broken, hypnotic sound, without emphasis or inflection, as though his lips were frozen, or the words torn ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... the brain stupor that was sometimes sent, like an anodyne, to those whom fate had consigned to Mrs. Cotton's keeping. The Reverend Matthew, in whom a prolonged course of his wife had developed a condition, when in her society, of semi-hypnotic trance, sat in silence at his hostess' side, devouring cake, and swallowing cups of tea, until what had apparently been starvation was averted; he then dreamily withdrew, and joined himself vaguely, to the group of which Miss Coppinger formed one. Frederica's early ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... stood expectant. They loved each other dearly, yet here was one moment where self-interest must prevail. Charles fixed the doorkeeper with his hypnotic smile, and he was chosen. Almost without hearing the injunction to report at seven o'clock, Charles ran back to the store, well-nigh breathless with expectancy over the coming event. With that family feeling which has marked the Frohmans throughout their whole life, Gustave hurried ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... to fight and kill though carved by scores of mortal wounds. Men with bullets in the heart or brain fight on, though already clinically dead. Death seemed an inescapable part of this kind of strength. But there was another type that could easily be brought about in any deep trance—hypnotic rigidity. The strength that enables someone in a trance to hold his body stiff and unsupported except at two points, the head and heels. This is physically impossible when conscious. Working with this as a clue, ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... if Flora would even consent to let her furniture be displayed in the centennial; but she did. Everybody consented to everything. I don't know whether Mrs. H. Boardman Jameson had really any hypnotic influence over us, or whether we had a desire for the celebration, but the whole village marshalled and marched to her orders with the greatest docility. All our cherished pieces of old furniture were loaded into carts and conveyed to the ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... and eager. "Climb!" he yelled above the roar of the motors. "Up!" Brice nodded—but it was no use. That plane was like a live thing; nothing we could do would swerve it from its course. We stared at one another. Were we mad? Were we under a hypnotic spell? But our minds were clear, and the idea of hypnosis was absurd, for we had tried to turn back. It was the machine that ...
— The Floating Island of Madness • Jason Kirby
... a horrible fascination about a ship's concert, something hypnotic that draws you, very much against your word and ...
— Ship-Bored • Julian Street
... they couldn't—" There was something hypnotic in the persistence of the nurse in ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... had done that. There could be no question at all upon the point. For me hypnotic suggestion was finally established. It took its place from now onward as one of the facts of life. That Agatha, who of all women of my acquaintance has the best balanced mind, had been reduced to a condition of automatism appeared to be certain. A person at a distance had worked ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... an authority than Professor Sznuysko that the Car Conductor usually performed these literary feats in public, writing between fares on the rear platform of a Sixth Avenue car. Smith's devotion to his Musa Sanctissima was often so hypnotic, I am told, that he neglected to let passengers on and off - nay, it is even held by some critics that he occasionally forgot to collect a fare. But be it said to his undying honor that his Employers never suffered from such carelessness, for it was the custom of our Poet ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor • Wallace Irwin
... and pools of sound to which you did not listen, but in which you bathed. And in his soul the legless man was playing only for Barbara, and only to Barbara. And so powerful was this obsession that it stole out of him like some hypnotic influence, affected the others, and gave him away. First Blythe looked toward Barbara, not realizing why, then Haddon looked, ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... religious phenomena, we find in Japan, as in other lands, the practice of ecstatic union with the deity. In Shinto it is called "Kami-oroshi," the bringing down of the gods. It is doubtless some form of hypnotic trance, yet the popular interpretation of the phenomenon is that ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... this hypothesis, the growing-pains of that late-blooming conscience were soon enough numbed by the hypnotic spell of clattering chips, an ivory ball singing in an ebony ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... she felt, had somehow affected, at the very outset, a degree of tacit intimacy between them which would not otherwise have occurred in a fortnight, perhaps never. But he had done it with an assurance almost, if not quite, hypnotic, and he had removed his hand—a move, she recognized, which offered more opportunities for bungling than the initial venture—with the exact degree of insouciance, of abstraction, but at the same time not without a slight lighting of the eyes expressive alike ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... no one would deny that the contemplation of pictures, even those of Saints or Holy Families, had given enormous pleasure. But why? Not because the crowds that flocked to the galleries really cared for them, but because gifted writers had for centuries been setting up hypnotic suggestions that in this way was pleasure to be obtained. He had often seen men and women standing before a canvas of REMBRANDT, hating the grubby muddle of it in their hearts, but adoring it in their heads—all because some well-known critic had told them to. Their pleasure, however, was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... hear,"—Mrs. Creve spoke up from the opposite side of the room under that hypnotic influence by which a dangerous topic spreads,—"did you hear about the poor guide who ran away from the hospital to escape from our wicked doctor here? What a ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... preach the lost art of loafing. No! Nothing so direct as preaching. She merely loafs,—consistently, restfully, delightfully, but with an almost fatal hypnotic persuasiveness. She is a sort of stationary Pied Piper, luring the unwary reader to her sun-flecked porch, to watch with her the queer procession of created things go by,—from lovers and ghosts to lizards ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... intoxicating that it goes through my veins like wine. The last time I heard her play was in an enormous hall in the West, when her audience was composed of music lovers of every class and description. Just back of me was a woman whose whole soul seemed to respond to Carreno's hypnotic genius. Carreno had just finished Liszt's "Rhapsodic Hongroise" No. 2, and had followed it up with a mad Tschaikowsky fragment. I was so excited I was on the verge of tears when I heard the woman behind me catch her breath with a sob ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... elements as the hypnotic fascinations of a sleek music-master, the follies of a runaway schoolgirl and the well-disciplined affections of a most superior young gentleman, Mr. W.E. NORRIS has contrived to create yet another new story, without infringement of his own or anyone else's copyright. Thanks to the incidence ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... unseen owner of the voice which had charmed him, and it was like a stretching and tearing of the nerves to be going from her instead of going to her. He was as much under duress as if he were bound by a hypnotic spell. The voice continually sounded, not in his ears, which were filled with the noises of the train, as usual, but in the inmost of his spirit, where it was a low, cooing, coaxing murmur. He realized now how intensely he must have ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... forward and laid his long, thin fingers upon the woman's shoulder. He had an almost hypnotic power of soothing when he wished. The scared look faded from her eyes, and her agitated features smoothed into their usual commonplace. She sat down in the chair ...
— The Adventure of the Red Circle • Arthur Conan Doyle
... somewhat the same way of men under the influence of intoxicants, of men crazed by some passion and unable to take into consideration the consequences of their acts, and of men bound by the spell of hypnotic suggestion. Indeed, whenever a man is in such a condition that he is glaringly incapable of leading a normal human life and of being influenced by the motives that commonly move men, we are inclined to say ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... faded arm-chair and instantly fell asleep. Was the room hypnotic? Why not? There are stranger things than that in Petrograd.... I myself am aware of what walls and streets and rivers, engaged on their own secret life in that most secret of towns, can do to the mere mortals who interfere with ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... coincidence) forecast the future. All these things, except the last, are familiar to everybody who dreams. It is also certain that similar, but yet more vivid, false experiences may be produced, at the word of the hypnotiser, in persons under the hypnotic sleep. A hypnotised man will take water for wine, and get drunk ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... "Abracadabra," which he continually repeated, he delivered the other sons of Aymon from their chains. He next entered the palace of the sleeping emperor, spoke to him in his sleep, and forced him, under hypnotic influence, to give up the scepter and crown, which ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... Evolution would have taught Weismann that biological problems are not to be solved by assaults on mice. The scientific form of his experiment would have been something like this. First, he should have procured a colony of mice highly susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. He should then have hypnotized them into an urgent conviction that the fate of the musque world depended on the disappearance of its tail, just as some ancient and forgotten experimenter seems to have convinced the cats of the Isle of Man. Having ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... and was a farewell to her as a pupil. Brilliant, joyous and iridescent in its opening and closing sections, that in the middle voices vague and tender regret. The composition sometimes is spoken of as the "Trilby" impromptu. It is the one Du Maurier made Trilby sing under the hypnotic influence ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... proposition has been made to him by Margrave, a wanderer in many countries, who has followed the Fenwicks from England to Australia. Margrave declares that he needs an accomplice to secure an "elixir of life" which his own failing strength demands. His mysterious mesmeric or hypnotic influence over Mrs. Fenwick had in former days been marked; and on the basis of this undeniable fact, he has endeavored to show that his own welfare and Mrs. Fenwick's are, in some occult fashion, knit ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... completely attained. St. Augustine, even at the period when he wrote his Confessions, mentions, as a matter of course, that sexual dreams "not merely arouse pleasure, but gain the consent of the will." (X. 41.) Not infrequently there is a struggle in sleep, just as the hypnotic subject may resist suggestions; thus, a lady of thirty-five dreamed a sexual dream, and awoke without excitement; again she fell asleep, and had another dream of sexual character, but resisted the tendency to excitement, and again awoke; ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the ground, with the addition of this salt of science comes a savour of homely virtue, an aroma promising sustenance and strength. It confounds suspicion and sees unbelief, first weaken, and at last do reverence. There is something hypnotic in the terminology. Enthusiasm, even backed by fact, will scare off your practical man, who yet will turn to listen to the theory of "the mechanics of erosion" and one of its proofs—"up there before our eyes, the ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... a sister of infinite love and infinite tact could know. But she never had dreamed that he could be enmeshed by the wiles of the wife of his friend. The crux of the whole matter lay in the possibility of saving him, not only from Eva's hypnotic charm, but from the less intricate and more thinly concealed machinations of Mr. Moore. Winifred felt her first smart of anger revive toward Mrs. Latimer as she recalled how ingenuously Charlie had been led to the ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... excitement that he must cure, and as there are many remedies for insomnia, he tried those which, it seemed to him, were suitable to his case; but bromide of potassium, in spite of its hypnotic properties, produced no more effect than the over-working of the brain and body. When he realized this he replaced it with chloral; but chloral, which should create a desire to sleep, after several days had no more effect than the bromide. Then he ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... had become the victim of the hypnotic power of Tushegoun Lama; but I preferred this to seeing an innocent Mongolian die, for I had not believed that Tushegoun Lama, after slashing open the bodies of his victims, could repair them ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... continued after the Empire of the Caesars passed away. The continuity of Roman history has been psychological. Humanity has "held a thought." Rome became a fixed idea. It exerted an hypnotic influence over the barbarians who had overcome all else. The Holy Roman Empire was a creation of the Germanic imagination, and yet it was a real power. Many a hard-headed Teutonic monarch crossed the Alps at the head of ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... crowded for my final performance and several Tri-D video cameras stared down at me. Pupils, lights and lenses, all came to a glittering focus on me. I slowly closed my eyes to blot the hypnotic horror out. ...
— Man Made • Albert R. Teichner
... Wayne took the hypodermic gun from his pouch, filled it with the anti-hypnotic drug that he had taken from the medical cabinet, and began to make his rounds. He fired a shot into each and every one aboard. He had no way of knowing who had been injected by the small monsters and who had not, so he was ...
— The Judas Valley • Gerald Vance
... my mind about Newport. I guess I'll spend the summer on my own Hotel de Roof!" And he grinned; but he grinned alone. Wilson, the dry goods man, who laughed so joyously at everybody's jokes, was now watching, as if under a hypnotic spell, the lips of the man who sat on the high stool beside the ticker and called out the prices to the quotation boy. Now and again Wilson's own lips made curious grimaces, as if speaking to himself. Brown, the slender, pale-faced man, ...
— The Tipster - 1901, From "Wall Street Stories" • Edwin Lefevre
... suddenly. They wanted to know who it was had told me. I refused the information, because it was evident they would have been angry with him. Everett's theory was that one of them had dreamt it—probably Camelford—and by hypnotic suggestion had conveyed to the rest of them the impression that they had dreamt it also. He added that but for one slight incident he should have ridiculed from the very beginning the argument that it could ...
— The Philosopher's Joke • Jerome K. Jerome
... the other arm was gone, and then the breasts, and then a part of the face—it was awful. The poor creatures on the islands awaiting their fate tried to cover their eyes with their hands to hide the fearful sight, but now I saw that they too were under the hypnotic spell of the reptiles, so that they could only crouch in terror with their eyes fixed upon the terrible thing that was ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... elephant from an Indian prince, hence we preferred to hire one from Mr. Zoroaster, who keeps a big shop full of beautiful brass and enamel work, makes Indian rugs and all sorts of things and exerts a hypnotic influence over American millionaires. One American millionaire, who was over there a few days ahead of us, evidently came very near buying out Mr. Zoroaster, who shows his order book with great pride, and a certain estimable American lady, who owns ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... local cadets, spontaneous in its enthusiasm, its zest for martial music no different, of course. Just behind these lads a strange figure walked in the procession, a bent and misshapen old man, whose face had no expression but a fixed and hypnotic stare. He was keeping time to the measure of the boys' music by snapping the spring of a mouse-trap which he held aloft. I could not find him in the program. Was he also drunk? Or was he a terrible jest? Most of our triumphant display followed this figure. If our illusions go, what is left ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... the same path is that upon which such perfect suppression of the physical as that which occurs in the hypnotic trance is not necessary, but the power of supernormal sight, though still out of reach during waking life, becomes available when the body is held in the bonds of ordinary sleep. At this stage of development stood many of the prophets and seers of whom we read, ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... interrupting him, with a very pale face. "Don't speak to me of that. I can't bear to think of it. Kelmscott, I was mad when I did that deed. I wasn't myself. I acted under somebody else's compulsion and influence. The man had a sort of hypnotic power over my will, I believe. I couldn't help doing whatever he ordered me. It was he who suggested it. It was he that did it. And it's he who was really ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... them. Instead, she saw that the yellow of the desert, the brown of the slopes, and the black of the distant granite ledges basseting from bleak hills were more beautiful than the tidy little plots of tilled ground she used to think so lovely. There was something hypnotic in these bald distances. She could not read, when she was out like this; she could only ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... all. And watching her own grey eyes, as they faced her in the mirror, she half comprehended why she continued to live so, even after her father died and took away the reason for her old solitude. She had been under the hypnotic suggestion of an event, an impression. That moment on Montgomery street, when she found her father lying drunk, when tragedy and responsibility came together—that moment had stretched itself out to six years. She had lived by it; was living by ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... domed city in the polar regions, where nobody ever had to go outdoors. He was less than professionally enthusiastic about the moving streets, and much less approving of the dream-broadcasts which supplied hypnotic, sleep-inducing rhythms to anybody who chose to listen to them. The price was that while asleep one would hear high praise of commercial products, and one might ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... wary by bitter experience of the sham and cheap fraud behind the tawdry canvas flap, stops a moment, laughs, and passes on. Then Temptation, in a panic, seeing his audience drifting away, summons from inside the tent his bespangled and bewitching partner, Mlle. Psychological Moment, the Hypnotic Charmer. She leaps to the platform, bows, pirouettes. The crowd surges toward the ticket-window, nickel ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... Renwick's pursuit—the belief that Renwick would go at once to the Hotel Europa! The power of suggestion! And she had followed it blindly—unawares, leading Hugh Renwick into this deadly trap which Goritz had laid. She read the plan now in all its insidious perfection. There was something malign—hypnotic—in an influence which could so easily compel compliance. And Hugh? She had written him to come here—to the door in the court below, where men would be waiting—perhaps to take his life. It was ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... Murder Machine," by Hugh B. Cave, a man, Sir John Harman, was made to kill a man by meccano-telepathically projected hypnotic suggestions. Some people think it is entirely possible to make a man do such a thing by hypnotism, but it is not possible because no person under hypnotic influence will do anything that his subconscious mind knows is immoral. Neither a thief nor a murderer can be made to confess their crime while ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... had decided by hypnotic suggestion and magic power what Mr. Prohack desired in the way of stuffs and patterns, he led Mr. Prohack mysteriously to a small chamber, and a scribe followed them carrying pencil and paper, and Mr. Prohack removed, with assistance, his shabby ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... wonderful dance—a dance of sensuous contortion crossed and arrested at every moment by the fierce flash of pride, the swift gesture of contempt indicative of the land that had conceived it—a dance that would diminish to the merest sway of the body accompanied by the slow, hypnotic enticement of half-closed eyes, and then, as a fan might shut or open, leap back in an instant to a barbaric frenzy of motion in which loosened hair and flaming draperies carried the beholder's senses upon a ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... that of the Future and was devoted to divinations, the oracles being given by a Vestal in a hypnotic condition, seated over a burning brazier. The doctor was accommodated with a test, but another inquirer who had the temerity to be curious as to what was being done in the Vatican received a severe rebuff; in vain did the spirit of the Clairvoyante strive to penetrate the "draughty and ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... boys turned and, as if under a hypnotic spell, began to push the car into the aerodrome. And once inside the little building, with set lips, as if working his courage up to that point, Norman broke the silence by saying: "I was going to make my first trip ...
— On the Edge of the Arctic - An Aeroplane in Snowland • Harry Lincoln Sayler
... hear the rest of that in the morning. Sergeant, relieve these sentries, and bring Private Keyse and the hypnotic subject before me in the morning. Make this man Brooker a prisoner at large for the present, and fall ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... I have found him looking at me frequently in a peculiar manner. Last night he stared at me with his burning eyes until I could feel his hypnotic influence. I hope—I trust you will believe I have not ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... persuasion, or by force of a stronger will, the medium and the hypnotic subject are victims either of ignorance or of design, to ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... of beauty is true in a way it is not true of Tennyson, for instance, as it is true of Baudelaire in a way it is not true of Victor Hugo. In Rossetti's work, perhaps because it is not the greatest, there is an actually hypnotic quality which exerts itself on those who come within his circle at all; a quality like that of an unconscious medium, or like that of a woman against whose attraction one is without defence. It ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... cases must be taken "cum grano salis." Cases of conception without the slightest sexual desire or pleasure, either from fright, as in rape, or naturally deficient constitution, have been recorded; as well as conception during intoxication and in a hypnotic trance, which latter has recently assumed a much mooted legal aspect. As far back as 1680, Duverney speaks of conception without the slightest sense of desire or pleasure on the part ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... and arguments that they also must speedily be acknowledged by scientists, when the latter take the trouble to study these facts and arguments. And with geology once adjusted to a system of real inductive science, instead of being as hitherto under the hypnotic control of speculative fancies and subjective methods, there is no longer any room for speculations regarding the origin of our world by evolutionary processes. It becomes almost a mathematical Q.E.D. that things were made in the beginning by methods and processes ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... pinchers deliberately together and sawed one across the other, producing a rasping sound which was almost a vibration in the air. Back and forth, back and forth, moved the claws. Watching them produced almost a hypnotic effect, and the reason for such a maneuver was totally beyond ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... that Isabel actively considered the question and chose to doubt Anthony rather than to trust him. She was so nearly passive now, with the struggle she had gone through, that this blow came on her with the overwhelming effect of an hypnotic suggestion. Her will did not really accept it, any more than her intellect really weighed it; but she succumbed to it; and did not even write again, nor question the man further. Had she done this she might perhaps have found out the truth, that the man, a stupid rustic with enough ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... objection it may be stated that the Coue method of Induced Autosuggestion is in no sense inferior to hypnotic suggestion. Coue himself began his career as a hypnotist, but being dissatisfied with the results, set out in quest of a method more simple and universal. Conscious autosuggestion, apart from its convenience, can boast one great advantage over its rival. The effects of hypnotic suggestion are ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... Brink, so I wrote to Mr. R. B. Bunnell, Superintendent of Telegraph of the P. Q. & X. Railroad at Kansas City, Missouri, saying I was an expert operator and desired a position on his road. Mr. Bunnell must have been laboring under a hypnotic spell, for by return mail he wrote, enclosing me a pass to Alfreda, Kansas, and directing me to assume charge of the night office at that point at the magnificent salary of $37.50 per month. This ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... nicely adjusted equilibrium of forces; its restless, upward-reaching pinnacles and spires; its ornament, intricate and enigmatic—all these suggest the over-strained organism of an ascetic; while its vast shadowy interior lit by marvelously traceried and jeweled windows, which hold the eyes in a hypnotic thrall, is like his soul: filled with world sadness, dead to the bright brief joys of sense, seeing only heavenly visions, knowing none ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... leader, and in the other case by the expansion of the idea. The Army is held together by both the man and the idea, and we need not turn away from its own history to get examples of this disintegration in both ways. Take the first bond of union, the man of striking, hypnotic personality. Since the very inception of the movement, time after time, men who have gained influence in the Army, have separated from its ranks and started a movement of their own of more or less ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... The hypnotic spell was broken and Ned slowly raised his rifle to his shoulder, while the panther crouched lower and waved his tail more quickly. In another second it might be too late, and once ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... only by the turning of Miss Gallifer's pages. It might have been three o'clock. Once more Barbara was lost in the unaccustomed hush, her eyes fixed on the white face on the pillow, in almost hypnotic restfulness. The pushing open of the door behind was so soft that she didn't notice. Miss ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... noblemen who are becoming so invaluable to writers of fiction, either in narrative or dramatic form. Shortly after the marriage her husband is arrested for a terrible murder committed some years before in Russia, under the evil influence of occult magic and mesmerism. The crime was done in a hypnotic state, and, as described by Violet Fane, seems much more probable than the actual hypnotic experiments recorded in scientific publications. This is the supreme advantage that fiction possesses over fact. It can make things artistically ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... the strange, hypnotic power of the mystical Father Gapon, who was clad in the robes of his office, tens of thousands of working-people marched that day to the Winter Palace, confident that the Czar would see them, receive their petitions, and harken to their prayers. It was not a ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... is only right to say that Colonel de Rochas is a savant who seeks nothing but objective truth and does so with a scientific strictness and integrity that have never been questioned. He puts certain exceptional subjects into a hypnotic sleep and, by means of downward passes, makes them trace back the whole course of their existence. He thus takes them successively to their youth, their adolescence and down to the extreme limits of ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... older than me." She had put her hands up to both cheeks of Jolly's horse, and was rubbing her nose against its nose with a gentle snuffling noise which seemed to have an hypnotic effect on the animal. Val contemplated her cheek resting against the horse's nose, and her eyes gleaming round at him. 'She's really a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... extravagant; the transformation by hypnotism of the absolutely tone-deaf girl into the unutterably peerless singer is unthinkable and absurd." The admirers of "Trilby" may very well grant this, and yet feel that their withers are unwrung. It is not in the hypnotic device and its working out that they find the charm of the story; it is not the plot that they are mainly interested in; it is not even the slightly sentimental love-story of Trilby and Little Billee. They are willing to let the whole framework, as ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... rankled! And yet it was nothing against Cassowary that he had been following Hood about like an infatuated fool. Deering knew himself to be equally culpable on that score, and he was even now trudging after the hypnotic vagabond with a country calaboose as their common goal. The chauffeur's interview with Constance had evidently cheered him mightily, and he joined his voice to Hood's in a very fair rendering of "Ben Bolt." Deering swore ...
— The Madness of May • Meredith Nicholson
... I asked by way of answer, "a treatise of Aristotle concerning which we had a discussion one day? Its subject was the hypnotic power possessed by the eyes of certain reptiles. I laughed the idea to scorn; you maintained that it was possible. Well, I agree with you; and I'd like to have about a dozen of our modern skeptical scientists in this cave with me for about ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... of images seems to take place without the volition of the poet. The hypnotic trance, the narcotic dream or revery, and even our experience of ordinary dreams, provide abundant examples. One dreams, for instance, of a tidal river, flowing in with a gentle full current which bends in one direction all the ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... is difficult to say what, usually warns me of the presence of these occult brains, and at certain times (and in certain places) I can feel, with my superphysical mind, their subtle hypnotic influences. ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... confirmed his own impressions. It was true that the PREMIER did not physically resemble an Arab sheikh, and his knowledge of medicine, science or philosophy, to say nothing of geography, was decidedly jejune, but the sad case of President WILSON made it all too clear that he was capable of exerting a hypnotic influence on his colleagues. Mr. KEYNES did not think Mr. LLOYD GEORGE was an Aristotelian; he preferred to consider him an unconscious Pragmatist. This view he proposed to develop in his forthcoming volume on the Subliminal ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 3rd, 1920 • Various
... unreal to tell about, nothing more concretely real to experience, than this undernote of the quick water. And when you do lie awake at night, it is always making its unobtrusive appeal. Gradually its hypnotic spell works. The distant chimes ring louder and nearer as you cross the borderland of sleep. And then outside the tent some little woods noise snaps the thread. An owl hoots, a whippoorwill cries, a twig cracks beneath the cautious prowl ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... hallucinations (dreamy images before going to sleep), besides all kinds of thought material, the state of going to sleep also portrays itself in exactly the same way that in the close of a dream or hypnotic illusions on awakening, the act of awakening is pictorially presented. The symbolism of awakening brings indeed pictures of leave taking, departing, opening of a door, sinking, going free out of a dark surrounding, ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... observed the Sage, brightly. "I brought my truth-compeller with me—a little, patent, electrical hypnotic arrangement, in the shape of this ring"—he showed it as he spoke. "I have only to turn it on my finger, and it obliges anyone who may be addressing me instantly ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various
... ritual murder: the incitations of the hierarchy, the superstition of the populace, the propagation of rumour in continued fraction of veridicity, the envy of opulence, the influence of retaliation, the sporadic reappearance of atavistic delinquency, the mitigating circumstances of fanaticism, hypnotic suggestion ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... another matter. One has a choice of two methods to reach the enemy one is aiming at. The first and least used is this: the magician employs a voyant, a woman who is known in that world as 'a flying spirit'; she is a somnambulist, who, put into a hypnotic state, can betake herself, in spirit, wherever one wishes her to go. It is then possible to have her transmit the magic poisons to a person whom one designates, hundreds of leagues away. Those who are stricken in ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... is clear and consistent without any reference to them.(4) It is true that, in order to accept the action on what we may call the realistic level, we must suppose Solness to possess and to exercise, sometimes unconsciously, a considerable measure of hypnotic power. But time is surely past when we could reckon hypnotism among "supernatural" phenomena. Whether the particular forms of hypnotic influence attributed to Solness do actually exist is a question we need not determine. The poet does not demand our absolute credence, as though he were ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... The gas was burning, Lise had come in, and was moving peculiarly about the room. Janet watched her. She stood in front of the bureau, just as Janet herself had done, her hands at her throat. At last she let them fall, her head turning slowly, as though drawn, by some irresistible, hypnotic power, and their eyes met. Lise's were filmed, like those of a dog whose head is being stroked, expressing a luxuriant dreaminess ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Minkiewicz did not inspire Chopin. Who gave him the theme for his Revolutionary etude—the one in C minor?" Minkiewicz ran his left hand with velocity across the table. His disciples followed those marvellously agile fingers with the eyes of the hypnotic.... ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... you for the small boy, in an older and much larger and wider brother's cast-off shirt, suspenders and trousers. At the corner of the avenue she remembered and turned her horse. There stood the boy gazing after her with a hypnotic intensity that made her smile. She rode back fumbling in her pockets. "I beg your pardon," said she to the boy. Then she called up ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... wounds, and a friend of mine who had witnessed the performance on one occasion seemed to think that in some cases the wounding and bleeding were not really objective facts, but represented to the audience by a species of hypnotic suggestion. As, however, my visit to Somerset West took place during the month of Ramazan there was no opportunity of witnessing the "Khalifa," which would be celebrated during Bairam, the month of rejoicing ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett |
