"Psychical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... corrective for the trainer of children than the habit of asking oneself, in question small and great,—Would I consent to be treated as I have just treated my child? If it were only remembered that the child generally suffers double as much as the adult, parents would perhaps learn physical and psychical tenderness without which a child's life ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... features of the scientific tendencies of the present day is the extraordinary interest taken in the investigation of those peculiar physical and psychical conditions attending the states now known collectively under the name of hypnotism, varying from lethargy, catalepsy, etc., to somnambulism. Until quite recently these investigations have been frowned upon ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... to last, my "Study of Medicine" has been generically and specifically a "Study of Man," physical, mental, ethical, and psychical. ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... a while she had gone down to the country with Mrs. More and her daughters; and now she was back once more, in a kind of psychical convalescence, at her aunt's new house on ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... results, see an article, "New Phases in the Relation of the Church to Health," by Dr. Richard Cabot, in the Outlook, February 29, 1908. The reader who is interested in the principle and possibilities of psycho-therapeutics or "mental healing" is again referred to Paul Dubois' remarkable book, "Psychical Treatment ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... process of organic advancement is through growth of the cell by selective appropriation of material, self multiplication of the cell, chemical transformations of the pabulum of the cell, endowment of the muscular and nervous tissues produced by those transformations with vital and psychical properties. ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... outline of the examination, the object of which is to discover as far as possible the real cause which led to the crime, what, if any, were the social, physical, psychical and provocative elements contributing to the cause; what their value; and what are the most promising lines upon which the criminal's reform may be directed. He is by no means regarded as a passive product of forces over which he has no control, nor his crime as ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... Coming Science," "The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism," "Death: Its Causes and Phenomena," "Modern Psychical Phenomena," "Your Psychic Powers: and How to Develop Them," "Higher Psychical Development," "True Ghost ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... including the use of medical amulets and charms, which have been regarded from early times as magical remedies, belong properly to the domain of Psychical Medicine. For the therapeutic virtues of medical amulets are not inherent in these objects, but are due to the influence exerted by them upon the imaginative faculties of the individuals who employ them. They afford powerful suggestions of healing. In this volume the writer ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... wave of modern psychism. He hardly knew the meaning of such words as "clairvoyance" and "clairaudience." He had never felt the least desire to join the Theosophical Society and to speculate in theories of astral-plane life, or elementals. He attended no meetings of the Psychical Research Society, and knew no anxiety as to whether his "aura" was black or blue; nor was he conscious of the slightest wish to mix in with the revival of cheap occultism which proves so attractive to weak minds of mystical tendencies and ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... soul culture is intended primarily for young people. The expansion of the spiritual nature is shown to be the supreme thing in life. In clear, brief, logical, sane manner Dr. Adam describes man's psychical nature and methods of its development in ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... terrible consequences of the battle. From this, and from the fact that the mass of soldiers will have but recently been called from the field, the factory, and the workshop, it will appear that even the psychical ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... occupied, however, with the smaller aspect of things, he had not the art of forcing Nature to speak, and in the province of psychical aptitudes he was barely able ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... in this connection the writings of William James, the psychologist, the proceedings of the Psychical Research Society, the wonderful results of psycho-therapeusis dealing with the unconscious self, the subliminal 'consciousness,' or as Captain Hadfield prefers to call it, 'heightened personality' in his paper on this subject ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... identical with mind; appearance and reality are one and the same thing." Bergson denies the identification of mind and body, saying:[FN181] "It (experience) shows us the interdependence of the mental and the physical, the necessity of a certain cerebral substratum for the psychical state-nothing more. From the fact that two things are mutually dependent, it does not follow that they are equivalent. Because a certain screw is necessary for a certain machine, because the machine works when the screw is there ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... account of Allen's appearance, or apparition, at Blocksby's, when I and Tarras, Wentworth and the attendant recognised him, and Miss Breton did not, is thus part of the History of the Unexplained. Allen might have appealed to precedents in the annals of the Psychical Society, where they exist in scores, and are technically styled "collective hallucinations." But neither a jury, nor a judge, perhaps, would accept the testimony of experts in Psychical Research if offered in a criminal trial, nor acquit ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... there in a spirit-body." "And so it is written, The first man, Adam, was made a living soul" (which is a quotation from Genesis 2:7—"and man became a living soul"), "but the last Adam," says Paul (meaning Christ), "became a life-making spirit." But, continues Paul, the soul-man (psychical man) comes first; the spiritual-man afterwards, according to a regular order. "The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second is the Lord from heaven." And then he adds,—and this is the key to the whole passage,—"As ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... satisfaction, but the element of choice comes in, a factor which sometimes upsets the plans of breeders. In man this aspect of the relation is all important. The higher side of sex, or what we may call the psychical secondary sex characters, seem to extend through the whole range of mental and spiritual activities. Because of this there is freshness of contact in mental and spiritual intercourse between men and women which differs somewhat from that between individuals of the ...
— Conception Control and Its Effects on the Individual and the Nation • Florence E. Barrett
... Clairaudience, Inspiration, Trance, and Physical Mediumship; Prayer, Mind, and Magnetic Healing; and all classes of Psychical Effects. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... to this day, use the number four in contempt, rather than three or five, is a mystery of what one might call the psychical side of the Italian language. ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... of his thought in his recent work connected with psychical research, in Myth, Ritual, and Religion, in Cock-Lane and Common-Sense, Mr. Lang begins by entering a protest against the attitude observed towards the subject by contemporary science, especially by anthropology, which, as having been so lately "in the same condemnation," might ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... saddening things that, try as we may, we can never be certain of making people happy, whereas we can almost always be certain of making them unhappy." Of the attitude towards Spiritualism of a certain member of the Society for Psychical Research:—"He doesn't believe in it, yet lends it the cover of his name. He is one of those people who talk of the 'possibility' of the thing, who think the difficulties of disproving a thing as good as direct ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... compelled to hesitate more than ever before we forsake that sturdy and plain-spoken guide called reason, whom we as confidently follow in the region of religion as in the business of everyday life. The Society for Psychical Research has some remarkable evidence to offer, apparently establishing to physical demonstration that the man [Transcriber's note: the man?] in us does not die but lives, and communicates with his fellows after ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... he pointed that interrogation relating to Nesta's precociousness of the intelligence. For, as they say in dactylomancy, the 'psychical' of women are not disposed in their sensitive early days to dwell upon the fortunes of their sex: a thought or two turns them facing away, with the repugnant shiver. They worship at a niche in the wall. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... no atman (soul). He said that when people held that they found the much spoken of soul, they really only found the five khandhas together or any one of them. The khandhas are aggregates of bodily and psychical states which are immediate with us and ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... humming the looms of our dreams. Wagner and Chopin have a motor element in their music that is fiercer, intenser and more fugacious than that of all other composers. For them is not the Buddhistic void, in which shapes slowly form and fade; their psychical tempo is devouring. They voiced their age, they moulded their age and we listen eagerly to them, to these vibrile prophetic voices, so sweetly corrosive, bardic and appealing. Chopin being nearer the soil in the selection of forms, his ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... physical plane of her busy sub-consciousness. I mean, simply, that instead of materialising as a story, her preoccupation induced a set of actual and surprising circumstances. Why couldn't it? Let Sir Oliver Lodge or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Society for Psychical Research, anybody who knows about that sort of ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... wrecked upon one of an archipelago of uninhabited islands far to the south, where the survivors settled. Naturally, the posterity of the parents possessed of such peculiar gifts had developed extraordinary psychical powers. ...
— To Whom This May Come - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... such a body of men, pledged to impartial investigation, as the Society for Psychical Research could not officially stand sponsor to the speculative comments of M. Sage, however admittedly clear-sighted and philosophical that French critic ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... that of genius and drunkard, who set off a train of ideas which buzzed in the brains of Poe, Baudelaire, and the symbolists. People who hear painting, see music, enjoy odorous poems, taste symphonies, and write perfumes are now classed by the omnipotent psychical police as decadents, though such notions are as old as literature. Suarez de Mendoza in his L'Audition Coloree has said that the sensation of colour hearing, the faculty of associating tones and colours, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... cold, objective, a pianist made, not born. But musicians and those with cultured musical palates discerned a certain acid quality in his playing. His gloomy visage, the reflex of a disordered soul, caused Baudelaire to declare that he had added one more shiver to his extensive psychical collection. In Paris the Countess X.—charming, titled soubrette—said, "Have you heard Racah play the piano? He is a damned soul out for ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... wonder-working words. St. Paul, in Christian circles, was the first to give the word its unique value. For him it named a new order of life and a new level of being. In his thought, a deep cleavage runs through the human race and divides it into two sharply-sundered classes, "psychical men" and "pneumatical men"—men who live according to nature, and men who live by the life of the Spirit. The former class, that is psychical men, are of the earth earthy; they are, as we should say to-day, empirical, parts of a vast nature-system, doomed, as is the entire system, ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... most clearly in three main lines: it is mechanical, psychical and social. Our power to make and use things is essentially human; we alone have extra-physical tools. We have added to our teeth the knife, sword, scissors, mowing machine; to our claws the spade, harrow, plough, drill, dredge. We are a protean creature, using the larger brain power through ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... in any case, would not be a persona grata to the Society for Psychical Research. As he is violent in his enmities, so is he gullible in marvels. His impeachment of Adriano Lemmi must be ruled completely out of court; his thaumaturgic experiences are paltry trickeries; his ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... higher sensitiveness of the lower class of animals. Nor need we hesitate to recognize the fine gradations from simple sensitiveness and volition to the higher instinctive and to the other psychical manifestations of the higher brute animals. The gradation is undoubted, however we may ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... banshee at Borris—though no living witness, I believe, has heard its warning wail. But as we sat in the beautiful library, and watched the dying light of day, a lady present told us a tale more gruesome than many of those in which the "psychical" inquirers delight. She was sitting, she said, in an upper room of an ancient mansion here in Carlow, in which she lives, when, from the lawn below, there came up to her a low, sad, shrill cry—the croon of a woman, such as one hears from the ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... own case have been declined on various pretexts by every medical journal to which I have offered them. There was, perhaps, some reason in this, because many of the medical facts which they record are not altogether new, and because the psychical deductions to which they have led me are not in themselves of medical interest. I ought to add, that a good deal of what is here related is not of any scientific value whatsoever; but as one or two people on whose judgment ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... so far as it is active in man, has the capacity, by co-ordinating the physical and etheric parts of the organism in one way or another, to promote happenings either of a more corporeal or a more psychical nature - namely, motion at one pole, sensation at the other, and feeling in the middle between them.1 Remembering Goethe's formula, 'colours are deeds and sufferings of light', we realize how deeply true the ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... possess a family likeness to the heroic legends of other Aryan races, the Russians forgot them, and later on, appropriated them again from Ural-Altaic sources, adding a few historical and geographical names, and psychical characteristics. But this view as to the wholesale appropriation of Oriental myths has not been established, and the authorities who combat it demonstrate that the heroes are thoroughly Russian, and ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... Peripheric or anatomical, caused by an unusual distribution of the nerves and their hyperaesthesia; (2) Luxurious, when love a tergo is preferred on account of the narrowness of the passage; and (3) the Psychical. But this is evidently superficial: the question is what causes this neuropathy, this abnormal distribution ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... self-study, her unflinching recognition of physical and psychical facts which the average woman blinks over, Mary deceived herself as to the date of that final triumph which permitted her to observe Rhoda Nunn with perfect equanimity. Her outbreak of angry feeling on the occasion of Bella Royston's death meant something ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... your way the people who were required to assist you." Chance! dear reader, is there such a thing as chance? Do you believe in chance? Do you attach any precise meaning to the word? Do you employ it at haphazard, allowing it to mean what it may? Chance! What a field for psychical investigation is at once opened up; how we may tear to shreds our past lives in search of—what? Of the Chance that made us. I think, reader, I can throw some light on the general question, by replying to your ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... cranial cavity. It is ovoid in shape, with an irregular, flattened base, and consists of lateral halves or hemispheres. The greater part of the cerebrum is composed of white matter. The hemispheres of the cerebrum are usually said to be the seat of all psychical activities. Only when they are intact are the process of feeling, thinking, and willing possible. After they are destroyed the organism comes to be like a complicated machine, and its activity is only the expression of the internal ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... the readers who then offered spontaneous tribute to that series of sonnets, and still treasured it as a work of all but faultless symmetry, built up by aid of a blended inspiration caught equally from Shakspeare and from Dante, with a superadded psychical quality peculiar to its author, there were many, even amongst the friendliest in sympathy, who heard of the completed sequence with a sense of doubt. Such is the silent and unreasoning and all but irrevocable edict of all popular criticism against continuations ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... much of a place, and that this is a great lark, and that he enjoys being here immensely," translated Mollie. "Some psychical phenomena!" exclaimed Young Outram, prancing up in ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... and Psychical Research, are the cloud no bigger than a man's hand that is forcing the facts of Magic again on the attention of both the theological and scientific world. Hypnotism and Psychical Research are already becoming respectable and attracting the attention of the generality ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... are with us yet. Ireland is still a bone of contention between political parties: the Channel tunnel is no nearer completion: and then as now, when other topics are exhausted, the "Spectator" can fill up its columns with Thought Transference and Psychical Research. ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... whole organism, physical and mental, being recognised more and more. Thought could not be kept back from a subject so profoundly suggestive. Besides the physical life dealt with by Mr. Darwin, there is a psychical life presenting similar gradations, and asking equally for a solution. How are the different grades and orders of Mind to be accounted for? What is the principle of growth of that mysterious power which on our planet culminates in Reason? These are questions which, though ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... the present Sir Robert Wadham and his people nearly out of their wits. And that's the way with almost all of us: there is literally no connection (as a rule) between our expressions and the things we intend to express. You know how the Psychical Society make quite a study of rappings, and try to interpret them by the alphabet? Well, these, as I told you, are merely a nervous symptom; annoying, no doubt, but not dangerous. The only spectres, almost, that manage to hint what they really mean ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... constantis" (Gussetius).[8] The soul, when thus considered as the passive object, is here therefore in a high degree in its proper place; and there can the less be any doubt of its occurring here in this sense, that it occurs twice more in vers. 11 and 12, of the natural psychical life of the Servant of God, which was given up to suffering and death. But, on the other hand, if the soul be considered as the active object, it stands here at all events rather idle,—a circumstance which is sufficiently apparent ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... harmless remarks are misinterpreted and her most generous acts become weapons wherewith to slay her, she loses all heart for resistance, and merely lies down to die. Very subtile and beautiful is the manner in which Bjoernson indicates the interaction of psychical and physical conditions. The "soul-frost" which chills the very marrow of her bones is so vividly conveyed that you shiver sympathetically. The self-righteous and brutally censorious attitude of the community ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... great pity if there were never such a gymnasium as parental resistance for lovers to exercise their hearts in? Shall we not, then, thank old Wieck for his fine lessons in psychical culture? His daughter Marie, by the way, Clara's half-sister, has only this year (1903) published a defence of the old man in answer to the first volume ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... and might have done so had not the Man of the World in me whispered that from professional Believers I should get little sympathy, and probably less credence still. For to have my experience disbelieved, or attributed to hallucination, would be intolerable to me. Psychical investigators, I am told, prefer a Medium who takes no cash recompense for his performance, a Healer who gives of his strange powers without reward. There are, however, natural-born priests who yet wear no uniform other than upon their face and heart, but since I know of none I fall ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... child. Moreover, the modern movement in favour of the sexual enlightenment of young persons renders indispensable the possession of precise knowledge of the sexuality of the child; and such knowledge is no less necessary to all instructors of youth, especially to those to whom the psychical life of children is a matter of concern. Judges and magistrates also, as we shall see in the seventh chapter, are very greatly interested in this matter: it is, in fact, hardly open to question that erroneous legal decisions and the unjust condemnation of reputed criminals can only be avoided ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... impression was that it was a case for the Psychical Research Society, but this romantic view faded in favour of a simple solution, propounded by Mr. Cox with much crisp-ness, that Mrs. Berry was leaving the realms of fact for those of romance. His actual words were shorter, but the ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... stranger saw embroidered on the breast of the tunic that same device, the arm and the leopard's head, which was visible in the carving of the room. Yes; this must still be a dream, which, under the unknown laws which govern such psychical states, had brought out thus vividly figures, devices, words, forgotten since his boyish days. Though of an imaginative tendency, the stranger was nevertheless strongly tenacious of the actual, and had a natural horror at the idea of being seriously at odds, in beliefs, perceptions, conclusions, ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... afternoon with Father H—— and John [Lord Dumfries] to Palace, and then with him to the Gruoch's Den. He gives us a long account of the psychical disturbances at B——; noises between his bed and the ceiling, like continuous explosion of petards, so that he could not ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... impress us more, perhaps, by their outward and physical, than by their inward and psychical life. On a first interview with them, especially, we receive an impression of clothes, good or otherwise, of beauty or plainness or ugliness of feature, and of correctness or uncouthness of manner. These are the common people, whether ladies and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... this time especially is being called to various forms of psychic phenomena measurably through the efforts of the Society for Psychical Research in investigating and sifting the evidence for the stories of apparitions, hallucinations, forewarnings, etc., but more because so many who have heretofore scoffed at and doubted such stories, or who have been foiled in their efforts to obtain ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... (Southard)* Phipps Psychiatric clinic Possession (Fraser) Post-traumatic Nervous and Mental Disorders (Benon) Primitive Races, Sex Worship and Symbolism in (Brown)* Primitive Tribes, Psychoneuroses among (Coriat)* Psychical, Adventurings in (Bruce) Psychobiology, (Dunlap) Psychology, Educational (Thorndike) Psychology, General and Applied (Munsterberg) Psychoneuroses, Treatment of * Sexual Tendencies in Monkeys, etc (Hamilton) Sleep and ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... was a minister, and that his home was in Rhode Island. His friends were sent for and recognized him, and he returned to his home after an absence of two years of absolutely foreign existence. A most careful investigation of the case was made on behalf of the London Society for Psychical Research. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... a disease of the most highly differentiated parts of the nervous system, in which the psychical functions, as thought, feeling, and volition, are seriously impaired, revealing itself in a series of mental phenomena. Institutions for the insane were at first founded for public relief, and not to benefit the insane; but this idea has changed in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 520, December 19, 1885 • Various
... proportions. As for the dogs, of course there were many, and during their lives they were intimate and valued family friends, and their deaths were household tragedies. One of them, a large yellow animal of several good breeds and valuable rather because of psychical than physical traits, was named "Susan" by his small owners, in commemoration of another retainer, a white cow; the fact that the cow and the dog were not of the same sex being treated with indifference. Much the most individual of the dogs ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... epitaph, mind you, that is in a literary sense distinctly fertilizing. It catches one's fancy in its own crude way, as pages and pages of infinitely more complicated stuff take possession of, germinate, and sprout in one's imagination in another way. We are all psychical parasites. Why, given his epitaph, given the surroundings, I wager any sensitive consciousness could have guessed at his face; and guessing, as it were, would have feigned it. What do you ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... which lay outside my plan to depict the West, had long demanded to be written, and I now set about it with vigor. As a matter of fact, I knew a great deal about mediums, for at one time I had been a member of the Council of the American Psychical Society, and as a special committee on slate writing and other psychical phenomena had conducted many experiments. I had in my mind (and in my notebooks) a mass of material which formed the background of my story, The Tyranny of the Dark. It made a creditable ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... hardly come up to the standards required by the Society for Psychical Research. They are purely popular, and the ghost is regarded as the deceased person, permitted or condemned by the powers of the lower world to hold communication with survivors on earth. Naturally, they were never submitted to critical inquiry, and there is no foreshadowing ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... analogy. Bodily health is no illusion. It does not consist in merely thinking that we are well, but is a real condition of well-being and of power; depending on the state of our tissues and correct balance and working of our physical and psychical life. And this correct and wholesome working will be furthered and steadied—or if broken may often be restored—by good suggestions; it may be disturbed by bad suggestions; because the controlling factor of life is ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... in its most general and comprehensive nature, the spontaneous and imaginative form in which the human intelligence and human emotions conceive and represent themselves and things in general; it is the psychical and physical mode in which man projects himself into all those phenomena which he is ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... came to an opposite conclusion, while a similar negative result was reached in the investigations of several committees of scientists. The latest and most persistent attempt to search into the reality of phenomena of this character has been that made by the London Society for Psychical Research, whose investigations have extended over years and have yielded numerous striking and suggestive results. The most important conclusion at which the members of this society have so far arrived is the hypothesis of Telepathy, or the seeming power of one mind to influence the thoughts ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... consciousness—Materialists cannot demonstrate how molecular vibrations can be transformed into objects—Parallelism avoids issue by declaring mind to be function of brain—Parallelists declare physical and psychical life to be two parallel currents—Bain's support of this—Objections to: most important that it postulates consciousness ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... demarcation, wider than that between the animals which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves; and I may add the expression of my belief that the attempt to draw a psychical distinction is equally futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life. [7] At the same time, no one is more strongly convinced than ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... more than enough! I had my ghost—a first-hand, authenticated article. I would write to the Society for Psychical Research—I would paralyze the Empire with the news! But I would, first of all, put eighty miles of assessed crop land between myself and that dak-bungalow before nightfall. The Society might send their regular ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... that govern psychical phenomena are as occult as the abstraction of the "fourth division of space"; and they defy the realism of common-place probability, mock all analysis, and annihilate distance. When Beryl had first met the keen scrutiny of Mr. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... nations and the Semites. But while race differences have followed mainly physical race lines, yet no mere physical distinctions would really define or explain the deeper differencesthe cohesiveness and continuity of these groups. The deeper differences are spiritual, psychical, differences undoubtedly based on the physical, but infinitely transcending them. The forces that bind together the Teuton nations are, then, first, their race identity and common blood; secondly, and more important, a common history, common ...
— The Conservation of Races • W.E. Burghardt Du Bois
... marred by the seal of commonness which trade impresses on so many men, the result of the subjection of the intellect to the will, and of the impossibility of grasping things except as they relate to self. In this respect the American cousin was his antipodes. His whole body had a psychical expression—slim, elastic, alert. Over his bright gray eyes the eyelids drew themselves horizontally, showing his dexterity and acuteness of mind; indeed, his ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... PSYCHIC BLUNDERING.—The Psychical Research Society held a meeting a few weeks since in Boston. Their first communication was on Thought Transferrence, by Dr. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... mind, however, the case of one pianist who is very widely known and highly lauded, but who is very slightly removed from the class of Blind Tom. A trained alienist, one acquainted with the difference between the eccentricities which frequently accompany greatness and the unconscious physical and psychical evidences of idiocy which so clearly agree with the antics of the chimpanzee or the droll Capuchin monkeys, might find in the performer to whom I refer a subject for some very interesting, not to ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... testimony of Lily Boyle and her father that Miss Maynard was their guest in Melbourne on the occasion of the New Year's Eve dance. These letters are presumably still amongst the archives of the Society of Psychical Research, and the story was printed by them in ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... freedom, of subtlety, of power, of creatively fixing, disposing, and shaping, reaches its climax—in short, that necessity and "freedom of will" are then the same thing with them. There is, in fine, a gradation of rank in psychical states, to which the gradation of rank in the problems corresponds; and the highest problems repel ruthlessly every one who ventures too near them, without being predestined for their solution by the loftiness and power of his spirituality. Of ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... accustomed to talk," writes Professor Karl Pearson,[1] "of the 'external world,' of the 'reality' outside us. We speak of individual objects having an existence independent of our own. The store of past sense-impressions, our thoughts and memories, although most probably they have beside their psychical element a close correspondence with some physical change or impress in the brain, are yet spoken of as inside ourselves. On the other hand, although if a sensory nerve be divided anywhere short of ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... natural laws, the keener he is about the supernatural. He may claim to have laid aside superstition, but he isn't to be believed in that. Though he has discarded witchcraft and alchemy, it is only that he may have more time for psychical research; true, he no longer dabbles with ancient magic, but that is because the modern types, as the ouija board, entertain him more. He dearly loves to traffic with that other world of which he knows so little and concerning which he is ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... relations maintained with the other life and with the Gods. Or, if one prefers to consider ghosts and gods as inseparable elements of the primary organism, then we should say that morality is born in that all-embracing psychical atmosphere. But it does not follow from that fact that the rise and development of morality are conditioned by belief in Gods and in immortality. Merely human relations are sufficient to the production ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... purely sentimental one - not a belief founded simply on emotion. There is a physical world - the world as known to our senses, and there is a psychical world - the world of feeling, consciousness, thought, ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... become for him the means of ventilating speculations on terrestrial movement, on the multiplicity of habitable worlds, on the principle of the universe, and on the infinite modes of psychical metamorphosis. Such topics were not calculated to endear him to people of importance on the banks of Isis. That he did not humor their prejudices, appears from a Latin epistle which he sent before him by way of introduction to the Vice Chancellor.[95] It contains these pompous phrases: ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Mystery of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey,' 'The False Jeanne d'Arc,' 'The Mystery of Amy Robsart,' and 'The Mystery of James de la Cloche,' are now published for the first time. Part of 'The Voices of Jeanne d'Arc,' is from a paper by the author in 'The Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.' 'The Valet's Tragedy' is mainly from an article in 'The Monthly Review,' revised, corrected, and augmented. 'The Queen's Marie' is a recast of a paper in 'Blackwood's Magazine'; 'The Truth about "Fisher's Ghost,"' and 'Junius and ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... years. I worked as hard as I knew how, and after the first black months a little light stole in on me. From thinking that she would have been interested in what I was doing I came to feel that she was interested—that she was there and that she knew. I'm not talking any psychical jargon—I'm simply trying to express the sense I had that an influence so full, so abounding as hers couldn't pass like a spring shower. We had so lived into each other's hearts and minds that the consciousness ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... written on this figurative expression in the Maya languages: "The literal or physical sense of the word heart is not that which is here intended. In these dialects this word has a richer metaphorical meaning than in our tongue. It stands for all the psychical powers, the memory, will and reasoning faculties, the life, the spirit, the soul. It would be more correct to render these names the 'Spirit' or 'Soul' of the lake, etc., than the 'Heart.' They indicate a dimly understood sense of the unity of spirit ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... some mysterious impression, apparently telepathic (the book is rich in such psychical phenomena), visits the weir on the river, at night, and next day finds Edwin's watch and chain in the timbers; his scarf-pin in the pool below. The watch and chain must have been placed purposely where they were found, they could not float thither, and, ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang
... period. H. Hffding (b. 1843) has been the most prominent contributor to psychology. His Problems of Philosophy and his Philosophy of Religion were translated into English in 1906. Alfred Lehmann (b. 1858) has, since 1896, attracted a great deal of attention by his sceptical investigation of psychical phenomena. F. Rnning has written on the history of thought in Denmark. In the criticism of art, Julius Lange (1838-1896), and later Karl Madsen, have done excellent service. In literary criticism Dr Georg Brandes is notable for the long period during which ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... physiolatry (the religion of the Vedas) and Sabaeism: the deity is the last and highest pinnacle of the spiritual temple, not placed there except by a comparatively civilised race of high development, which leads them to study and speculate upon cosmical and psychical themes. This progression is admirably wrought out in Professor Max ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... psychical theory connected with so singular a belief? [14] I think it might be this: The Soul, within its own body, always remains viewless, yet may reflect itself in the eyes of another, as in the mirror of a necromancer. Vainly ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... patriotism has seemed to many to mark an arrest of development in the psychical expansion of the individual, a half-way house between mere self-centredness and full human sympathy. Some moralists have condemned it as pure egoism, magnified and disguised. 'Patriotism,' says Ruskin, 'is an absurd prejudice founded on an extended selfishness.' ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... treatment that the unfortunates actually were being tormented by diabolical agencies, which he banished by his word? The last of these possibilities should not be held to be impossible until much more is known than we now know about the mysterious phenomena of abnormal psychical states. If this is the explanation of the maladies for Jesus' day, however, it should be accepted also as the explanation of similar abnormal symptoms when they appear in our modern life, for the old hypothesis of a special activity of evil spirits at the time of the incarnation ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... weird! Moya, you must write an account of your experience for the Society for Psychical Research. ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... statement. And we become at once conscious, if we weren't so before. Nem con. And our little baby body is a little functioning organism, a little developing machine or instrument or organ, and our little baby mind begins to stir with all our wonderful psychical beginnings. And so we are ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... time, in the right way, and that you will recognize it when it comes. Hold to this thought, never allow it to weaken, hold to it, and continually water it with firm expectation. You in this way put your advertisement into a psychical, a spiritual newspaper, a paper that has not a limited circulation, but one that will make its way not only to the utmost bounds of the earth, but of the very universe itself. It is an advertisement, moreover, which if rightly placed on your part, ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... this monograph has been incited to its publication by the commendations of three of the most eminent critics and editors of magazines in the United States, to whom it was submitted in manuscript. In this essay, he discusses his subject from a physio-psychical standpoint, and believes that he has kept intact the canons of scientific investigation, ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... Mummy just as his daughter had left him after saying "good-night." He was not a man to be easily astonished. Not only was he one of the best-read amateur Egyptologists in Europe, but he was also an ex-President of the Royal Society, a Member of the Psychical Research Society, and, moreover, Chairman of a recently appointed Commission on Comparative Insanity, the object of whose labours was to determine, if possible, what proportion of people outside asylums were mad or sane according to a standard which, ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... Adventure, which interprets the spirit of Columba. Nature and the spiritual meet in the psychic phase into which Sharp passed, not only in the poetic and native sense, but in a more literal sense than that. For the Green Life continually leads those who are akin to it into opportunities of psychical research among obscure and mysterious forces which are yet very potent. With a nature like his it was inevitable that he should be eventually lured irresistibly into the enchanted forest, where spirit is more and more the ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... are, as Hamlet says, real mysteries in this dull, prosaic life of ours. One or two true tales may not come amiss. I am quite ready to give any member of the Psychical Society chapter and verse and authorities, and ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... excessive importance attached to a possible future state: he looks upon this as a psychical stimulant, a day dream, whose revulsion and reaction disorder waking life. The condition may appear humble and prosaic to those exalted by the fumes of Fancy, by a spiritual dram-drinking, which, like the physical, is the pursuit of an ideal happiness. But he is too ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... law to the domain of the spirit. As the human embryo passes through the principal stages of the development of the individual from lower forms of life, so the growing male must pass through the stages of psychical development through which the race has passed. The gynecocratic government of prehistoric time is revived in the nursery, where the mother rules supreme and the sisters dominate. The normal, healthy school-boy, preferring ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... to the condensation of moisture in the air. It is a natural phenomenon known to babes like Beth, but ill-observed, and not at all explained, because man has gone such a little way beyond the bogey of the supernatural in psychical matters that he is still befogged, and makes up opinions on the subject like a divine when miracles are in question, instead of searching for information like an honest philosopher, whose glory it is, not to prove himself right, but ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... general Progress, is a hypothesis which may or may not be true. And if it is true, there remains the further hypothesis of man's moral and social "perfectibility," which rests on much less impressive evidence. There is nothing to show that he may not reach, in his psychical and social development, a stage at which the conditions of his life will be still far from satisfactory, and beyond which he will find it impossible to progress. This is a question of fact which no willing on man's part can alter. ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... simulate a mental summary; but the composition in its totality, with its particular melodies, harmonies, and rhythms, and with the specific union of all these elements characteristic of this composition, does not represent any definite psychical or ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... made elaborate remarks on them also to his simple comrades. He spoke about the psychical aspect of fighting, the physiology of heroic deeds, the resignation of those destined for death, &c. He was a thoughtful man and unquestionably sensitive; but all that he said had the stamp of oriental thought, systematically arranged in advance and quite perfectly expressed at ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... a very interesting one for the student of psychical pathology to note. It seems to be a disease as native and universal to the human mind as is the decay of the teeth to the human body. It seems as though we all must suffer somewhat from it, and most of us suffer ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... and still more was to be heard, in Paris. He was all innuendo and strange hints and whispered secrets, and I-could-if-I-woulds. One of my recent winters had been devoted, not to dabbling in magic, for which I have not the temperament, but to reading the literature of magic or of all things psychical, and I could then, though I could not now, have passed a fairly good examination in the modern authorities, from Madame Blavatsky to Louis Jacolliot. Therefore I proved a sympathetic listener and heard, for my pains, of the revival of old religions, and above all of old rites, and of ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... learning means something which the individual does when he studies. It is an active, personally conducted affair. The dualism here is between knowledge as something external, or, as it is often called, objective, and knowing as something purely internal, subjective, psychical. There is, on one side, a body of truth, ready-made, and, on the other, a ready-made mind equipped with a faculty of knowing—if it only wills to exercise it, which it is often strangely loath to do. The separation, often touched upon, between subject matter and method is the ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... the thought of it, to the exclusion of his own anxieties. What! this woman had made of him an ideal such as he himself sought among the most exquisite of her sex? How was that possible? What quality of his, personal, psychical, had such magnetic force? What sort of being was he in Marcella's eyes? Reflective men must often enough marvel at the success of whiskered and trousered mortals in wooing the women of their desire, for only by a specific imagination can a person of ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... viz., half-past eight p.m., that I saw the vision of my father sitting in my room at Jethou. The mysterious appearance was in some way connected with his will, but how it was all brought about I must leave to the Psychical Society to fathom.[8] ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... discover that for many years profoundly scientific men had been seriously investigating and experimenting with mysteries unexplainable by the accepted laws of material science. They had discussed, argued and written grave books upon them. They had been doing all this before any society for psychical research had founded itself and the intention of new logic was to be scientific rather than psychological. They had written books, scattered through the years, on mesmerism, hypnosis, abnormal mental conditions, the powers of suggestion, even unexplored ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... schoolmasters, rate collectors—who go consumed from day to day and meet no fit companion, and who must needs find some artificial vent for their mental energy. No one has ever calculated how many sound Problems are possible, and no doubt the Psychical Research people would be glad if Professor Karl Pearson would give his mind to the matter. All the possible dispositions of the pieces come to such a vast number, however, that, according to the theory of probability, and allowing a few thousand arrangements ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... despair. He would say "Your case is a very usual one," so that she did not feel ashamed of being like that. He reduced it all, dispassionately and yet not unsympathetically, and with clear scientific precision, to terms of psychical and physical laws. He trained his patient to use her mind and her will, as well as to remember her dreams and to be shocked at nothing ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... but he didn't understand the question. I puzzled over it a good deal, for it seemed to me that if Hollond felt lonely, there must be more in this world of his than we imagined. I began to wonder if there was any truth in fads like psychical research. Also, I was not so sure that he was as normal as I had thought: it looked as if his nerves ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... can't tell," answered the young father. "Perhaps selfish people shouldn't have children; or perhaps it's the children that make us unselfish, and so keep us happy. Maybe it's one of those intricate psychical reactions, like a chemical change—I don't know! But I do know the kids are the best things ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... and the study of man's mental life; precise studies of the ways of children and wild peoples; and new methods like those of the psycho-analyst must also receive the attention they deserve, for they are giving us a "New Psychology" and the claims of psychical research must also be recognised by ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... quite satisfied. Other mysteries come and go, but the gipsy mystery stays with us, and was to Borrow a source of endless content. For after sharpening his wits on the ethnological riddle, he could refresh himself with the psychical aspect of the matter, discovering in them the incarnation of one essential human quality, incompletely present in all men. They are the perfect vagabonds; but the germ of vagabondage inheres in mankind at large, and is the source ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... the question, Which of these is the "community?" and also points the way to the answer. None of the groupings mentioned can be considered "the community." Yet each is "a community." A "community" is a psychical and not a physical thing. It can only approximately be bounded by physical lines. In the last analysis the true "community" is nothing more nor less than that group of two or more individuals who are bound together by a single interest. ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... had a message for you, and Stephen Clifden will tell you the same thing when you meet. Believe it for it is true. Remember always that the psychical is not the mystical and that what we seek is not marvel but vision. These two things are very far apart, so let the first with all its dangers pass you by, for our way lies to the heights, and for us there is only one danger—that of turning back and losing what the whole world cannot give ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... whether a woman, a child, and a dog had passed that way, but he had seen nothing. The apparition had disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. Mr. Stead's article ends here. Of course, one can only surmise as to the nature of the phenomena. No member of the Psychical Research Society could do more—and in the absence of any authentic history of the spot where the manifestations occurred, such a surmise can be of little value. Since the phenomena were seen by three people at the same time, it is quite safe ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... a psychical storm, agitating to unimaginable depth the mystery of the past within us. Or we might say that it is a prodigious incantation, every different instrument and voice making separate appeal to different billions of prenatal memories. There are tones that ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... water which he had found upon the dead men around him. It seemed incredible that such a thing could have happened, but on making inquiries concerning his division, the number of which I have forgotten, it proved to be perfectly true. Surely this case presents physiological and psychical ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... was always afraid he should be dropped down upon to "say it." Mr. Ashman's book is a little bewildering to an outsider who fails to distinguish the two vital forces. He says: "It is much rarer to find a high development of a temperament in which the psychical element prevails, than in which it is well blended with the vital-magnetic, or than in which the latter excels. In nearly all popular public men there is a blending of the two. We see it well exemplified in John Bright, Spurgeon, and others. This is the secret of their drawing, ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... Street. He didn't want a big ocean—just a kind of an oceanette with a seating capacity of five thousand square miles was his idea, and when he had done with his phantasie, the doleful dumps that rose at the psychical aroma of the hypothetical fried chicken and mashed potatoes of our dream, ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... who are certainly subject to trances," answered Gilbert. "The matter is more in the line of psychical research than medical. What were the trances of ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the child's psychical health have their parallel in those of its physical health.—Many persons who have asked me to continue my methods of education for very young children on lines that would make them suitable for those over seven years of age, have expressed a doubt whether ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... only person whom poltergeists visit. Judging from my correspondence and the accounts I see in the letters of various psychical research magazines, they patronise many people. Their modus operandi, covering a wide range, is always boisterous. Undoubtedly they have been badly brought up—their home influence and their educational training must have been sadly lacking in discipline. Or is it the ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell |
