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Prescience   /prˈiʃiəns/   Listen
Prescience

noun
1.
The power to foresee the future.  Synonym: prevision.






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"Prescience" Quotes from Famous Books



... complaint of the guilty. The courage of the despiser will fail: the last poor comfort of the blasphemer, to hurl against the judgment seat the last despairing, defiant word, will be taken away. The history of the fact written by divine prescience before the time, makes no mention of what the condemned will say. The record simply runs, "These shall ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... life of the poor, by applying to it his own standards instead of measuring it by theirs? Business, for the man of business genius, is more than an employment; it is his epic, his romance, his adventurous crusade. He brings to it something of the statesman's prescience, the diplomatist's sagacity, the great captain's power of organising victory. His days are battles, his life a long campaign; and if he does not win the spoil of kingdoms, he does fight for commercial supremacy, which comes to much the ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson

... remembrance of past misfortunes should correct national manners, and produce a general improvement in the minds and feelings of men. Neville was always sanguine; and Dr. Beaumont confessed that all things seemed to tend to the restoration of monarchy; yet, with the prescience of a man long accustomed to calamity, he doubted whether even that desired event would speedily repair the deep ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West

... wish to lay claim to any special prescience or wisdom, for, in spite of lucid intervals of foresight, we were all deceived by Germany. Nearly fifty years of peace had blinded us to fifty years of relentless preparation for war. But if we were deceived by the treachery of Germany's false ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch

... through his wide-open eyes, Quebec, the lost Stadacona of the Mohawks, the St. Lawrence, Tandakora, the huge Ojibway who had hunted him so fiercely, St. Luc, De Courcelles, and all the others who had passed out of his life for a while, though he felt now, with the prescience of old King Hendrik, that they were coming back again. His path would lie for a long time away from cities and the gay and varied life that appealed to him so much, and would lead once more through the wilderness, which also appealed ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler

... on, the silent woman slept, and in silence the watcher gazed. And as he looked a great fear, a prescience of evil that should come, entered into Geoffrey and took possession of him. A cloud without crossed the ray of sunlight and turned it. It wavered, for a second it rested on his breast, flashed back to hers, then went out; and as it flashed and died, he seemed to know ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard

... Aimed by the telescope's adjustment, the ray that could disintegrate a giant space flier utterly flared out at his finger's pressure. Against the lambent brown a spot glowed red where the beam struck. But, warned by some uncanny prescience, the trespasser leaped aside in the instant between Thomas' thought and act. Before Darl could aim and fire again the foe had dodged back and was protected by the curve of the ...
— The Great Dome on Mercury • Arthur Leo Zagat

... wait for some grand "mission," some mighty crusade to call him to action. The world is full of wrong which needs no preternatural prescience to discover—fraud which bears its name boldly upon its very face. The true reformer will denounce fraud and falsehood wherever found—will assail the wrong no matter how strongly intrenched it be in prescriptive right. But he will make haste slowly to change the fundamental ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... because in the one hundred and forty-eighth Psalm they are mentioned AFTER the heavenly bodies and the "heaven of heavens," but BEFORE the terrestrial elements. As to their purpose, he hesitates between those who held that they were stored up there by the prescience of God for the destruction of the world at the Flood, as the words of Scripture that "the windows of heaven were opened" seemed to indicate, and those who held that they were kept there to moderate the heat of the heavenly bodies. As to the firmament, he is in ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... cavalry, Sheridan resolved to hold the inestimable advantage he had gained, and sent a request to Grant to hurry up the required infantry support; saying that if it reached him that night, they "might perhaps finish the job in the morning." He added, with singular prescience, referring to the negotiations which had been opened: "I do not think Lee means to surrender until compelled to ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay

... high, that the first fathers of the Christian church could no otherwise account for a reputation thus universally received, than by supposing that the devils were permitted by God Almighty to inform the oracles with a more than human prescience, that all the world might be concluded in idolatry and unbelief, [3] and the necessity of a Saviour be made more apparent. The gullibility of man is one of the most prominent features of our nature. Various ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin

... the most difficult, when it is practicable, to a successful result. The flutter of haste is characteristic of a weak mind that has not the command of its thoughts; a strong mind, master of itself, possesses the clearness and prescience of reflection. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various

... Leaving Forsythe in charge of the bridge, he came down the stairs and aft on the run. Not a word was spoken by either; but, with the prescience that men feel at the coming of a fight, the two cooks left their dishes and the engineers their engines to crowd their heads into the hatches. Riley showed his disfigured face over the heads ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson

... than by my poor knowledge; and therefore in the year 1300, when I returned from Rome, I began to compile this book, to the reverence of God and Saint John and the praise of this our city Florence.' The key-note is struck in these passages. Admiration for the past mingles with prescience of the future. The artist and the patriot awake together in Villani at the sight of Rome ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds

... to look as he gets older," thought Annie with a touch of prescience. "He's going to change into somebody else—little by little. This is the worst spell he's ever had. And all this mean blood's going to live again in my child. It goes on and ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various

... common sense: it must be a mixture of sense and sympathy and imagination, and delicacy and humour and tact—and I can't find a better way of expressing it than to call it a sense of beauty, a faculty of judging, in a fine, sweet-tempered, gentle, quiet way, with a sort of instinctive prescience as to where the ripples of what you do and say will spread to, and what sort of effect they will produce. That's the right sort of virtue—attractive virtue—which makes other people wish to behave likewise. I don't say that a man who lives like that can ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson

... odd note of prescience in her voice. It was so pronounced that the sense of foreboding communicated ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... refreshment it craved. He sighed deeply, and the hot moisture smarted again upon his eyelids, but this time not all in grief. With his tender compassion for himself there mingled now a flutter of buoyant prescience, ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic

... and enterprise,' he says with just prescience, 'will want other rewards than the mere accumulation of wealth,' and other rewards, may we add, than knighthoods and sham peerages. 'The awakening ambitions of the gifted and heroic will need fitting spheres for their honourable ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley

... boyhood he had known, but chiefly because in after life it was borne in on him that he had been deprived of something infinitely precious which others have—the enduring and sustaining memory of a love which is unlike any other love known to mortals, and is almost a sense and prescience of immortality. ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson

... in desperation. All this was sharpened by the certainty that the mineral was only valueless pyrites, and the prescience of Nate's anger when this fact should come to his knowledge, and prudence no longer restrain him. His rage would vent itself on his luckless victim for every cent, every mill, that the discovery of the "fools' gold" had ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)

... in his eyes that sometimes does exist between men, Carrick saw the thought with the weird prescience of the dying. "Dreams go by contraries, sir," he said and attempted ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton

... taken alarm. She hastened after him, dragging me with her. Lord Cheisford was past middle age, but he was running along the cliff path like a boy. We followed. Lady Angela would have passed him, but I held her back. She did not speak a word. Some vague prescience of the truth even then, I think, ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... head-quarters of the army and the quartermasters ought to have inquired at the head-quarters of the defenses of Washington, if the roads are safe. But of course it was not done, as the big men here possess all the prescience, and need no valuable information. All of them appear to me as ostriches, who hide their heads and eyes, not to see ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski

... him of the Divine Attributes. His thirst for the beautiful belongs to his immortality, for it never rests in the appreciation of mere finite beauty, but struggles wildly to obtain the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of time, to attain a portion of that loveliness whose elements pertain to Eternity alone; and thus, when by poetry ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various

... No proud Austrian, nor weak and haughty Bourbon shall flame their colors from the palaces of France. No, my countryman! he who serves you, who leads your armies to victory, who raises your citizens to distinction, he whose courage is undaunted, he who has the power of prescience—is Napoleon. ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn

... neither dark nor fair, neither red nor brown, it was of a pale hazel colour and fell in straight masses nearly to her feet. Her eyes were of a deep grey fringed with dark lashes; they had a mysterious and pathetic look—a look caused by longing after something indefinite and yet desired, or by a prescience ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt

... is one in which the nation needs statesmanship and a broad outlook upon the world. In the existing situation we need not the duplicity of a Machiavelli, but the commanding prescience of a Gladstone or an Alfred the Great, or a Julius Caesar. Luckily we have exactly this type of man at the head ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock

... subjects with foul insurrection Have batter'd down her consecrated wall, And by their mortal fault brought in subjection Her immortality, and made her thrall To living death, and pain perpetual; Which in her prescience she controlled still, But her foresight ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... letters this poet says:—"Non posso negare che io mi doglio oltramisura di esser stato tanto disprezzato dal mondo quanto non e altro scrittore di questo secolo." In another letter, however, after complaining of being "perseguitato da molti piu che non era convenevole," he adds, with a proud prescience of his future fame, "Laonde stimo di poter mene ragionevolmente ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... two parties seemed to have become fused in a remarkable intimacy. This was clearly due to the presence of the young people, and Thorpe congratulated himself many times each day upon the striking prescience he had shown ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic

... thy dead, "Well done," Shall they not hear "O son"? And bowing thy face to theirs made pale for thee, Shall the shut eyes not see? Yea, through the hollow-hearted world of death, As light, as blood, as breath, Shall there not flash and flow the fiery sense, The pulse of prescience? Shall not these know as in times overpast Thee loftiest to the last? For times and wars shall change, kingdoms and creeds, And dreams of men, and deeds; Earth shall grow grey with all her golden things, Pale peoples and hoar kings; But though ...
— Two Nations • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... wrested from Russia by Japan. The democratic upheaval which began five hundred years ago is assuming Protean forces; and amongst them is the malady aptly styled "constitutionalitis" by Dr. Dillon. The situation in India demands prescience and statecraft. Though world-forces cannot be withstood, they are susceptible of control by enlightened will-power. Will peace be restored by the gift of constitutional government at a crisis when the august Mother of Parliaments is herself ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea

... recognized the basic fact in this running patter. Each was trying to buck up the other. Jane was honestly worried. She could not say what it was that worried her, but there was a strong leaven in her of old-wives' prescience. It wasn't due to this high-handed adventure of Cleigh, senior; it was something leaning down darkly from the future that worried ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath

... if prescience of unrealized love Startle the breast with each melodious air, And gifts that gentle hands are donors of Still wait intact somewhere, Furled up all golden in a perfumed place Within the ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger

... sneered at his Meetings as though they were mere scenes of "passing excitement" had any idea of the profound teaching he gave his people! The then editor of "The Christian," who took the trouble to visit them, as well as to converse with The General at length, with remarkable prescience wrote, as early as 1871, in his preface to The General's first important publication, "How to Reach the Masses with ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton

... Carolina, insisted, that, if we built ships, they would all fall into the hands of the British; and the capture of the Danish fleet at Copenhagen was instanced,—the fall of Genoa, Venice, and Carthage, notwithstanding their navies, being also cited. Story, with almost a prescience of the future, urged in its favor,—"I was born among the hardy sons of the ocean, and I cannot doubt their courage or their skill; if Great Britain ever gets possession of our present little navy, it will be at the expense ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various

... a few extracts from that diary still preserved in his own hand which give the intimation of a prescience that should in itself hold for him a grateful place in the memory of the west and of a concern about little things that should bring him a bit nearer ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... the prescience of death full upon him, with a numb despair clutching his soul, he shrank from that ghastly, hideous aspect of what he knew must be his last sight of ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... great love into a greater hate: round it hang the black elf-locks, disheveled, that have never been braided since the gripe of Telamonian Ajax ruffled them so rudely. In her great, troubled eyes you read terrible memories, and a prescience of coming death—death, most grateful to the dishonored princess, but before which the frail womanhood can not but shudder and quail. No wonder that the reverend men glance at her uneasily, scarcely mustering courage enough sometimes to answer ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence

... deepening twilight, Kate watched his retreating form, a feeling of vague apprehension, of she knew not what, filled her gentle breast. Was it a premonition of his impending doom?—a prescience that she ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow

... the little summer settlement on the Down East coast where I have been passing the last three months, and with each loath day the sense of its peculiar charm grows more poignant. A prescience of the homesickness I shall feel for it when I go already begins to torment me, and I find myself wishing to imagine some form of words which shall keep a likeness of it at least through the winter; some shadowy semblance which I may turn to hereafter if any chance or change ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... old age of the world drew on. This the mass of mankind saw not, or, living lustily although unhappily, affected not to see. But, for myself, the Earth's records had taught me to look for widest ruin as the price of highest civilization. I had imbibed a prescience of our Fate from comparison of China the simple and enduring, with Assyria the architect, with Egypt the astrologer, with Nubia, more crafty than either, the turbulent mother of all Arts. In history {*2} of these regions I met with ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... and incontestable, though mysterious, authority exercised upon their lives by higher intelligences than their own—intelligences unseen, unknown, but felt. Yes! felt by the most careless, the most cynical; in the uncomfortable prescience of danger, the inner forebodings of guilt—the moral and mental torture endured by those who fight a protracted battle to gain the hardly-won victory in themselves of right over wrong—in the thousand and one sudden appeals made without warning to that compass of a man's life, Conscience—and in ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli

... head to foot, and seemed to fathom what was coming, with a prescience vague, but unmistakable. One appeal was left to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various

... and unflinching sincerity he clung to his original sentiments touching the French Revolution. Nor let the present writer shrink from adding, they constitute but one of the many specimens of that instinctive prescience, whereby this profoundest of philosophical statesmen was enabled to herald from afar the final triumphs of courage, patriotism, and truth. The passage occurs towards the conclusion of his "Letters on a Regicide Peace," and is as follows:—"Never ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke

... was in his twenty-fourth year, and that the Abolition movement had then no actual existence, the orator evinced surprising prescience in his forecast of the future, and of the strife and hostility which the agitation ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke

... his own play be true, heeds not what he loses by the falsehood of others. A man who lives from the past, yet knows that its honey can but moderately avail him; whose comprehensive eye scans the present, neither infatuated by its golden lures nor chilled by its many ventures; who possesses prescience, as the wise man must, but not so far as to be driven mad to-day by the gift which discerns to-morrow. When there is such a man for America, the thought which urges her ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various

... strange prescience, in some respects, has the devoted and watchful heart that loves! William Hinkley, had seen but for a single instant, the face of that young traveller, who has already been introduced to us, and that instant was enough ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms

... Landale's weighted brow she propped up her own long sallow face, upon its aching side, with a trembling hand, and, full of agonised prescience, ventured to ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... prompting spirits, if really assumed to be the efficient agency behind the Oracles, be figured as holding any relation at all to moral good or moral evil? Why not allow of demoniac powers, excelling man in beauty, power, prescience, but otherwise neutral as to all purposes of man's moral nature? Or, if revolting angels were assumed, why degrade their agency in so vulgar and unnecessary a way, by adopting the vilest relation to man which ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... when the secret eye of thought Is changed with obscuration, and the sense Aches with long pain of hollow prescience, And fiery foresight with foresuffering bought Seems even to infect my spirit and consume, Hunger and thirst come on me ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... hastened forth, intent upon immediate prevention, if possible, of any further ordeals undertaken in behalf of herself. She was thoroughly frightened. A prescience of something ominous impending seemed to grip her very heart. She glanced about, helplessly, unfamiliar with the place. Van was nowhere in sight. She started to run around the cabin when Gettysburg ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels

... mine some prescience, or dream, or desire (How shall I name it aright?) comes for a moment and goes— Rapture of life ineffable, perfect—as if in the brier, Leafless there by my door, trembled ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... walked up and down, feverish and anxious (he was at the time in poor health), and then he would fling himself on a sofa, still and ever indulging in his surmises. With that kind of prescience which he had so frequently displayed in the Dreyfus affair, he felt certain that something very important had occurred, for otherwise such a mysterious telegram would never have been sent him. This lasted ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

... harmonious allotment of the most varied gifts to different beings; definite recognition of time and space, as in the life of individuals, of species, in the stages of growth, in the geographical limitation of types; prescience and omniscience, as shown in the prophetic types of earlier geological ages; omnipresence, by the adjustment of the whole series of animal organisms to the various parts of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... past his twenty-fourth year. If possible, let him repair to the venerable fane in the year 1861, and choose a chill, fair day of the English December, so short as to be red all through with a sense of the late sunrise and a prescience of the early sunset. Then he will know better than I could otherwise tell him how I felt in that august and beautiful place, and how my heart rose in my throat when I first looked up in the Poets' Corner and read the words, "Oh, rare Ben Jonson!" The good Ben was never so constantly rare ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... policy, and call it cowardice; Count wisdom as no member of the war; Forestall prescience, and esteem no act But that of hand; the still and mental parts— That do contrive how many hands shall strike, When fitness calls them on, and know, by measure Of their observant toil, the enemies' weight— Why, this hath not a finger's dignity. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd

... Garvez spurred his big mare forward till he rode beside the sergeant. A tall, half-lanky lad he was with the eager prescience of youth, its dreams and something of its shyness hidden in the dark alertness ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman

... By accident most strange, bountiful Fortune, Now my dear lady, hath mine enemies Brought to this shore; and by my prescience 180 I find my zenith doth depend upon A most auspicious star, whose influence If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes Will ever after droop. Here cease more questions: Thou art inclined to sleep; 'tis a good dulness, 185 And give ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare

... upon my shoulder, and tried to rise, half-blinded by the dazzling rays of a lantern, which was swinging close before me. There were a dozen men upon the ground, attracted by the story the driver had told, and among them was a local medical man, who had had the old-fashioned prescience to charge a big flask with brandy. I was glad enough to get a pull at its contents, and the doctor having gone carefully over me and pronounced that no bones were broken, I was lifted with a good deal of trouble into his dog-cart, and at my own request was driven on to Richmond. It ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray

... woman who looks to find appreciation and sympathy. It is not necessary, for such a purpose, to speculate upon Grecian or Roman noses, thin or protruding lips, blue, gray, or brown eyes; each soul knows its own sphere and the people that belong in it; and a sure instinct or prescience guides us in our choice of friends. Alice at a glance became conscious of an affinity, and quietly waited till circumstances should bring her into associations with the woman whom she hoped ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... the one hand, of an assured treasure of religious knowledge in the reason, and the abandonment of him, on the other, to the juggling of cunning priests and despots. Thus the deists had no sense either for the peculiarities of an inward religious feeling, which, in happy prescience, rises above the earthly circle of moral duties to the world beyond, or for the involuntary, historically necessary origin and growth of the particular forms of religion. Here, again, we find that turning away from will and ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... in which modern literature is advertised with the prospectus of this book, and think what a reading public it addresses, what criticism it expects. It seems to have been uttered from some eastern summit, with a sober morning prescience in the dawn of time, and you cannot read a sentence without being elevated as upon the table-land of the Ghauts. It has such a rhythm as the winds of the desert, such a tide as the Ganges, and is as superior ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

... a woman, known as the Queen of Hearts, who had attained the age of one hundred years, and who had been known for three quarters of a century as a fortune-teller, died in Vienna. Apparently gifted with the faculty of prescience, intimately acquainted with the shuffling of cards, deeply learned in the lore of the prophetic lines traced by the graver of Fate upon human hands and feet, this lady devoted her days to the unravelling of ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant

... war, at least in words (and—should My chance so happen—deeds), with all who war With Thought;—and of Thought's foes by far most rude, Tyrants and sycophants have been and are. I know not who may conquer: if I could Have such a prescience, it should be no bar To this my plain, sworn, downright detestation Of every ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... syllable of recorded time] Recorded time seems to signify the time fixed in the decrees of Heaven for the period of life. The record of futurity is indeed no accurate expression, but as we only know transactions past or present, the language of men affords no term for the volumes of prescience, in which future events may be supposed to ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson

... my object as ever. I cannot work, I cannot think. I have said fine things in my books about the discipline of reluctant suffering; and now my feeling is that I could bear any other kind of trial better. It seems to be given to me with an almost demoniacal prescience of what ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson

... of the white frost and the bare cliffs. In the northern heavens played a soft light, and now and then a star shot. The man who marked its trail across the studded skies thought of himself as of one as far withdrawn as it from the world of lower lights in the forest at his feet. Already he felt a prescience of the loneliness of the morrow, and the morrow, and the morrow, of the slow drift of the days in the waning forest, the hopeless nights, the terror of that great solitude—and felt, too, a feverish desire to hasten that approach, to embrace that which ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston

... being very sparingly furnished with the power of prescience, he can provide for the future only by considering the past; and as futurity is all in which he has any real interest, he ought very diligently to use the only means by which he can be enabled to ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson

... reviewed, and that of Sotos Ochando is recommended as the best. The a posteriori principle is rejected and the a priori deliberately adopted. This is excusable, owing to the fact that most projects hitherto had been a priori. The philosopher Charles Renouvier gave proof of remarkable prescience by condemning the a priori theory in an article in La Revue, 1855, in which he forecasts the ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark

... at the window. The mysterious brother Rivers might have been one of the robbers,—perhaps the one who accompanied Mrs. Barker to San Jose. But it was plain that the young girl had no complicity with the actions of the gang, whatever might have been her companion's confederation. In the prescience of a true lover, he knew that she must have been deceived and kept in utter ignorance of it. There was no look of it in her lovely, guileless eyes; her very impulsiveness and ingenuousness would have ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte

... from a sentiment of profound gloom, as I listened to these sombre predictions. It seemed incredible that they could be well founded, but I had more than once had an opportunity to remark the extraordinary prescience of the remarkable ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke

... a wrathful voice, for he felt anger stirring in him. Perhaps it was excited by that ancient instinct which causes the male animal to resent the spying upon him when he is courting his female as the deadliest of all possible insults, or perhaps by some prescience of affronts which were about to be offered to him and Isobel by these two whom he knew to be bitterly hostile. At least his temper was rising, and like most rather gentle-natured men when really provoked and cornered, he ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard

... may have been prescience, it may have been merely the deplorable state of his nerves, but, as he continued to look out upon that unfamiliar landscape, the beauty of it, in growing on him, became almost intolerable. It affected him with an indescribable ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair

... declared that Spain was the place for it, and that then England would intervene 85. General Wellesley, fresh from India, was present. Ten years later, when he had accomplished that which Pitt had seen in the lucid prescience of his last days, he related at Paris what I scarcely hesitate to call the most astounding and profound prediction in all political history, where such things ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

... never could fall off at any blow Struck by thy possible hand—why, thus I drink Of life's great cup of wonder! Wonderful, Never to feel thee thrill the day or night With personal act or speech, nor ever cull Some prescience of thee with the blossoms white Thou sawest growing! Atheists are as dull, Who cannot guess ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... effort rather than of satiated pleasure, it was no more than she had seen in them at other times. She acknowledged that she had few facts to go upon—that she had indeed little more than the terrified prescience which warns the animal ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King

... Hojo Tokimasa, his son Yoshitoki excelled him in both of those attributes as well as in prescience. It was to the mansion of Yoshitoki that Sanetomo was carried for safety when his life was menaced by the wiles of Tokimasa. Yet in thus espousing the cause of his sister, Masa, and his nephew, Sanetomo, against his father, Tokimasa, and his brother-in-law, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... country louts who only stared dully as they passed. But in a flash the inspiration came to her. Germany! Germany could help her carry out her purpose to warn the Duchess before she reached Sarajevo. She glanced at her companion and found that his brown eyes had turned as though by prescience ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs

... laughingly disclaiming any such prescience; "I am not nearly as clever as that. For instance: the armour was not provided as a protection against the attacks of savage animals or fish, but for quite ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... I know on the earth's surface, who greater prescience has than thou, Gripir! Thou mayest not conceal it, unhappy though it be, or ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson

... are in consultation, for all the armies are in the same lamentable predicament—to the great triumph of Col. N., whose prescience is triumphantly vindicated! But Gen. Wise, when I mentioned these things to him, said we would starve in the midst of plenty, meaning that Col. N was incompetent to ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones

... ashamed to doubt, And, lacking prescience, went without: Often appeared to halt, And was, of ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various

... in Rome, with the divinities of the Jews and the Christians thrown in, that in a day to come he would avenge Domitian's rods with daggers. Had the prince been able to do so, there might have risen in his mind some prescience of a certain scene, in which he must play a part on a far-off but destined night. He might have beheld a vision of himself, bald, corpulent and thin-legged, but wearing the imperial robes of Caesar, rolling in a frantic struggle ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard

... interests, for the national cause; one dynasty whose sons knew no fear save that others should encounter death before them on Italy's behalf. Had the profoundest statesmanship, the keenest political genius, governed the counsels of Piedmont in 1849, it would, with full prescience of the ruin of Novara, have bidden the sovereign and the army strike in self-sacrifice their last unaided blow. From this time there was but one possible head for Italy. The faults of the Government of Turin during Charles Albert's years of peace had ceased to have any bearing ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... friend at times displayed a sort of prescience, of which I may have occasion to speak later, but I, together with the rest of pur- blind humanity, am commonly immune from the prophetic instinct. Therefore I chronicle the fact for what it may be worth, that as I gazed with a sort of disgust at ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer

... disdain the impotent malice of his enemies, who had left him happiness, since they had left him virtue. From the earth, Boethius ascended to heaven in search of the Supreme Good; explored the metaphysical labyrinth of chance and destiny, of prescience and free will, of time and eternity; and generously attempted to reconcile the perfect attributes of the Deity with the apparent disorders of his moral and physical government. Such topics of consolation so obvious, so vague, or so abstruse, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon

... guardian angels? Is it the faint shadow, the solemn rustle of their hovering wings, as like mother birds they spread protecting plumes between blind fledglings, and descending ruin? Will theosophy ever explain and augment prescience? ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... also a strict supralapsarian. At the colloquy of Moempelgard (Montbeliard), 1586, in disputing with Andreae, he defended the proposition "that Adam had indeed of his own accord fallen into these calamities, yet, nevertheless, not only according to the prescience, but also according to the ordination and decree of God—sponte quidem, sed tamen non modo praesciente, sed etiam iuste ordinante et decernente Deo." (186.) "There never has been, nor is, nor will be a time," said he, "when God has wished, wishes, or will wish, to have compassion ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente

... before she could seize the meaning. Frightful news concerning Jack! Had he suffered a relapse? Had he been accidentally hurt? No; if it had been news of that sort, Olympia would have come herself. A gleam of prescience shot through her brain. The court—the charges against Jack! That was it. That was the secret of her father's equanimity under her raillery. She turned with a rush into the library. The bad blood of the Boones was all up in her soul now. She walked straight at, not to her father, and, ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... thus far forth, By accident most strange, bountifull Fortune (Now my deere Lady) hath mine enemies Brought to this shore: And by my prescience I finde my Zenith doth depend vpon A most auspitious starre, whose influence If now I court not, but omit; my fortunes Will euer after droope: Heare cease more questions, Thou art inclinde to sleepe: 'tis a good dulnesse, And giue it way: I know ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... given in the narrative is the dream of his burning pillow, which suggested to him that he would undergo martyrdom by fire. But what more natural than this presentiment, when persecution was raging around him and fire was a common instrument of death? I need not stop here to discuss how far a prescience may be vouchsafed to God's saints. Even 'old experience' is found to be gifted with 'something like prophetic strain.' It is sufficient to say here again that it would be difficult to point to a single authentic biography of any ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels

... is the cause of death; and sin's alone The cause of God's predestination: And from God's prescience of man's sin doth flow ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick

... think of the present situation of England? Is not this the great and fatal crush of their funding system, which, like death, has been foreseen by all, but its hour, like that of death, hidden from mortal prescience? It appears to me that all the circumstances now exist which render recovery desperate. The interest of the national debt is now equal to such a portion of the profits of all the land and the labor of the island, as not to leave enough for the subsistence of those who ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... luck man has no glimmer of prescience. Day by day we rattle the box, throw the dice; but of how these will fall we have no knowledge. We only hope with the gambler's feverishness; and it is this very hazard that keeps us crowding and pushing to hold our place at the tables ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson

... out to his companions curtly, with a philosophic commentary on the folly of "throwing up their hand before the game was played out." But they were furnished with liquor, which in this emergency stood them in place of food, fuel, rest, and prescience. In spite of his remonstrances, it was not long before they were more or less under its influence. Uncle Billy passed rapidly from a bellicose state into one of stupor, the Duchess became maudlin, and Mother Shipton snored. Mr. Oakhurst alone remained erect, ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)

... she found everybody had got up early, and Mary Nellen, with some prescience of it, had breakfast ready. Jeff, now in his coat, stood by the dining-room door with his father, talking in a commonplace way about the house as it used to be, and the colonel was professing himself glad no newer fashions had made him ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown

... summer sunshine, and the western breeze that tasted of ocean, heightened his natural cheeriness. Dr. Madden fell into a familiar strain of prescience. ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing

... child, as though stirred by some prescience, began to whimper and make little struggling movements—Phoebe had died as simply as she had lived, and ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... $4,000,000, he sighed because he had not foreseen the catastrophe and had sold Sugar short. If a strike by the men of the Suburban Trolley Company led to violence and destruction of life and property, he cursed an unrelenting Fate because he had not had the prescience to "put out" a thousand shares of Trolley. And he constantly calculated to the last fraction of a point how much money he would have made if he had sold short just before the calamity at the very top prices and had covered his stock at the bottom. Had he only known! ...
— The Tipster - 1901, From "Wall Street Stories" • Edwin Lefevre

... perceive that, from the moment when he was placed in a position of independent command, his mind appears to have taken a higher stand: he recognised higher responsibilities: and one may almost detect, in the confirmed self-reliance of his judgment even in this comparatively limited sphere, a prescience of future greatness. ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington

... one of thought. She sees clearly the facts of her experience and condition, and she knows exactly how those facts look in the eyes of others. She is one of those persons who possess a keen and just prescience of events, who can look far into the future and discern those resultant consequences of the present which, under the operation of inexorable moral law, must inevitably ensue. Self-poised in the right and free from the disturbing ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter

... myself the superior of all competitors, I used to glory in the havoc I should make on my return to England. But this the will of fate opposes, at least for the present: and of what duration my honeymoon is to be is more than any prescience of ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft

... the livery stable happenings as related by Bertie gave Mrs. Crocks many avenues of information, all of her prescience could not be explained through that or any other human agency. The young doctor declared she had the gift or divination, was a mind reader, and could see in the dark! Many a time when he had gone quietly to the stable and taken ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung

... failed slightly over the last words; she could not think with calmness of the destiny that he accepted. Involuntarily some prescience of pain that would forever pursue her own life unless his were rescued lent an intense earnestness, almost entreaty, to her argument. She did not bear him love as yet; she had seen too little of him, too lately only known him as her equal; but there were in her, stranger than ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... there been satisfied, by the date of my letter, that it was his own fault that he had it not before. But, governed by the same pragmatical motives which induced me to correspond with him at first, I was again afraid, truly, with my foolish and busy prescience; and the disappointment would have thrown him into the way of receiving fresh insults from the same persons; which might have made him guilty of some violence to them. And so to save him an apprehended rashness, I rushed ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... are so; bot I shall never be of the opinion they can forsee future contingencies, which I suppose the divell himselfe can neither forknow nor fortell; these being things which the Almightie hath keepd hidden in the bosome of his divine prescience. And whither the great God hath preordained or predestinated these things, which to us are contingent, to fall out by ane uncontrollable and unavoidable necessitie, is a question not yet decided." [SIR JAMES TURNER'S ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott

... Broadway, musing and unhappy. To a man of his delicate and hyper-sensitive nature, an event of this kind was a vast disturbance. He felt that this anonymous letter was but the forerunner of a long series of troubles. That prescience which nervous people have of misfortunes portrayed to him a future black with ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... comet myself, and knew little about the methods of exploring the heavens for one, except what had been told me by H. P. Tuttle. But I gave him the best directions I could, and we parted. It is now rather humiliating that I did not inquire more thoroughly into the case. It would have taken more prescience than I was gifted with to expect that I should live to see the bashful youth awarded the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society for ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb

... can never be known. Vorontzoff, Russian ambassador at London, who had earlier been a bitter enemy of Pitt, now expressed the fervent desire that death had carried off his weary old frame, rather than that of the potential Saviour of Europe. The words are instinct with prescience. The personality and the actions of Pitt were alike a summons to a life of dignity and manly independence. His successors had perforce to take a course not unlike that which they were about to censure in him; and the distrust which the Czar Alexander felt for them in part accounts for the collapse ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... were written at a period before the great problems which have since controlled our history were recognized or appreciated among the people at large, they will be found to indicate a moral tone and a political prescience quite remarkable in a young man of ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith

... profit of a lucky financial group in the Eastern States. He knew also that such financial groups are never national: he knew that the Bank had foreign backers, and he showed an almost startling prescience as to the evils that were to follow in the train of cosmopolitan finance, "more formidable and more dangerous than the naval and military power of an enemy." But above all he knew that the Bank was odious to the people, and he was true to his political ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton

... man a clairvoyant? How could he know that Vicky had done this very thing? But I realized at once, that he knew it, not from cognizance of facts, but from his prescience of what would necessarily follow in such ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells

... a shaky little laugh. She would tell Cutty. The real drums of jeopardy weren't emeralds but the roll of warning that prescience taps upon the spine, the occult sense of impending danger. That was why the Elevated went tumpitum-tump! tumpitum-tump! She would tell Cutty. The drums ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath

... seems the most natural thing in the world that there should have sprung up on the Saskatchewan this rich metropolis, anticipating for itself a future expansion second to no city in commercial Canada. But some one had to have faith and prescience before Edmonton got her start, and the god-from-the-machine was the Canadian Northern, in other words, William Mackenzie and D.D. Mann. Individuals and nations as they reap a harvest are apt to forget the hands that sowed the seed in faith, nothing doubting. When this railroad went into Edmonton, ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... Madonnas, those fair, fresh girl-mothers whom sorrow has never breathed upon to blight a line or tint, and yet who seem to have a prophecy written upon their faces—not of the glory of the agony, but of the lifelong sadness of a strange destiny. This girl has some mournful prescience perhaps. Let me talk with her ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various

... distance, now it approaches nearer, appears to have been a mere bugbear—and let this comfort you, that I look on myself at this day as the happiest of women; nor have I done anything which I do not rejoice in, and would, if I had the gift of prescience, do again." ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding

... naturally to the important Enquiry, whether the Devil can walk about the World invisibly or no? The Truth is, this is no question to me; for as I have taken away his Visibility already, and have denied him all Prescience of Futurity too, and have prov'd he cannot know our Thoughts, nor put any Force upon Persons or Actions, if we should take away his Invisibility too, we should undevil him quite, to all Intents and Purposes, as to any Mischief ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe

... narrowly, after the plan of escape had been conceived and discussed amongst us. Men seldom see themselves as others see them; and while, to ourselves, everything connected with our contemplated escape appeared concealed, Mr. Freeland may have, with the peculiar prescience of a slaveholder, mastered the huge thought which was disturbing ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass

... invariably refused to stoop to compromise or to disguise. Consequently, we cannot wonder that he never attained his ambition; particularly as he lacked the aid of money, and had no support, except the politically doubtful one of a literary reputation. His penetration and power of prescience were remarkable, and it is startling to find that he foretells the fall of the Monarchy of July, and the Revolution of 1848.[*] "I do not think," he says, "that in ten years from now the actual form of government will subsist—August, ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars

... prescience, took alarm. Noticing the two maids standing wide-mouthed in the hallway, she summoned her most commandatory tone, stepped into the hall, half closing the door behind her, and cowed the two handmaidens under ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz

... the Building of the Vessel that was to be conservatory of the wrecks of the species of drowned mankind. In the intensity of the action, he keeps ever out of sight the meanness of the operation. There is the Patriarch, in calm forethought, and with holy prescience, giving directions. And there are his agents—the solitary but sufficient Three—hewing, sawing, every one with the might and earnestness of a Demiurgus; under some instinctive rather than technical guidance; giant-muscled; ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... siren. His rival, or rather his partner, was—Philip of Spain! The revelation of promiscuous worship, threatened by Escovedo, sounded like a knell to Perez and the princess. Was it a mad defiance, or a profound prescience, of the consequences, which, when Escovedo, stung on one occasion beyond forbearance by the demonstration of iniquity which Othello in his agony demands of Iago, declared loudly his purpose of divulging every thing to the king?—was it, we say, the fury or ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various

... gone by since the Great War broke out. It needed no prescience, no remarkable statesmanship or gift of forecasting the future, to see that, when such mighty forces were unloosed, and when it had been shown that all treaties and other methods hitherto relied upon for national protection and for mitigating the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland

... God, that we must place a barrier to His sovereignty, and fix the boundaries of Omnipotence between the Jordan and the Lebanon? It is not thus written; and were it so, I'll pit my inspiration against the prescience of my ancestors. I also am a prophet, and Bagdad shall be my Zion. The daughter of the Voice! Well, I am clearly summoned. I am the Lord's servant, not Jabaster's. Let me make His worship universal as His power; and where's the priest ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli

... look simply at the magnitude of the results obtained, compared with the exiguity of the resources at command,—if we remember that out of the small Kingdom of Sardinia grew united Italy, we must come to the conclusion that Count Cavour was undoubtedly a statesman of marvellous skill and prescience. Abraham Lincoln, unknown to fame when he was elected to the presidency, exhibited a power for the government of men which has scarcely been surpassed in any age. He saved the American Union, he enfranchised the black race, ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty

... embodies; or, rather, ideas are themselves products of an inner movement which has an automatic extension outwards; and this extension manifests the ideas. Mere craving has no lights of its own to prophesy by, no prescience of what the world may contain that would satisfy, no power of imagining what would allay its unrest. Images and satisfactions have to come of themselves; then the blind craving, as it turns into an incipient ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... to find him indeed unchanged. Even his voice had in an hour curiously lost that hurting strangeness. As she listened she became absent, almost drowsy with memories of that far night when his voice was quite the same and their hands had trembled together—with such prescience that through all the years her hand was to feel ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson

... and went down the grand corridor. The bulldog tugged at his chain. Animals are gifted with prescience. He knew that his master had passed forever out of his life. Presently he heard the voice of the princess calling; and the glamour of royalty encompassed him,—something a human finds hard to resist, and he was ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath

... grieving that no one should live in it. How little did I then think that the very first news I should hear from Mrs. Smith, when I next came into the country, would be that Barton cottage was taken: and I felt an immediate satisfaction and interest in the event, which nothing but a kind of prescience of what happiness I should experience from it, can account for. Must it not have been so, Marianne?" speaking to her in a lowered voice. Then continuing his former tone, he said, "And yet this house you would spoil, Mrs. Dashwood? You would rob it of its simplicity by imaginary improvement! ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... is more unhappy in reproaching himself when guilty, than in being reproached by others when innocent. The pains of the mind are harder to bear than those of the body. Hope, in this mixed state of good and ill, is a blessing from heaven: the gift of prescience would be a curse. The first step towards vice, is to make a mystery of what is innocent: whoever loves to hide, will soon or late have reason to hide. A man who gives his children a habit of industry, provides for them better than by giving them a stock of money. Our good and ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... had seemed changed to her. And noticing the unsteady characters, the breaks in the words, she felt a chill at her heart. He was ill, very ill—she had become certain of this now, by a divination in which there was less of reasoning than of subtle prescience. And the rest of the journey seemed terribly long, for her anguish increased in proportion as she approached its termination. And worse than all, arriving at Marseilles at half-past twelve, there was no train ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola

... Boone, James Harrod and Benjamin Logan, fighting, bleeding, hunting game for the beleaguered garrisons, were the precursors of George Rogers Clark. Clark possessed prescience. He knew the British had determined on the extermination of the Kentucky settlements, because these settlements thwarted the British plan of preserving the west as a red man's wilderness. He had been in the fights at Harrodstown, in 1777, and doubtless knew that the British partisans ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce

... with more impatience for their women than themselves; so that those states who have been obliged to give among their hostages the daughters of noble families, are the most effectually bound to fidelity. [56] They even suppose somewhat of sanctity and prescience to be inherent in the female sex; and therefore neither despise their counsels, [57] nor disregard their responses. [58] We have beheld, in the reign of Vespasian, Veleda, [59] long reverenced by many as a deity. Aurima, ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus

... suspended, but underneath, in the darkness, something was coming to pass. If only she could break through the last integuments! She seemed to try and put her hands out, like an infant in the womb, and she could not, not yet. Still she had a strange prescience, an intimation of something yet ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... She had resolved in her mind the events of the past few days. 'Why was Chios within the grove?' She could solve the problem—foolish man! 'What demon prompted him—what fiend lured him to the verge of death? Could I but see him, warn him, for my prescience tells me he will attempt this thing again. Rash man! How can I save him? Whom ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short

... so many things. It leaves room for the existence and growth of a mind, of an imagination which, in time, shall lead rather than follow the processes of reason; which shall leap before it looks, conscious of prescience before proof, arriving on wings while the shoestrings are being tied. Blessed are the ignorance, the beliefs and the innocency of the country boy. For if he can maintain a remnant of these into maturity ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee

... striking manner, giving him a unique place in history. He spoke with accuracy of many events, without information other than that received directly from God. But this will astonish no one who is acquainted with man's power in prayer. Prayer was the secret of Peden's prescience. God proceeds on established principles, in His dealings with His people. "The secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him." "And the Lord said, Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I do?" Peden's prayers on certain occasions lasted all night. Communion with God was his delight; he lived ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters

... backwards and seems to be rushing madly up-stream, but is really stationary in the headlong charge. But for these signs of reluctance, the waters seem to fling themselves on with some foreknowledge of their fate, in an ever wilder frenzy. But it is no Maeterlinckian prescience. They prove, rather, that Greek belief that the great crashes are preceded by a louder merriment and a wilder gaiety. Leaping in the sunlight, careless, entwining, clamorously joyful, the waves riot ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke

... consent, through all my veins like wine This prescience flows; your lips meet mine above, Your clear soft eyes look upward into mine Dim in a ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.

... be their enemy, instead of their friend as it had been of late, and every inch of progress would have to be won either with the assistance of the sail or by arduous toil with the paddle. Luckily for them, they had had the prescience to bring the sail along with them when they found themselves obliged to abandon the boat, and now they reaped the full reward of their labours, and were glad that they had resisted the often-repeated temptation to leave it behind when they encountered some exceptionally ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood

... whom he raised to the earldom of Portland, contrasted advantageously with the waste and extravagance of the government under Buckingham. But economy failed to close the yawning gulf of the Treasury, and the course into which Charles was driven by the financial pressure showed with how wise a prescience the Commons had fixed on the point of arbitrary taxation as the chief danger to constitutional freedom. It is curious to see to what shifts the royal pride was driven in its effort at once to fill the Exchequer, and yet to avoid, as far as it could, ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green

... pensive, and thoughtful. You see in it that he has often been amused, and that he may easily be amused again. Spenser's is of sharper and keener feature, disdainful, and breathing that severity which appertains to so many of the Elizabethan men. A fourteenth-century child, with delicate prescience, would have asked Chaucer to assist her in a strait, and would not have been disappointed. A sixteenth-century child in like circumstances would have shrunk from drawing on herself the regards of the sterner-looking man. We can ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith

... Washington's prescience is remarkable. Recognizing, in October, 1789, that France had "gone triumphantly through the first paroxysm," he felt that she must encounter others, that more blood must be shed, that she might run from one extreme to another, and that "a higher-toned despotism" might replace "the one which existed ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes

... This whole volume is but their masterful development. They prove that together with audacious sincerity in the coordination of facts and an infallible judgment, Ardant du Picq possessed prescience in the highest degree. His prophetic eye distinguished sixty years ago the constituent principles of a good army. These are the principles which lead to victory. They are radically opposed to those which enchant our parliamentarians or military politicians, which are based ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq



Words linked to "Prescience" :   prescient, capacity, mental ability



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