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More "Volition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... garment. In an instant he became absolutely cool, steady, and self-possessed, and lifting his rifle to his shoulder with a lightning-like movement, while the sights of the weapon seemed to line themselves of their own volition upon the centre of the beast's broad forehead, right between the eyes, he pressed the trigger. There was a flash, a sharp, whip-like report, a faint puff of smoke, and the lion dropped stone dead where ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... the course of reproduction we have so far been concerned with what are commonly considered the blind operations of Nature in the absence of conscious and deliberate volition. We have seen that while at the outset Nature seems to have impressed an immense reproductive impetus on her creatures, all her energy since has been directed to the imposition of preventive checks on that reproductive impetus. The end attained by these ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... examined the face of the man. Then he took the head in both his hands and raised it. "What are you doing?" screamed Emma, hoarsely, shrinking back at the sight of the head that seemed to be rising of its own volition. ...
— The Dead Are Silent - 1907 • Arthur Schnitzler
... education of childhood may be doubtful; it is, at any rate, less automatic than the previous acts, for a man might by conscious effort learn to perform it more skilfully, or even to suppress it altogether. Actions of this kind, with which instinct and volition enter upon equal terms, have been called 'semi-reflex.' The act of running towards the train, on the other hand, has no instinctive element about it. It is purely the result of education, and is preceded by a consciousness ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... that face: he knew it as well as, far better than he knew his own; its oval curves, its dimpled sweetness, its laughing eyes. Just for such brief seconds of time as were necessary for perfect recognition he saw it; and then, impelled by his former purpose—no time now for a new volition—he got himself up and walked on, with his eyes in ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... I opened it, and the next door across the little passage, I saw the same thing repeated in the bedroom beyond—a door closing, apparently from its own volition. The same thing happened with the door ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... That it felt real affection for him there seemed little doubt, for now that the blacks were disposed of it walked slowly back and forth about the stake, rubbing its sides against the ape-man's legs and purring like a contented tabby. That it had gone of its own volition to bring the balance of the pack to his rescue, Tarzan could not doubt. His Sheeta was indeed a ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and horses of fire, no sudden rapture; but, as the narrative makes emphatic, a slow, leisurely, self-originated floating upwards. He was borne up from them, and no outward vehicle or help was needed; but by His own volition and power He rose towards the heavens. 'And a cloud received Him out of their sight'—the Shechinah cloud, the bright symbol of the Divine Presence which had shone round the shepherds on the pastures of Bethlehem, and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of here!" yelled the tall fellow, who had first challenged his right to remain in Pleasantville or its environs. As the crowd fell apart to make way for him, willing hands were extended to give him the needed impetus, and without special volition of his own. ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... are either to go home or not, does not prevent your freedom; because the liberty of choice between the two is compatible with that certainty. But if one of these events be certain now, you have no future power of volition. If it be certain you are to go home to-night, you must go home.' JOHNSON. 'If I am well acquainted with a man, I can judge with great probability how he will act in any case, without his being restrained by my judging. GOD may have this probability increased to certainty.' BOSWELL. 'When ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... over the prayer prayed itself without seeming thought or volition on his part, as he went from place to place, faithfully, keenly, step by step, searching out what he needed to know. At last toward six o'clock, his chain of evidence led him to the door ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... marked a share. It was by pure accident that she had joined the crowd assembled to see the King lay the foundation-stone of the proposed new Theatre. She had been as it were, entangled in the press of the people, and had got pushed towards the centre of the scene almost against her own volition. And while she had stood,—a passive and unwilling spectator of the pageant,—her attention had been singularly attracted towards the uneasy and restless movements of the youth who had afterwards attempted the assassination of the monarch. She had watched him narrowly; ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... grew harder with the lapse of years; the smile that took no radiance from a light within; the frown that blackened as the soul grew darker. He saw all these, and still for ever, amid a thousand distracting ideas, his thoughts, which were beyond his own volition, concentrated in the one plague-spot of his life, and held him there, fixed as a wretch bound hand and foot upon ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... disappearance, Peter stood for several minutes thinking. His brief crusade into Niggertown had ended in a situation far outside of his volition. That morning he had started out with some vague idea of taking Niggertown in his hands and molding it in accordance with his white ideas; but Niggertown had taken Peter into its hands, had threatened his life, had ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... glittering arch of her upper third, occasionally, and scrape it along behind the comblike row; sometimes a pinnacle stood straight up, like a statuette of ebony, against that glittering white shield, then seemed to glide out of it by its own volition and power, and become a dim specter, while the next pinnacle glided into its place and blotted the spotless disk with the black exclamation-point of its presence. The top of one pinnacle took the shapely, clean-cut form of a rabbit's ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the infant, for the most part, follow passively the traction exercised by nurses and mothers, sometimes consciously, but more often unconsciously. We have now to consider a period when the child becomes possessed of a driving force of his own, and moves in this direction or that of his own volition. In this new intellectual movement through life he will not avoid tumbles. He will feel the restraints of his environment pressing upon him on all sides, and he will often come violently in contact with rigid rules and conventions to which he must ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... would take drastic treatment to get under the hide of this sneering bully who had come within an ace of ruining the life of June Tolliver. The law could not touch him. He had not abducted her. She had gone of her own volition. Unfulfilled intentions are not criminal without an overt act. Was he to escape scot free? She had scoffed at the idea that June might die. But in her heart she was not so sure. The fever was growing on her. It would be days before ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... aspects of our psychic life that are so distinct, and it would be foolish to delay in order to enumerate the differences. The characteristic of novelty should by itself suffice, since it is the special and indispensable mark of invention, and for volition is only accessory: The extraction of a tooth requires of the patient as much effort the second time as the first, although it ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... blue, or gray, or black, as her feeling varies and the soul informing them is in a state of joy, or trouble. Her most bewitching feature is her mouth, which has two dangerous dimples near it that go and come, sometimes without her volition and sometimes, I fear, with her full accord and desire. Her hair is brown and falls in such a mass of ringlets that no cap has ever yet been found which can confine it and keep it from weaving a golden net in which to ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... knowledge by means of principles a priori [56]; the will, or practical reason; the faculty of choice (Germanice, Willkuehr) and (distinct both from the moral will and the choice,) the sensation of volition, which I have found reason to include under the head of single and double touch." To this, as far as it relates to the subject in question, namely the words (the aggregative and associative power) Mr. Wordsworth's "objection is only that the definition is too ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... and Mollie were alone in the tiny library. Babcock had been warmed, washed, fed. Seemingly without volition on his part, he was before the hard-coal blaze, his feet on the fender, the light carefully shaded from his ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... becoming supercilious—it had always been illogical; while the cote gauche was just beginning to discover that it had made a revolution for other people. Then it was happiness itself to be with Adrienne, and when I felt the dear girl pressing me to her heart, by an act of volition of which pocket-handkerchiefs are little suspected, I threw up a fold of my gossamer-like texture, as if the air wafted me, and brushed the first tear of happiness from her eye that ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... defensive, one clenched fist held menacingly before them. Sally tried to take her eyes away, but a morbid fascination held them. The anticipation of that first blow dragged her as the butcher drags his sheep to the shambles. Every glance she stole in their direction was reluctant; but all power of volition seemed to have left her. The sight of those two half-stripped bodies, gleaming in the gas-light, had concentrated in her eyes. At that moment they ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... trustworthy observer. (477/2. Mr. Wallace speaks of "a readiness to accept the most marvellous conclusions or interpretations of physiologists on what seem very insufficient grounds," and he goes on to assert that the frog experiment is either incorrectly recorded or else that it "demonstrates volition, and not reflex action.") If, indeed, any one knows a frog's habits so well as to say that it never rubs off a bit of leaf or other object which may stick to its thigh, in the same manner as it did the acid, your objection would be valid. Some of ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... so blended with their personal being, that we can hardly decide whether it is thought that wills or will that thinks. Their actions display the intensest intelligence; their thoughts come from them clothed in the thews and sinews of energetic volition. Their force, being proportioned to their intelligence, never issues in that wild and anarchical impulse, or that tough, obstinate, narrow wilfulness, which many take to be the characteristic of individualized ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... the flutter which Mr. Vandeford now answered, without any conscious volition. "There ought to be a great play out of the Klondike. Jack London could have done it, but—but—" the faithful gray eyes were raised to his with the ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... her with the demand for human sacrifice. Those devouring kisses sent unimagined apprehensions through her heart. They seemed to satisfy him so little while they sapped from her every atom of vitality, leaving her helpless as an infant, her body drawn to his as a needle to the magnet, not of her own volition, but simply by his strength. And ever the fire of his passion grew hotter till she felt as one bound on the edge of a mighty furnace which scorched her ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... of the usual course had happened; he and his crew having, seemingly, regarded the attempt to board them as men regard the natural phenomena of the planets, or in other words, as if the ship, of which they were merely parts, had escaped by her own instinct or volition. This habit of considering the machine as the governing principle is rather general among seamen, who, while they ease a brace, or drag a bowline, as the coachman checks a rein, appear to think it is only permitting the creature to work her own will a little more freely. It is ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... notions of Nature, however exalted or however grotesque, have their foundation in experience. The notion of personal volition in Nature had this basis. In the fury and the serenity of natural phenomena the savage saw the transcript of his own varying moods, and he accordingly ascribed these phenomena to beings of like passions with himself, but vastly ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... only a particular mode of thinking, like intellect; therefore (by Prop. xxviii.) no volition can exist, nor be conditioned to act, unless it be conditioned by some cause other than itself, which cause is conditioned by a third cause, and so on to infinity. But if will be supposed infinite, ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... her thoughts for a month past; he had come back to her. She had not to consider whether she should ever see him again; he was with her now. She had not to think whether he was there for good or evil, she had lost all volition in the will of the man who stood before her; she was the slave of his ring, rejoicing in her slavery, and ready to do his bidding as all the other ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... yawn, remarked that she should often drop in for a warm; the rest of the house seemed to her chilly. Celia gave the required invitation, and Lady Heyton stood looking about her vacantly, and as if she were waiting for the volition to go. ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... of kataplexy, so far as Spiders are concerned. "I have frequently watched Spiders in this condition," he observes, "to determine the point in question, and their behaviour always impressed me as being a genuine feigning of death, and therefore entirely within their volition. The evidence is of such indefinite nature that one can hardly venture to give it visible expression, but my conviction is none the less decided. I may say, however, that my observations indicate that the Spiders ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... necessary and innocent result of the relative position of sun, moon, and earth. The comets became bodies in space, unrelated to the beings who had imagined that all creation was watching them and their doings. By degrees caprice, volition, all symptoms of arbitrary action, disappeared out of the universe; and almost every phenomenon in earth or heaven was found attributable to some law, either understood or perceived to exist. Thus nature was reclaimed ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... shaking his head groggily. Then he realized what had been done to him. With a snarl of rage, he was on his feet, his knife in his hand. It was a Terran bowie knife. Without conscious volition, Howell's pistol was out and he was ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... Maxwell, who sent and asked the Battalion to supply picquets for duty in the disturbed area. This action rather raised the resentment of some units and created a certain amount of ill-feeling. So acute did this become that on one occasion the Battalion of its own volition was on the point of "standing to" with entrenching tool handles to repel a threatened raid. However, common sense prevailed and good feeling with the men of the Eastern States was soon re-established, but not before the title "J——'s Own" had been ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... the mind, to keep it in repair. By altering the state of the body, we are changing that of the mind, whenever the defects of the mind depend on those of the organization. The mind, or soul, however distinct its being from the body, is disturbed or excited, independent of its volition, by the mechanical impulses of the body. A man becomes stupified when the circulation of the blood is impeded in the viscera; he acts more from instinct than reflection; the nervous fibres are too relaxed or too ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... difficulty in imagining that, at some former period, this universe was not in existence; and that it made its appearance in six days (or instantaneously, if that is preferred), in consequence of the volition of some pre-existent Being. Then, as now, the so-called a priori arguments against Theism; and, given a Deity, against the possibility of creative acts, appeared to me to be devoid of reasonable foundation. I had not then, and I have not now, the smallest a priori objection ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... and kissed him with a sense of shame. Before morning all power of speech or volition left Anthony Thurston, and twelve hours later ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... Helen crossed herself hastily, pushing the magic ball towards him. But, as though endowed with life and volition of its own—or was it merely that Dick's hand was even yet not quite of the steadiest?—it evaded his grasp, fell off the table edge and rolled, gleaming moonlike, far across the floor, away behind the pedestal of the bronze Pompeian Antinous, into the ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... designed in the properties and successions of natural objects, intimates, nevertheless, a preconceived progress. Organisms may be evolved in orderly succession, stage after stage, towards a foreseen goal, and the broad features of the course may still show the unmistakable impress of Divine volition." ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... classification of mental phenomena, as revealed in consciousness, and not constructed in an "independent" and a priori method. The most careful psychological analysis has resolved the whole complex phenomena of mind into thought, feeling, and volition.[61] These orders of phenomena are radically and essentially distinct. They differ not simply in degree but in kind, and it is only by an utter disregard of the facts of consciousness that they can be confounded. Feeling is not reason, nor can it by any logical dexterity ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... organs of volition, the one part of the body that the mind can directly command and act on. The muscles are preeminently the mind's instruments, the visible and moving part of its machinery. They are thought carriers, and during the growth period their ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... and other well-known celebrities assisting). Then he describes me: "A muffled creature of sinister aspect. Short, auburn-locked, extinguished by a portentous hat, tripping and stumbling over a cloak, or robe, in whose dragging folds he conceals his identity as well as his power of volition, a weird and gruesome phantom. What—oh what—is this hovering ghost? He must be just defunct, for the purgatorial garments fit him not, he stumbles at every step, and when he trips an underdress is unveiled that's like a City waiter's. ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... with it something more, that is, than I had seen accomplished by the police of the District of Columbia since I had had the honor of being one of their number. Therefore, when I found myself plunged, almost without my own volition, into the Jeffrey Moore affair, I believed that the opportunity had come whereby I ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... sovereignty is not limitable (which is true) it cannot be surrendered (which is palpably untrue) involves the confusion of two distinct ideas. It is like arguing that because no man can while he lives give up, do what he will, his freedom of volition, so no man can commit suicide. A sovereign power can divest itself of authority in two ways. It may put an end to its own existence or abdicate. It may transfer sovereign authority to another person, or body of persons, of which body it may, or may ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... more amazed. She had thought him handsome before; he was glorious now. Arrayed in fashionable, well-fitting clothes, wearing only a mustache, and with his hair properly cut, he was a vision of manly beauty. Instantly, without any volition on her part, her heart went out to him; she knew that ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... this peculiar diffidence that finally controlled the situation. I mean that if they had failed for the first year or two because they couldn't help it they kept up the habit because they had—what shall I call it?—grown nervous. It really took some lurking volition to account ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... worshipped my mother, but I rarely kissed her or expressed my love for her in words. My love for Dicky terrifies me sometimes, it is so strong, but I cannot go up to him and offer him an unsolicited kiss or caress. Respond to his caresses, yes! but offer them of my own volition, never! There is something inside me that makes ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... the character of Ophelia has a relative beauty and delicacy when considered in relation to that of Hamlet, which is the delineation of a man of genius in contest with the powers of this world. The weakness of volition, the instability of purpose, the contemplative sensibility, the subtlety of thought, always shrinking from action, and always occupied in "thinking too precisely on the event," united to immense intellectual power, render him unspeakably interesting: and yet I doubt whether any woman, who would have ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... delicacy. If we have not half an hour to spare to lie quietly and breathe we can practice the breathing while we walk. It is wonderful how we detect strain and resistance in our breath, and the restfulness which comes when we breathe so gently that the breath seems to come and go without our volition brings new ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... to his own volition. He might as well try to lift himself up by his hair as determine that now he would be a human being by himself. It was an awakening of new powers. He no longer let sunshine and rain pass unnoticed over his head. A strange thing happened to him—he looked wonderingly ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... anything! We didn't take in society papers, because father does not care for gossip or grandees. He has other pursuits. I can show you some of dear mother's articles. There's one called 'Unconscious Volition,' and another on the 'Progress of Species.' I'll bring them ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... He loved Henrietta Temple. She should be his. Who could prevent him? Was he not an Armine? Was he not the near descendant of that bold man who passed his whole life in the voluptuous indulgence of his unrestrained volition! Bravo! he willed it, and it should be done. Everything yields to determination. What a fool! what a miserable craven fool had he been to have frightened himself with the flimsy shadows of petty worldly cares! He was born to follow his own ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... but speedily dropped it to cast a quick glance around the room. Had I heard anything? No. The house was perfectly still, save for the sound of conversation in the drawing-room. Yet I found it hard to keep my eyes upon the page. Quite without my volition they flew, first to one corner, then to another. The room was light, there were no shadowy nooks in it, yet I felt an irresistible desire to peer into every place not directly under my eye. I knew it to be folly, and, after succumbing to the temptation of ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... not expressly allege that the assumption of power and authority which it condemns was intentional and corrupt is no answer to the preceding view of its character and effect. The act thus condemned necessarily implies volition and design in the individual to whom it is imputed, and, being unlawful in its character, the legal conclusion is that it was prompted by improper motives and committed with an unlawful intent. The charge is not of a mistake in the exercise of supposed powers, but of the assumption ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... moral discipline consciously undertaken by personal effort. "The making of mind" is not an art of youth alone. It is an art of middle age and of the older years. Says William James: "The man who daily inures himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition and self-denial in unnecessary things, will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast." Such a one also will resist the decay ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... and things, that imputes a quasi-personal character to facts. To the archaic man all the obtrusive and obviously consequential objects and facts in his environment have a quasi-personal individuality. They are conceived to be possessed of volition, or rather of propensities, which enter into the complex of causes and affect events in an inscrutable manner. The sporting man's sense of luck and chance, or of fortuitous necessity, is an inarticulate or inchoate animism. ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... early and slipped up to the boat-deck to cool off before dinner. He sat down on a bench and half closed his eyes. When he opened them again he saw a woman—the woman, Folly Delaires—standing with her back to him at the rail. He had not heard or seen her come. Almost without volition he arose and stepped to the rail. He leaned on it beside her. ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... up? I think it's happening to me. Please send Louis away," she wrote, and folded the note into an envelope which she fastened down. That moment she found herself crying out without her own volition. She slammed the door and lay down on the floor inside it, to barricade it against Louis. She heard his steps coming along the verandah and clenched her hands fiercely over ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... Manifestation in the most beautiful language and soaking up all the credit of it for himself. The Englishman, said the letter, was not there at all. He was a backslider without Power or Asceticism, who couldn't even raise a table by force of volition, much less project an army of kittens through space. The entire arrangement, said the letter, was strictly orthodox, worked and sanctioned by the highest Authorities within the pale of the Creed. There was great joy at this, for some of the ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... sounds, and I shall plunge with joy into the unsatisfactory pleasures. To-day, however, all these have passed from mind, and I settle down another notch, head snuggled on knees, and sway, elephant-fashion, with sheer joy, as a musky, exciting odor comes drifting, apparently by its own volition, down through the ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... to his mind they were neither more nor less god-inflicted than all others. The doctrine of abstract entities was a kind of instinctive conciliation between the observed uniformity of the facts of nature, and their dependence on arbitrary volition; since it was easier to conceive a single volition as setting a machinery to work, which afterwards went on of itself, than to suppose an inflexible constancy in so capricious and changeable a thing as volition ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... observable in his fierce and desperate countenance no attempt at the insinuation of the other, only a fearful resolution that made her feel like a puppet before him, and drove her, almost without her volition, to ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... when she did not blench, he began to accuse her as men were used to accuse their daughters in the bright days of the Sailor King. He invented enormities which she had committed, and there would have been no obscene infamy of which Maggie was not guilty, if Edwin—more by instinct than by volition—had not pushed open the door ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... merely conforming to the customary is no more moral than an automaton. Given a certain situation, he makes a certain response. It makes no difference that the act happens to have fruitful consequences. It is not a matter of individual choice, of conscious volition. Aristotle long ago stated the ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... Borealis from heaven?" Crossman cut in. He spoke unconsciously. He had not wished to say that, he had not wanted to speak at all, but his subconscious mind had welded the thought of her so fast to the great mystery of the Northern Lights that without volition he had ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... which I shall simply record without attempting to explain. On the hall-table a scarf, evidently the property of the servant before alluded to, was lying. As Ah Fe tried the lock with one hand, the other rested lightly on the table. Suddenly, and apparently of its own volition, the scarf began to creep slowly towards Ah Fe's hand; from Ah Fe's hand it began to creep up his sleeve slowly, and with an insinuating, snake-like motion; and then disappeared somewhere in the recesses of his ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... spontaneity! You, the most deliberate thing that ever walked or crawled! You'd be verily deliberately spontaneous—that's you. Because you want to have everything in your own volition, your deliberate voluntary consciousness. You want it all in that loathsome little skull of yours, that ought to be cracked like a nut. For you'll be the same till it is cracked, like an insect in its skin. If one cracked your skull perhaps one might get a spontaneous, passionate woman out of you, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... impatiently until, presently, the music stopped and they came to us. Then Ned's parted lips said something, and then—as the music recommenced, I was in his arms and, almost without my own knowledge or volition, ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... of the missing were found, save that of Cary—Cary, who, having been given up for lost, turned up most unexpectedly the very day that Fitzroy, applicant for reenlistment, was summarily turned down. But Cary came not of his own volition. He marched with a file of the guard. Cary's story was simple enough. Rawdon and Lowndes had hardly got away on the train when Sergeant Stowell and his party came searching. Cary hid. He was still half drunk. Some one told him of Kelly's arrest, and charged him with ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... countenances and movements of his three guides, so far as Duncan could discover, except that the strokes of their paddles were longer and more in unison, and caused the little bark to spring forward like a creature possessing life and volition." ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... utterly unexplainable and unaccountable accident. He felt as he had done once when, younger, he had stuck his own knife, with which he was whittling, into his eye, to the possible loss of it. It seemed to him as if something had taken place without his volition. He was like a puppet in a show. He looked at Maria, and realized that he hated her. He wondered how he could ever have thought her pretty. He looked at Gladys Mann, and felt murderous. He had a high temper. As the train approached, ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... proper time, if the enemy formed for attack. Only one of those three brigades—Opdycke's—came in at the proper time and took its appropriate place; and that, it was asserted, and no doubt truly, was by the brigade commander's own volition, he having been a soldier enough to know his duty in such a case, without the necessity for any orders. The other two brigades remained in their advanced position until they were run over by the enemy. Much ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... this whitish substance is the centre of the nervous system and the seat of consciousness and volition, and, from the constant study of character by type or by phrenology, one may even go on to deduce with reason that in this protoplasmic substance—in each of the numerous cells into which it is divided and subdivided—are located the human faculties. Hence, it would seem that one may rationally ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... proposition, but only for the briefest possible moment. His gentle, dreamy, wistful countenance seemed almost to light up from within. His answer was given in one breath and as if entirely without conscious volition. ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... these sullen glances. Cries of "Traitor!" "Godless gallows-bird!" "Down with the damned renegade!" dispelled what doubt remained. A shade of melancholy deepened the expression of the sweet, thoughtful mouth; then, as by volition, the habitual look of pensive cheerfulness came back, and he ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... practical unity for its possessor, and that from this practical point of view we can class a field with other fields similar to it, by calling it a state of emotion, of perplexity, of sensation, of abstract thought, of volition, and the like. ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... never leave the house with her lover? Why does a man never kill a man? Why does a man never kill himself? Why is nothing ever accomplished? In real life murder, adultery, and suicide are of common occurrence; but Mr. James's people live in a calm, sad, and very polite twilight of volition. Suicide or adultery has happened before the story begins, suicide or adultery happens some years hence, when the characters have left the stage, but bang in front of the reader nothing happens. The suppression or maintenance of story in a novel is a matter of personal taste; some prefer ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... these differences of power and function? According to the Higher Space Hypothesis they are due to varying potencies of movement in the secret causeways and corridors of space. The higher functions of consciousness—volition, emotion, intellection—may be in some way correlated with the higher powers of numbers, and with the corresponding higher developments of space. Thus would the difference between physics and metaphysics become a difference of degree and not of kind. Evolution is to be conceived of as a continuous ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... are still unable to define the limits of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. "Plants have been described by naturalists, who would determine the limits of the two kingdoms, as organized living bodies, without volition or locomotion, destitute of a mouth or intestinal cavity, which, when detached from their place of growth, die, and, in decay, ferment, but do not putrefy, and which, on being subjected to analysis, furnish an excess of carbon and no nitrogen. The powers of ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... moment he perceived a curious phenomenon a short distance before him—another Christmas-tree, but one which moved, apparently of its own volition, along the sidewalk. As Mr. Carter overtook it, he saw that it was borne, or dragged, rather by a small boy who wore a bright red flannel cap and mittens of the same peculiar material. As Mr. Carter looked down at him, he looked up at Mr. ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... nearly happened. There was no warning of approach now as the creature passed over the grass. Suddenly, like a dark, drifting shadow, the huge bulk loomed up once more before me, making for the entrance of the cave. Again came that paralysis of volition which held my crooked forefinger impotent upon the trigger. But with a desperate effort I shook it off. Even as the brushwood rustled, and the monstrous beast blended with the shadow of the Gap, I fired at the retreating ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... earliest period of its existence the embryon would seem to consist of a living filament with certain capabilities of irritation, sensation, volition, and association, and also with some acquired habits or propensities peculiar to the parent; the former of these are in common with other animals; the latter seem to distinguish or produce the kind of animal, whether man ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... War, without instructions of any kind, committed to Colonel Lafayette C. Baker, of the secret service, the stark corpse of J. Wilkes Booth. The secret service never fulfilled its volition more secretively. "What have you done with the body?" said I to Baker. "That is known" he answered, "to only one man living besides myself. It is gone. I will not tell you where. The only man who knows is sworn to silence. Never till the great trumpeter comes shall the grave of Booth ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... with the Test." And then, as he depresses the Elevator, the Aeroplane with relief assumes its normal horizontal position. Then, almost closing the Throttle, the Thrust dies away. Now, the nose of the Aeroplane should sink of its own volition, and the craft glide downward at flying speed, which is in this case a hundred miles an hour. That is what should happen if the Designer has carefully calculated the weight of every part and arranged for the centre of gravity to be just the right distance in front ...
— The Aeroplane Speaks - Fifth Edition • H. Barber
... Deity. With what awe does the first acquaintance with death impress us! What a thrill passes through the living, as it bends over the inanimate body, from which the spirit has departed! The clay that returns to the dust from which it sprung, the tenement that was lately endued with volition and life, the frame that exhibited a perfection of mechanism, deriding all human power, and confounding all human imagination, now an inanimate mass, rapidly decomposing, and soon to become ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... can look further for victims. I believe that only a small proportion of the women who are in the houses of ill-fame—only a small proportion—make their way there of their own volition, and that small proportion are of the degenerate class who are born with a screw loose somewhere. From their babyhood they who are born with this taint—and we could, perhaps, trace that taint back—but born with that taint, they gradually go into that ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... I look at it, the more I am convinced that you came on board of your own volition. You had two or three good opportunities to ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... are occasionally exerted, and produce all the motions of the fibrous parts of the body; these are the faculties of producing fibrous motions in consequence of irritation which is excited by external bodies; in consequence of sensation which is excited by pleasure or pain; in consequence of volition which is excited by desire or aversion; and in consequence of association which is excited by other fibrous motions. We are hence supplied with four natural classes of diseases derived from their proximate causes; ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... for treason has gone by. We must look at things as they are. Even in battle the white flag must be respected. Let this subject be frankly discussed in a conciliatory manner. If any State has the right to go out of the Union at its own volition, then this Government, in my opinion, is not worth the trouble of preserving. The President is sworn to protect and uphold the Government. So long as there is a navy, an army, and a militia, it is his sworn duty to uphold it—to uphold it as well against an attack from States as from individuals. ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... one's life of one's own volition is one thing. To permit another to take it in a fashion of his own arbitrary selection is quite another. Hamilton Burton had never been submissive. He meant to die as he had lived—"captain of his soul," and so he turned quietly toward the window ledge where he had laid the automatic ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... Almost without volition he half arose to his feet. The girl followed his action, still clinging to his shoulder. Dan inclined his head to speak to her, when with a shriek the wind came again. There was a dull crash forward, a splintering and rearing ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... is now lying at the foot of my bed thinking matters out, and bids me tell you that after various attempts to escape Home Rule, not being (like her mistress) one of those natures made perfect through suffering, she is only 'kept alive by the force of her own volition,' in this house that is full of old maids and has nothing better in it than one old cat, and he isn't worth hunting, being destitute of a tail. Naturally she is doing her best (like somebody else) to keep herself unspotted from that world which is a source of so much ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... the injury resulting from an indefinite continuance of this state of things. It was stated that at this juncture our Government was constrained to seriously inquire if the time was not ripe when Spain of her own volition, moved by her own interests and every sentiment of humanity, should put a stop to this destructive war and make proposals of settlement honorable to herself and just to her Cuban colony. It was urged that as a neighboring nation, with large interests ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • William McKinley
... are taken from the nest and reared by hand, they insist for a long time on being fed in the juvenile manner. However, by and by they begin of their own volition to pick up food after the manner of the adults. At first they are very clumsy about it, but they persevere until they acquire skill, and presently they refuse entirely to open their mandibles for food. Here ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... balloon, even before these gentle impulses; occasionally collapsing, it is true, as the ground-swell swung the yards to and fro, but, on the whole, standing out and receiving the air as if guided more by volition than any mechanical power. The effect on the hull was almost magical; for, notwithstanding the nearly imperceptible force of the propelling power, owing to the lightness and exquisite mould of the craft, it served to urge her through the water at the rate of some three or four knots in the ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... new-found joy, it seemed as though she were borne along on the waves of the music without effort or volition of her own. She dared not trust herself to speak. Once or twice she raised her eyes to meet the dark ones whose gaze she felt upon her face, but the love-light shining in their depths overpowered her glance and she turned her eyes away. She knew that he had seen and recognized the woman, and ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... where women arrest all their feelings and wait. The splendid house, the light, the warmth, all the evidences of a luxurious life about, moved her no more than if she was in a dream. A great sorrow had put her far above these things. She followed the servant who met her at the door without conscious volition. A woman going to execution could hardly have felt more indifference to the mere accidentals of the way of sorrow. And when a door was swung softly open, she saw no one in the room but Roland. Roland helpless, unconscious. Roland even ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... it struck him. Then, alone as he was, he colored to the temples, and gave a little gasp. Like an overwhelming tidal wave there swept over him the realization that his will was mastered by a power above it, mightier than itself; that his seeing Winifred Anstice again was hardly a question of volition any longer, any more than breathing was a matter of will—that he must see her—that the chief question of his future was whether she cared ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... copied from any internal impression. It may be said, that we are every moment conscious of internal power; while we feel, that, by the simple command of our will, we can move the organs of our body, or direct the faculties of our mind. An act of volition produces motion in our limbs, or raises a new idea in our imagination. This influence of the will we know by consciousness. Hence we acquire the idea of power or energy; and are certain, that we ourselves and all other intelligent ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... term is often extended to include panthelism or animatism, the doctrine that a great part, if not the whole, of the inanimate kingdom, as well as all animated beings, are endowed with reason, intelligence and volition, identical with that of man. This latter theory, which in many cases is equivalent to personification, though it may be, like animism, a feature of the philosophy of peoples of low culture, should not be ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... marble springs to life under the workman's hands: we can almost see it happening in these Essays: and we know how often enough a writer finds his own creation kicking over the traces, as it were, and becoming almost independent of his volition. There is no original for Sir Roger or Falstaff or Mr. Micawber: they may not have sprung Athena-like fully armed out of the author's head, and they may have been suggested by some one he had in mind. But once created they ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... carriage, I more than once detected the fragrant sigh of some astonished cow, whose ruminating repose upon the highway we had ruthlessly disturbed. But in the darkness our progress, more the guidance of some mysterious instinct than any apparent volition of our own, gave an indefinable charm of security to our journey that a moment's hesitation or indecision on the part of ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... affairs exists," he went on smoothly, "when its chief magistrate can be abducted and kept hidden, without—or with?—her own volition for a whole week. Only in the extravaganzas of modern romance could we look for similar happenings. Just what is our duty in the premises, gentlemen, is a serious question. The citizens' committee ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... being, to man—the lord of the animal kingdom,—he displayed it, to use his own words, "as plainly as if it were written in our mother-tongue." His discovery consisted in the fact, that the spinal nerves are double in their function, and arise by double roots from the spinal marrow,—volition being conveyed by that part of the nerves springing from the one root, and sensation by the other. The subject occupied the mind of Sir Charles Bell for a period of forty years, when, in 1840, he laid his last ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... the talent for insuring its continuity. Like Arthur Rimbaud, he suffered from the nostalgia of the open road. He disappeared frequently. His whereabouts was a mystery to his friends. He did not care for money or for honours. He was elected without volition on his part as a member of the Academy. Yet he did not use this powerful lever to further his welfare. Silent, a man of continent speech, he never convinced his friends that his art was chaste; yet he never painted an indelicate stroke. His personages, all disillusionised, vaguely suffer, make love ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... our cherished view of Imagination. It creates only as a mechanic creates a chest of drawers, a sideboard, a clock, or a watch. It originates not a single material of thought, volition, or action. But, mechanic-like, it works by plumb and rule on all the materials found in the warehouse of memory; and manufactures, out of the same plank of pine, or bar of iron, or wedge of gold, or precious stone, some new utensil, ornament, or adornment ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the bone of my skull, each sending a little electric thrill down the spine. She then carefully explained how such taps were producible at any point desired by the operator, and how interplay of the currents to which they were due might be caused otherwise than by conscious human volition. It was in this fashion that she would illustrate her verbal teachings, proving by experiment the statements made as to the existence of subtle forces controllable by the trained mind. The phenomena all belonged to the scientific side of her teaching, ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... out upon the new drop, Jack Ketch alertly tucking up his greasy sleeves to do the last office of mortality; yet cannot I elicit a groan or a moral reflection. If you told me the world will be at an end to-morrow, I should just say, "Will it?" I have not volition enough left to dot my i's, much less to comb my eyebrows; my eyes are set in my head; my brains are gone out to see a poor relation in Moorfields, and they did not say when they'd come back again; my skull is a Grub Street attic to ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... of reason by the subject. But as this exercise of reason is not always directed on the determination of the object, in other words, on cognition thereof, but also on the determination of the subject and its volition, I do not intend to treat of it in ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... canvas for the storms—and it opened like the folds of a balloon, even before these gentle impulses; occasionally collapsing, it is true, as the ground-swell swung the yards to and fro, but, on the whole, standing out and receiving the air as if guided more by volition than any mechanical power. The effect on the hull was almost magical; for, notwithstanding the nearly imperceptible force of the propelling power, owing to the lightness and exquisite mould of the craft, it served to urge her ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... a little disturbed by the way he had been injected into Mrs. Dawson's evening without her volition. He ...
— The Beauty and the Bolshevist • Alice Duer Miller
... nothing: I know you to be a weak and wavering coward, who of your own volition would never rise from the level of a ruined spendthrift and penniless vagabond. You forget, perhaps, that I hold a bond which gives me an interest in your fortunes. I do not forget. When my own wisdom counsels action, I shall act, ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... one thing, only one, that you and all my other callers appear to have overlooked. You fail for some reason to realize that I do things only of my own volition. It is eccentric, I know, but we ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... friend and I chanced to be near when you fell from the car—" with that innate refinement which always belied his vocation and his rags Bridge chose not to embarrass the girl by a too intimate knowledge of the thing which had befallen her, preferring to leave to her own volition the making of any explanation she saw fit, or of none—"and we carried you in here ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Nothing. For a few minutes her brain seemed in too great a whirl to comprehend anything but that she was being carried on in earth's diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees, with as little volition on her part as if she were dead. Then the room grew stifling, and instinctively she went to the open casement window, and leant out, gasping for breath. Gradually the consciousness of the soft peaceful landscape stole into her mind, and stilled the ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... from wishing to live, "emancipate one's self from the thirst of being." The wise man is he who casts aside everything that attaches to this life and makes it unhappy. One must cease successively from feeling, wishing, thinking. Then, freed from passion, volition, even from reflection, he no longer suffers, and can, after his death, come to the supreme good, which consists in being delivered from all life and from all suffering. The aim of the wise man is the annihilation of personality: the ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... boldly across the clearing. Those who opened the gates to him permitted their surprise to show clearly in their expressions. That the discredited and hunted lieutenant should be thus returning fearlessly of his own volition, seemed to disarm them quite as effectually as his manner toward Lady Greystoke ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the truth of a very common saying—"birds of a feather will flock together"—every time it is repeated in our hearing. This expression, in its most comprehensive sense, applies to everything having life and volition or the power to will. It is seen in the fishes of the sea, in the birds of the air, and in all the denizens of earth, from insects and worms up to the highest forms of organic brute life, and in man. ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... features of Hugo's poetry is his custom of attributing human desires and volition to inanimate objects. To Hugo, the whole universe seemed to be alive, both as a whole and in each of its separate parts, and his way of humanizing the inanimate is not so much a conscious literary artifice as the ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... thinking of which we are conscious may be referred to two general classes, the one of which is the perception or operation of the understanding, and the other the volition or operation of the will. Thus, to perceive by the senses (SENTIRE), to imagine, and to conceive things purely intelligible, are only different modes of perceiving (PERCIP IENDI); but to desire, to be averse from, to affirm, to deny, to doubt, are different modes ...
— The Principles of Philosophy • Rene Descartes
... position, and was to retire and take its position in reserve at the proper time, if the enemy formed for attack. Only one of those three brigades—Opdycke's—came in at the proper time and took its appropriate place; and that, it was asserted, and no doubt truly, was by the brigade commander's own volition, he having been a soldier enough to know his duty in such a case, without the necessity for any orders. The other two brigades remained in their advanced position until they were run over by the enemy. Much idle controversy was indulged in among officers of the Fourth Corps and others in ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... dangerous tendency. When the traces of individual action upon nations are lost, it often happens that the world goes on to move, though the moving agent is no longer discoverable. As it becomes extremely difficult to discern and to analyze the reasons which, acting separately on the volition of each member of the community, concur in the end to produce movement in the old mass, men are led to believe that this movement is involuntary, and that societies unconsciously obey some superior force ruling ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... say to every individual; and what she said to myself was this:—"I have long wished to know you, Mr. Coverdale, and to thank you for your beautiful poetry, some of which I have learned by heart; or rather it has stolen into my memory, without my exercising any choice or volition about the matter. Of course—permit me to say you do not think of relinquishing an occupation in which you have done yourself so much credit. I would almost rather give you up as an associate, than that the world should lose ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... one which it bears in no other instance of the more than two hundred and seventy uses of the word in the New Testament. It is not the word used in Acts 2: 2, as might be expected if it signified wind. Then it seems unnatural to ascribe volition to the wind, thelei. On the contrary, if the words apply to the Spirit, the saying is in entire harmony with other Scriptures, which affirm the sovereignty of the Holy Ghost in regeneration (John 1: 13) and in the control and direction of those who are the subjects ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... decidedly preponderate on the side of Necessity. The prescience of the Deity cannot, on any known principle, be reconciled with the contingency which attaches to the actions or determinations of man, on the hypothesis of freedom[2]. And, moreover, if every event requires a cause, and every volition is guided by motives, what are called the spontaneous acts of the mind must be the necessary result of motives which direct and command its elections. "To say that in our choice we reject the stronger motive, and that we choose ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... himself passed along like a country politician in line at a presidential reception. His legs got to working without volition, it seemed, and he was several rods away before he realized that he had not spoken to ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... the name given by students of psychical research to writing performed without the volition of the agent. The writing may also take place without any consciousness of the words written; but some automatists are aware of the word which they are actually writing, and perhaps of two or three words on either side, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... not of our own creation or choice, but are brought to bear upon us independently of our own action. There has been, from the creation until now, an unbroken series of causes and effects, and we can trace every human volition to some anterior cause or causes belonging to this inevitable series, so that, in order for the volition to have been other than it was, some member of this series ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... ours, in every feeling and every volition and every thought, we are conscious of a self which expresses its aims and meanings. Every idea of ours points beyond itself, every volition binds us in decision, and every experience gets meaning by our attitudes. The most immediate task which life demands from us in the understanding of ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... man," said I, "should be Volition in women: Reason, Intuition; Reverence, Devotion; Passion, Love. The woman should strike a lower key-note, but a sharper sound. Man has vigour of reason, woman quickness of feeling. The woman who possesses masculine ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... twigs we clutched at sustained us for the while, or treacherously yielded to our grasp. For my own part, I scarcely knew whether I was helplessly falling from the heights above, or whether the fearful rapidity with which I descended was an act of my own volition. ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... for it was he, knelt down by me, and putting his arms round me, raised me from the ground, without any volition of my own. I know not what state I was in. I was perfectly conscious; but had no more power over the movement of a muscle than if I were dead. My eyes were closed, and my head drooped on his breast, as he raised me, bowed by ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... black piles of coal hung high and gloomy; then a stray sunbeam brought out their peacock colors; then came the fog again, driving hurriedly by, as if impatient to go somewhere and enraged at the obstacle. It seemed to have a vast inorganic life of its own, a volition and a whim. It drew itself across the horizon like a curtain; then advanced in trampling armies up the bay; then marched in masses northward; then suddenly grew thin, and showed great spaces of sunlight; then drifted ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... powerfully, more concentratedly than usual, he becomes an offender as certainly as water abandons the fluid for the vaporous state at 80 degrees, Reaumur. Under the brutal and brutalising treatment of the bourgeoisie, the working-man becomes precisely as much a thing without volition as water, and is subject to the laws of nature with precisely the same necessity; at a certain point all freedom ceases. Hence with the extension of the proletariat, crime has increased in England, and the British nation has become ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... at the back of the laboratory slowed down. Smithers was obeying orders. Tommy hung close by the vision instrument, his hands moving vaguely and helplessly, as one makes gestures without volition when anxious for someone else to duplicate the movements for which he sets ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... painful interest. Heaven was moving forward to aid and rescue him, and hell to claim another victim. But neither the one nor the other could act upon him for good or for evil, except through his own volition. It was for him to turn himself to the one, and live, or to the other, ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... embodied in the completed 'Urizen,' the 'Europe,' 'Ahania,' and 'The Book of Los.' Such oracular works Blake put forth as dictated to him by departed spirits of supreme influence and intellectuality, or by angelic intelligences, quite apart from his own volition; indeed, only with his "grateful obedience." Such claims are not out of place in the instance of one who "saw God"; who often "conversed familiarly with Jesus Christ"; who "was" Socrates; who argued conclusions for hours at a time with Moses, with Milton, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... creed—explaining the manifestation in the most beautiful language and soaking up all the credit of it for himself. The Englishman, said the letter, was not there at all. He was a backslider without power or asceticism, who couldn't even raise a table by force of volition, much less project an army of kittens through space. The entire arrangement, said the letter, was strictly orthodox, worked and sanctioned by the highest authorities within the pale of the creed. There was great joy at this, for ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... exception to the irrevocable law, that "nature abhors a vacuum." This act of opposition between both forces constitutes the respiratory act, and thus the respiratory thoracic being (like a vibrating pendulum) manifests respiratory motion, not as an effort of volition originating solely with itself, but according to the measure of the force of either law; as entity is relationary, so is functionality likewise. The being is functional by relationship; and just as a pendulum is functional, by reason of the counteraction of two opposing forces,—viz., ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... and intensity of the teller's initiatory mood. An act of memory and of will is the requisite. The story-teller must call up—it comes with the swiftness of thought—the essential emotion of the story as he felt it first. A single volition puts him in touch with the characters and the movement of the tale. This is scarcely more than a brief and condensed reminiscence; it is the stepping back into a mood ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... have been impossible to lose. But I could not get a bid, and so I shifted along down-town—Madison Square, Union Square, then westward by Jefferson Market and West Tenth Street. Ever edging a little closer to the river, you observe, and yet, upon my honor, I was not conscious of any definite volition in the matter; it was as though some one were gently pushing me along. Then Abingdon Square and your entrance upon the boards of my little drama—you and Mr. Bardi. Gentlemen, I thank you ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... force him to act at times. "All-powerful," thought Tarzan. "The little bugs say that God is all-powerful. It must be that God made me do these things, for I never did them by myself. It was God who made Teeka rush upon Histah. Teeka would never go near Histah of her own volition. It was God who held my knife from the throat of the old Gomangani. God accomplishes strange things for he is 'all-powerful.' I cannot see Him; but I know that it must be God who does these things. No Mangani, no Gomangani, ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a man? Why does a man never kill himself? Why is nothing ever accomplished? In real life murder, adultery, and suicide are of common occurrence; but Mr. James's people live in a calm, sad, and very polite twilight of volition. Suicide or adultery has happened before the story begins, suicide or adultery happens some years hence, when the characters have left the stage, but bang in front of the reader nothing happens. The suppression or maintenance of story ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... things, Howard saw, in a moment like that. He went down and met them in the hall, and had that strange sense of unreality in moments of crisis, when one hears one's own voice saying courteous things, without any volition of one's own. The big doctor looked at him kindly. "It is all quite simple and straightforward!" he said. "You must not let yourself be anxious; these times pass by and one wonders afterwards how one could ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... depresses the Elevator, the Aeroplane with relief assumes its normal horizontal position. Then, almost closing the Throttle, the Thrust dies away. Now, the nose of the Aeroplane should sink of its own volition, and the craft glide downward at flying speed, which is in this case a hundred miles an hour. That is what should happen if the Designer has carefully calculated the weight of every part and arranged ...
— The Aeroplane Speaks - Fifth Edition • H. Barber
... the water, and then she caught a dim view of the canoe, which approached noiselessly, and soon grated on the shingle with its bow. The moment the weight of Hetty was felt in the light craft the canoe withdrew, stern foremost, as if possessed of life and volition, until it was a hundred yards from the shore. Then it turned and, making a wide sweep, as much to prolong the passage as to get beyond the sound of voices, it held its way towards the ark. For several minutes nothing was ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... govern it by despotic power? In the nature of things, we could not by physical force control the will of the people and compel them to elect Senators and Representatives to Congress and to perform all the other duties depending upon their own volition and required from the free citizens of a free State as a constituent member of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... Granville Joy's great bliss and astonishment, insinuated herself, through the crowd of out-going scholars, close to him, and presently, had he not been so incredulous, for he was a modest boy, he would have said it was by no volition of his own that he found himself walking down the street with her. And when they reached his house, which was only half-way to her own, she looked at him with such a wistful surprise as he motioned to leave her that he could not mistake it, and he walked on at her side quite ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... and on the left, sent staff officers on errands of inquiry and pushed skirmish lines silently and cautiously forward into the dubious region between the known and the unknown. At some points on the line the troops, apparently of their own volition, constructed such defenses as they could without the silent ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... veux," she said, and we drank in each other's souls, or gaped at each other like a pair of idiots just as you please. I had a horrible, yet pleasurable consciousness that she had gripped hold of my nerves of volition. She was willing me to live. I was a puppet in her hands like the wild tom-cat. At that moment I declare I could have purred and rubbed my head against her knee. I would have done anything she bade me. If she had sent me to fetch the Cham of Tartary's cap or a hair of the Prester John's ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... frame and lowering aspect, and as he came forward and stood in the doorway there was observable in his fierce and desperate countenance no attempt at the insinuation of the other, only a fearful resolution that made her feel like a puppet before him, and drove her, almost without her volition, ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... could he do but endure it? was the answer. What was the power that induced strong soldiers to put off their jackets and shirts, and present their hands to be tied up, and tortured for hours, it might be, under the scourge, with an air of ready volition? The moral coercion of despair; the result of an unconscious calculation of chances which satisfies them that it is ultimately better to do all that, bad as it is, than try the alternative. These unconscious calculations ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... body tense, sacred, eloquent, like the body of some young prophetess. Then all were on their knees, and Maggie, too, her face in her hands, was praying. It was, perhaps, the first time in her life that she had actively, consciously, of her own volition prayed. The appeal formed itself as it were without ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... doubt if the Slave-Trade can be abolished or civilization advanced, in Central Africa, because of the neighbourhood of The Desert. This, however, is transferring the guilt of slavery and of voluntary barbarism, if barbarism can be crime, from the volition of responsible man to a great natural fact, or circumstance of creation—The Desert; and is a style of observation perfectly indefensible, as well as contrary to philosophy and facts. First, we cannot limit the stretch or progress of the Negro mind any more than that of the European intellect. ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... without our volition, took such sudden possession of Hiram, that he raised his eyes from his papers and turned them upon the questioner, as if expecting ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... had gathered on its way sea-birds and birds from the land; there were gulls, electric white and black man-of-war birds, butterflies, and they all seemed imprisoned under a great drifting dome of glass. As they went, travelling like things without volition and in a dream, with a hum and a roar the south-west quadrant of the cyclone burst on the island, and the whole bitter ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... remarks that notwithstanding such attributes "the idea of unity—of a being with whom volition is action, who has no need of inferior ministers to execute his purposes—was too simple, or too vast, for their understandings; and they sought relief, as usual, in a plurality of deities, who presided over the elements, the changes of the seasons, and the various ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... requisites in his creed. It was a favorite maxim with him, that the last thing death assailed was the eyes, and next to the last, the jaws. This he interpreted to be a clear expression of the intention of nature, that every man might regulate, by his own volition, whatever was to be admitted into the sanctuary of his mouth; consequently, if the guest proved unpalatable, he had no one to blame but himself. The surgeon, who was well acquainted with these views of his patient, beheld him, as he cavalierly ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... the idea of future destination, dependent upon the volition of the agent—will. Shall is simply predictive; will is predictive and ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... brain. If prior development in growth proved a superiority of rank, the ganglionic system which accompanies the arteries and precedes the evolution of the convoluted cerebrum would hold the highest rank, although it is destitute of consciousness and volition, which ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... Metaphysic of Morals, will serve the double end of meeting a speculative requirement, and of furnishing the only true norm of practice. It investigates the idea and principles of a potentially pure Will, instead of the acts and conditions of human volition as known from psychology. Not a complete Metaphysic of Morals, however, (which would be a Critique of the pure Practical Reason), but merely a foundation for such will be given. The supreme principle of morality is to be established, apart from detailed application. First, common notions ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... did exactly what the doctor wished: he slept, or, rather, sank into a state of stupor which lasted for many hours, came to his senses again, partook of a little food, and then dropped asleep once more; and this was repeated for days before he thoroughly recovered, and then began of his own volition ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... generalisation of him, and paused to reapproach him on another level. The little girl began to play with her glasses, and accidentally knocked them from her nose. The minister's face and figure became a blur, and in the purblindness to which she was reduced she had a moment of clouded volition in which she was tempted to renounce, and even oppose, the scheme for a Social Union, in spite of her promise to Mr. Brandreth. But she remembered that she was a consistent and faithful person, and she said: "The ladies have a plan for raising the money, and they've applied to me to second it—to ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... book that saturates the soul with despair, and blights it with the negation which seems the only possible truth in the circumstances; so that one questions whether the Russian in which Turgenieff and Tolstoy, and even Dostoyevsky, could animate the volition and the expectation of better things has not sunk to depths beyond any counsel of amelioration. To come up out of that Bottomless Pit into the measureless air of Mr. White's Kansas plains is like waking ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that is mysterious in the toy they call "Planchette," a triangular thin slab of polished wood on a couple of small wheels, with a pencil at the apex. Hands laids upon this by two persons properly conditioned, will give apparent vitality and volition to the small machine, and make the pencil seem to write of itself in answer to expressed (or meditated) questions. At a wealthy mansion in South Kensington, for instance, I saw two charming young Italian ladies, sisters, covering ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... foreigners have proved a drain upon the Vanderbilt fortune, although, thanks to their large share in the control of laws and industrial institutions, the Vanderbilts possess at all times the power of recouping themselves at volition. The American marriages, on the other hand, contracted by this family, have interlinked other great fortunes ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... appetite or inclination, by showing us the means of attaining happiness or avoiding misery: Taste, as it gives pleasure or pain, and thereby constitutes happiness or misery, becomes a motive to action, and is the first spring or impulse to desire and volition. From circumstances and relations, known or supposed, the former leads us to the discovery of the concealed and unknown: after all circumstances and relations are laid before us, the latter makes us feel from the whole a ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... been at times fantastic, had never showed her anything measurably approaching the scene that smote her eyes now. For the moment death, Red Jabez, her destiny, everything melted into the visionary beyond and left her capable of no volition. ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... who knew that their possessions would double in value the day the United States Constitution was signed. "Thus, in the first place, by the encouragement of our people, and latterly, apparently, by its own volition, the Union has increased enormously in power, till it now embraces 10,000,000 square miles, and has a free and enlightened population of 300,000,000. Though the Union established by Washington and his contemporaries has attained ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... Reason and the contribution of history. The subconscious functions are very real and very important aspects of personal life, and can never again be ignored in any full account of personality. They influence every thought, feeling, attitude, volition, opinion, mood, and insight, and are thus operative in all the higher as well as in all the lower phases of human life and character. Metaphorically, but only metaphorically, we speak of the sub-conscious as a vast zone, an indefinable margin, surrounding the ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... Mamma's conclusions seemed to me without premise. What of my own fortunes? I thought the wind of the desert, had blown upon them and they were dead. I remember, in the trembling of my heart as I sat and listened and mused, and thoughts trooped in and out of my head with little order or volition on my part, one word was a sort of rallying point on which they gathered and fell back from time to time, though they started out again on fresh roamings - "Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations"! - I remember, - it seems to me now as if it had been ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... of a child unconsciously, for the contractile power of the womb is independent of volition. Under an anaesthetic the uterus acts as energetically as if the patient were in the ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... me from behind; I was wrenched loose from the body of my victim and lifted into the air. I was turned about and stared hard into the implacable crystalline eyes of one of the insects. For a moment my senses reeled and then, without volition, I dropped my bar. I remembered the children and realized that I was being hypnotized. I fought against the feeling, but my senses reeled and I almost went limp, when the sound of a pistol shot, almost in my ear, roused me. The spell of the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... to vouloir weakens the meaning from strong volition to condescension. Here: "has deigned." Cf. l. 357. Similarly aimer "to love," but aimer ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... childhood may be doubtful; it is, at any rate, less automatic than the previous acts, for a man might by conscious effort learn to perform it more skilfully, or even to suppress it altogether. Actions of this kind, with which instinct and volition enter upon equal terms, have been called 'semi-reflex.' The act of running towards the train, on the other hand, has no instinctive element about it. It is purely the result of education, and is preceded by a consciousness ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... was originally considered as a power flowing from the hypnotist, is nothing more than his mental action or control which prevents the subject from exercising his own volition." ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... because I am not in love with her, and I shall not allow myself to be." He was perfectly sure of himself, and perfectly sincere, too; what lover has ever understood that love has nothing to do with volition! ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... perception of the relation which the component ideas of the proposition bear to each, which is passive: the investigation being confused with the perception has induced many falsely to imagine that the mind is active in belief,—that belief is an act of volition,—in consequence of which it may be regulated by the mind. Pursuing, continuing this mistake, they have attached a degree of criminality to disbelief; of which, in its nature, it is incapable: it is equally ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... hoped, to mellow things. Indeed, the succeeding weeks brought more trouble, and most of it came through the organ. Some of the rattling panels, in spite of every effort to make them fast, rattled the more. One night when the servants were alone in the house, of its own volition the organ sent forth, to break the still hours, a blood-curdling basso-profundo groan that suggested ghosts to their superstitious minds. The housemaid came to regard the instrument as something uncanny, and, even as the cook had done before her, shook the ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... death and disorder, and it was necessary that the pieces should be kept cool in order to be in efficient condition to grapple with and suppress this attack. Sometimes a regiment, stung to a frenzy of courage by bullets and the death of comrades, will rise from its trench without the volition of its officers, and go frantically forward against overwhelming odds. A different effect of an almost identical psychological process is patience. Men will sometimes lie as quietly under a rain of bullets, in order to get in one effective shot at an enemy, ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... in conversation with two or three men and women who were watching the youngsters' game, and presently found himself applauding his son for a brilliant ace. But after perhaps five minutes he walked quite without volition, straight to Harriet's neighbourhood, and she rose at once, introduced her new friend, and with a glance at her wrist, announced that ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... love for her in words. My love for Dicky terrifies me sometimes, it is so strong, but I cannot go up to him and offer him an unsolicited kiss or caress. Respond to his caresses, yes! but offer them of my own volition, never! There is something inside me that makes it ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... growing interest and affection, she slowly revealed the story of Konopisht Garden, her share in it, and the events that had followed. Marishka could see that the woman was greatly impressed by the story which lost no conviction from the pallid lips which told it. And of her own volition, that night, Ena promised the girl to reveal no word of her confidences, and gave unreservedly the outward signs of her friendship for the tender creature committed to her care. She had believed that the kindness of the Herr Hauptmann had meant the beginnings of a romance. But ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... Gordon Garfield and explain the situation. But such confession must, I knew, lead to my prosecution and inevitable imprisonment. I had taken a false step while under the baneful influence of some drug which had stultified my own volition and held me powerless to resist the temptation. I was now ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... all art which is in any way imitative or reproductive of fact—form, or colour, or incident—is the representation of such fact as connected with soul, of a specific personality, in its preferences, its volition and power. ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... Shelby, nor Eliza, nor the tall Kentuckian who aids her, nor John Bird, nor Uncle Tom himself in the final act of his drama, can help himself. For good or evil they are the products and results of the system; and yet they have and they give the illusion of volition. ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... practised eye did not miss the handle of a long knife in its sheath. It went swiftly through his mind that those who sent him on this errand should have warned him of the size of the quarry. Suddenly, almost without his own volition, he found himself saying: "I ask your pardon. I was dead beat an' fair famished, an' I crawled ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... or wind through the maze of a department store. The American reading public is not the book-reading public that it should be or could be made to be; but the habit must be made easy for it to acquire. Books must be placed where the public can readily get at them. It will not, of its own volition, seek them. It did not do so with magazines; it will ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... bursts through some rocky cleft reveal the wide ocean rolling on from the dim horizon to the shore. Here and there may be seen the white sail, or the hull of some distant bark, gliding on so smooth and silently as to suggest the idea of volition obeyed without any visible effort. Rising from the ravine, the road passes diagonally up the steep. At the period of which we speak, ere it reached the main line of communication through the country, a reft or chasm in the steep wall towards the sea—a nearly perpendicular ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... from the Eskimos during this stupendous attack. They seemed bereft alike of voice and volition, but, on beholding the closing catastrophe, they rushed to the rescue with a ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... whose footsteps she had heard stood upon the doorstep with a hand lifted to knock, but pausing to "makeup his mind." He heard the bolt shoot back, recognized the nature of the mistake, and, feeling that here again he was robbed of volition, rapped. ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... forms of death, shook the gentle girl to the centre of her soul. It merged in a defiance of duty to Stephen, and a total recklessness as to plighted faith. Every nerve of her will was now in entire subjection to her feeling—volition as a guiding power had forsaken her. To remain passive, as she remained now, encircled by his arms, was a sufficiently complete result—a glorious crown to all the years of her life. Perhaps he was only grateful, and did not love her. No matter: it was infinitely more ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... of volition is the life of action. Now all our actions represent a resultant of the forces of impulse and inhibition, and by constant repetition of actions this resultant may become almost habitual and unconscious. Such is the case, ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... themselves, but as compared with the nature of the agent; what we censure in men, we tolerate and even admire in animals, and as soon as we are aware of our mistake in assigning to the former a power of free volition, our notion of evil as a positive thing ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... the same moment a section of the book-case surrounding the room moved inward, apparently of its own volition, and two men, one of whom was the man Lopes, crept cautiously into the apartment. Hastily seizing Jim's inanimate body by the arms and legs, they dragged him out of the room, carried him down a long narrow passage and, ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... among the slopes and dells of Ocean to watch the lovely growths and the strange creatures in which, through plant and mineral, or what seem such, Life is yearning upward toward the higher individuality of Volition. She tells us (for we seemed among her hearers as we read, and drew our stool nearer) all about the sea-anemones and corals, the coral-reefs, the jelly-fishes, star-fishes, and sea-urchins,—which last are not to be confounded with the buoys so frequently to be met with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... except that, on this occasion, the whole of his person was developed. He appeared a tall, upright form, that was far from being destitute of natural grace and proportions, but which had been so exquisitely drilled into simultaneous movement, that the several members had so far lost the power of volition, as to render it impossible for one to stir, without producing some thing like a correspondent demonstration in all its fellows. This rigid and well-regulated personage, after making a formal military bow to his superior, helped himself to a chair, ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... first acquaintance with death impress us! What a thrill passes through the living, as it bends over the inanimate body, from which the spirit has departed! The clay that returns to the dust from which it sprung, the tenement that was lately endued with volition and life, the frame that exhibited a perfection of mechanism, deriding all human power, and confounding all human imagination, now an inanimate mass, rapidly decomposing, and soon to become ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... psychology must be based upon the observation and classification of mental phenomena, as revealed in consciousness, and not constructed in an "independent" and a priori method. The most careful psychological analysis has resolved the whole complex phenomena of mind into thought, feeling, and volition.[61] These orders of phenomena are radically and essentially distinct. They differ not simply in degree but in kind, and it is only by an utter disregard of the facts of consciousness that they can be confounded. Feeling is not reason, nor can it by any logical dexterity ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... sometimes she stood behind the door and called in her soft, trembling voice, "Fossette! Fossette!" And on this morning she did not come into the room. The dog did not immediately respond. Sophia was in an agony. She marshalled all her volition, all her ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... cold—stunted somehow—not because there had not been enough wood to feed them, but because the fire itself was old and tired. Blinking at the flames, he stood still, unaware of the fact that he was swaying on feet planted a little apart. He could not move, not of his own volition. ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... essential mark of volition is that the personality as a whole, or the central feature or nucleus of the personality, the man himself, is thrown upon the side of the weaker motive."—McDougall: Introduction to ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... the demand for human sacrifice. Those devouring kisses sent unimagined apprehensions through her heart. They seemed to satisfy him so little while they sapped from her every atom of vitality, leaving her helpless as an infant, her body drawn to his as a needle to the magnet, not of her own volition, but simply by his strength. And ever the fire of his passion grew hotter till she felt as one bound on the edge of a mighty furnace which scorched her mercilessly from ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... If in action there were only one factor, that is to say, the motive, the action would seem to be necessary and to be traceable in its origin apparently back to the nebula. But surely there are two factors, the motive and the volition. Of the second factor in actions which are matters of course we are not conscious; where there is a conflict of motives or hesitation of any kind, we are. Huxley at one time held that man was an automaton. I believe my illustrious friend afterward receded from ...
— No Refuge but in Truth • Goldwin Smith
... No volition of his own was needed to carry him onwards; wind and tide did all that. He had merely to keep his place and steer his little bark up the wide river. He saw against the sky the great pile of Westminster. He ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... grant them a right to assume the existence of either matter or motion, since both manifestly depend, for their slightest manifestation, upon the more potent agency of "vital force," as expressed in thought, volition, and consciousness—that triumvirate of the intellectual faculties without which neither matter nor motion could have so much as a ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... effectually it is necessary to be fully possessed of only two beliefs: the first, that the order of nature is ascertainable by our faculties to an extent which is practically unlimited; the second, that our volition counts for something as a condition of the ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... of contact we have a swift, unexpected, even unsought-for attainment, which is entirely of His volition; that sudden condescension to the soul, in which in unspeakable rapture she is caught ...
— The Golden Fountain - or, The Soul's Love for God. Being some Thoughts and - Confessions of One of His Lovers • Lilian Staveley
... that whatever assistance you may have rendered Mr. Bingham (for which, by the way, I consider you have received ample compensation), you rendered it entirely of your own volition and on your own responsibility. It is quite your own personal affair. I could not ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... "not so well" for a long time and, for two days, very ill. Queed sitting before the table, his gas ablaze and his shade up, tilted back his chair and thought of her now. All at once, with no conscious volition on his part, he found himself saying over the startling little credo that Fifi had suggested for his taking, on the day he sent her ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... is that of memory. It grows out of the biological discussion of instinct, heredity, etc. Included in the subject of memory is that of association. Following this come imagination, imitation, training of the senses, apperception, formal discipline, feeling, volition, motor training, induction, etc. Periods of mental development and the specific topics of childhood and adolescence should receive definite consideration, though more exhaustive treatment should be reserved for a distinct course in child study. The ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... whether Cochose lunged forward of his own volition, or was pressed on from behind, yet suddenly he was within reach of me, and the battle was on. It was short and fierce, his object evidently being to crush me in his giant grip, mine to oppose science to strength, and avoid his bear-hug. We swayed back and forth to the sharp pitching ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... question at rest. And there looked out at him, it seemed, the same dark sallow face that had so much appalled him only two nights ago—expressionless, cadaverous, with shadowy hollows beneath the glittering eyes. And even as he watched it, its lips, of their own volition, drew together and ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... from the carriage, I more than once detected the fragrant sigh of some astonished cow, whose ruminating repose upon the highway we had ruthlessly disturbed. But in the darkness our progress, more the guidance of some mysterious instinct than any apparent volition of our own, gave an indefinable charm of security to our journey that a moment's hesitation or indecision on the part of the ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... proprietorship, but are removable at will. Consequently, they can be deprived of those missions even though they live like saints. Is it possible that when the will of another is sufficient to remove them from their curacies, their own volition will not suffice with the knowledge of the dangers which will follow from such a charge? Further, is the regular incapable of being a proper parish priest, or is he not? If he is, why, if the secular ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXXVI, 1649-1666 • Various
... after him, mastering herself, with tense volition:] What must be, must be!—'tis ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... Gengulphus might choose, For saints, e'en when dead, still retain their volition, It should rest there, to aid some particular views, Produced by his ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... verser (ou ne pas verser) le sang de ses peuples *—as Alexander expressed it in the last letter he wrote him—he had never been so much in the grip of inevitable laws, which compelled him, while thinking that he was acting on his own volition, to perform for the hive life—that is to say, for ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... the 26th verse—"Let us make man in our image"—gives us the only explanation of man's presence on earth. Without revelation no one has been able to explain the riddle of life. Man comes into the world without his own volition; he has no choice as to the age, nation, race, or family environment into which he shall be born. So far as he is concerned, he comes by chance; he goes he knows not when, and cannot insure himself for a single hour against accident, disease or death; and yet, he is supreme above ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... time when the little party arrived there happened to be a circle gathered around one of the most accomplished performers to witness an exhibition of his skill, and surely nothing could be more graceful. Without sensible effort, and as if by mere volition, he seemed to glide over the glossy surface, now forwards, now backwards, now sideways, now swiftly, now slowly, whirling like an eagle in rapid or dilatory curves, describing all the lines that Euclid ever drew or imagined, and cutting such initials of the names of the spectators ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... this bloody day, Dennis Morolt's horse had kept pace for pace, and his arm blow for blow, with his master's. It seemed as if two different bodies had been moving under one act of volition. He husbanded his strength, or put it forth, exactly as he observed his knight did, and was close by his side, when he made the last deadly effort. At that fatal moment, when Raymond Berenger rushed on the chief, the brave squire forced his way up to the standard, and, grasping it ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... homo duplex; and this double nature remains a mystery to himself. We think; but what is thought? Nobody can say. We walk; but what is this organic action? Nobody knows. My will is an immaterial force; all the faculties of my soul are immaterial; nevertheless, if I will to raise my arm, this volition overcomes matter. How does this power act? What mediation serves for the conveyance of the mental command, in order to produce a physical effect? As yet ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... strange enough symptom to me of the bewildered condition of the world, to behold a man of this temper, and of this veracity and nobleness, self-consecrated here, by free volition and deliberate selection, to be a Christian Priest; and zealously struggling to fancy himself such in very truth. Undoubtedly a singular present fact;—from which, as from their point of intersection, ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... Something must break ... their breaths were too long drawn. He got to his feet and the flapper was unaccountably standing beside him. It was too dark to see her face, but he knew that for once she was not looking at him; for once that head was bent. And then, preposterously, without volition, without foreknowledge, he was holding her tightly in his arms; holding her tightly and kissing her with a simple directness that "Napoleon, Man and Lover," could ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... are the most powerful stimulus to exertion, and the best means of attaching the people to the institutions under which they live. It is apparent that this political effect upon the character of society cannot have any action upon slaves. Having no choice or volition, there is nothing for stimulus to act upon; they are in fact no part of society. So that, in the language of political economy, they are, like machinery, merely capital; and the productions of their labor ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... not feel and know that he could command and control the action of his brain, and even of every part of it? Now, I said, if the brain is only dumb matter, which you admit, and cannot create thought, where is this volition, or what is it? It is not cerebral, for then matter would create thought; that is, be the creator and the created at ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... quasi-personal character to facts. To the archaic man all the obtrusive and obviously consequential objects and facts in his environment have a quasi-personal individuality. They are conceived to be possessed of volition, or rather of propensities, which enter into the complex of causes and affect events in an inscrutable manner. The sporting man's sense of luck and chance, or of fortuitous necessity, is an inarticulate or inchoate animism. It applies to objects ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... over his shoulder. Something sang like an arrow through the air; I felt a blow and then a sharp pang, and there I was pinned by the shoulder to the mast. In the horrid pain and surprise of the moment—I scarce can say it was by my own volition, and I am sure it was without a conscious aim—both my pistols went off, and both escaped out of my hands. They did not fall alone; with a choked cry the coxswain loosed his grasp upon the shrouds, and plunged head ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... precisely what I would have done myself had I been in their places, losing all the while in amiability more than was gained in mental discipline. My experience in a factory was limited to three months. From working with the machines and as they worked, hardly using more intelligent volition than they, I began to fancy myself becoming like them, with no more rights to be respected, no more moral responsibility, and left without even serving my notice. Clerking I tried "just for fun." If all people who came to trade were like some, it would be the pleasantest, ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... southernmost bench; but she had chosen it. She had chosen it, afar off, while it was yet empty and Mr. Ollerenshaw was on his feet. When Mr. Ollerenshaw dropped into a corner of it the girl's first instinctive volition was to stop, earlier than she had intended, at one of the ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... "The hunt had become a monomania with him. It had become an obsession. He had given his whole mentality to it and it had absorbed all his faculties. He was now the victim of it. He had grown powerless in the grip of the idea; he had lost volition ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... process to rewind the clock, to reload the gun, and to replenish the fuel. To restore muscular and nerve cells is a very delicate process. So wonderful is the human organism, however, that the process is carried on perfectly without our consciousness or volition except under abnormal conditions. ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... of machine-industry then may be measured by the increased number and complexity of the processes related to one another in the mechanical unit or machine, and by a corresponding shrinkage of the dependence of the product upon the skill and volition of the human being who tends or co-operates with the machine. Every product made by tool or machine is qua industrial product or commodity the expression of the thought and will of man; but as machine-production becomes more highly developed, more and more of the thought and will of the inventor, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... his misery. His figure swung sideways; he fell on the cushions of the sofa and his arms stretched across them, his gray head lying heedless; sobs that tore roots came painfully; it was the last depth. Out of it, without his volition, he spoke aloud. ...
— The Lifted Bandage • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... that they early observed that something happened in the world. The world was not dark, nor still, nor dead. The sun rose, and man awoke, and asked himself and the sunshine. 'Whence?' he said; 'stop, what is there? who is there?' Such an object as the sun cannot rise of its own volition. There is something behind it. At first the sun itself was considered a labourer; it accomplished the greatest work on earth, gave light, heat, life, growth, fruits. It was quite natural, then, to pay great honour to the sun; to be grateful to it, to appeal to it ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... intellect! I lift a volume, but a sentence tires; Even a flimsy magazine requires From me more concentration and direct Volition than my vagrant wits elect To give the pages. All my soul desires Is to gaze without purpose on the fire's Crackle of glowing cinders, and detect Weird shapes of beasts and palaces and men In the red ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... god-inflicted diseases, that to his mind they were neither more nor less god-inflicted than all others. The doctrine of abstract entities was a kind of instinctive conciliation between the observed uniformity of the facts of nature, and their dependence on arbitrary volition; since it was easier to conceive a single volition as setting a machinery to work, which afterwards went on of itself, than to suppose an inflexible constancy in so capricious and changeable a thing as volition ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... of the corner of his eye and wondered why he had ever been fated to fall in love with such a creature. He was convinced that he had been fate-forced into the intrigue. He had no sense whatever of volition or wicked intent. He could only feel that he had tried to be decent and play fair ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... current among the people. Owing to the fact that every Jewish community, at the mutual responsibility of all its members, was compelled by law to supply a definite number of recruits, and that no one was willing to become a soldier of his own volition, the Kahal administration and the recruiting "trustees," who had to answer to the authorities for any shortage in recruits, were practically forced to become a sort of police agents, whose function it was to "capture" the necessary quota of recruits. ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... way we may attempt to explain it, the fact remains that volition is the fundamental characteristic of Spirit. We may speak of conscious, or subconscious or super-conscious action; but in whatever way we may picture to ourselves the condition of the agent as contemplating his ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... said, of his own volition, and not as an emissary from the White House. But in view of his close relation to affairs, his interview is significant as possibly reflecting an Administration attitude at that ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... sensitive particle of the brain, that cannot be obliterated, and each of which the mind can recall at will. And that, too, is a fact of surpassing wonder: what is the delicate instrument that registers, with no seeming volition, these amazing pictures, and preserves them thus with so fantastic a care, retouching them, fashioning them anew, detaching from the picture every sordid detail, till each is as a lyric, inexpressible, exquisite, too ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... she was now compelled to pass; she could only feel her way. The thoughts which began to course through her mind did not originate in any efforts of the will, but issued spontaneously from the depths of her soul, and as they arose without volition, so did they flow on until they finally became as pure and clear as the waters of the brook by ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... came to our house alone, gratuitously, on her own volition, sat within a few feet of our entire family and two of our neighbors, having no cabinet or any paraphernalia which are always required by those charlatans who have associated the fair name of spiritualism with fraud and chicanery. In about ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... use his own words, "as plainly as if it were written in our mother-tongue." His discovery consisted in the fact, that the spinal nerves are double in their function, and arise by double roots from the spinal marrow,—volition being conveyed by that part of the nerves springing from the one root, and sensation by the other. The subject occupied the mind of Sir Charles Bell for a period of forty years, when, in 1840, he laid his last paper before ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... held it within reach of Animula. The sylph took it in her delicate hand, and began to eat. My attention was so entirely absorbed by her, that I could not apply myself to the task of determining whether this singular plant was or was not instinct with volition. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... were as inert and helpless as the huge red-and-gray disks. He saw four ball-shaped creatures float by, clinging together; then a group of eight, then one of twelve. All these, to the extent of their volition, seemed to be in a state of extreme ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... run away and hide with some one who would let her act like the child she was, I experienced for the moment, I believe, the truest happiness of my life. Meeting her advances with all the warmth her manner invited, I found her ere long listening eagerly while I told her, almost without my own volition, the story of my past life, in the ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... monotony and loneliness. All the notions that went to make up her idea of happiness were culled from what she had heard and dreamed of life beyond her wilderness. Added to this there was the fact that the man who had presumed to stand between her and the accomplishment of the first strong volition of her life had become intolerable to her—whether more by his severity or by his kindliness she could not tell. She folded her shawl-draped arms more strongly across her breast, and hugged to herself all the dreams and desires, hopes and dislikes, that had grown within ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... leaves us both free to make other plans, in case we find that the adjustment is not as perfect as we could have wished. However, that is a future contingency. Quid sit futurum cras—you know the sentiment. If you leave us, it will doubtless be at your own volition and, like the man in the parable, for the purpose of taking ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... action of mind—not of thinking. The unparticled matter, or God, in quiescence, is (as nearly as we can conceive it) what men call mind. And the power of self-movement (equivalent in effect to human volition) is, in the unparticled matter, the result of its unity and omniprevalence; how I know not, and now clearly see that I shall never know. But the unparticled matter, set in motion by a law, or quality, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... months, and have been beset with countless dangers, but Opechancanough overcame them, and "conquered all along from Mexico" to Virginia.[329] He was now an extremely aged man. Being unable to walk he was carried from place to place upon a litter. His eyelids were so heavy that he could not of his own volition move them, and attendants stood always ready to raise them whenever it became necessary for him to see.[330] But his mind was clear, his force of will unshaken, and the Indians paid him the reverent obedience that ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... warrant, which will not justify such proceeding: Affectio enim tua nomen imponit operi tuo: item crimen non contrahitur nisi nocendi, voluntas intercedat," which, as I understand, may read: "For your volition puts the name upon your act; and a crime is not committed unless the will of the offender takes part ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... it nearly happened. There was no warning of approach now as the creature passed over the grass. Suddenly, like a dark, drifting shadow, the huge bulk loomed up once more before me, making for the entrance of the cave. Again came that paralysis of volition which held my crooked forefinger impotent upon the trigger. But with a desperate effort I shook it off. Even as the brushwood rustled, and the monstrous beast blended with the shadow of the Gap, I fired at the retreating form. In the blaze of the gun I caught a glimpse of ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... cut the reins and tied them, and mounting without stirrups rode towards the bridge. The horse went quietly enough now, and the man allowed it to choose its way. He was going home to find shelter from the cold, because his animal instincts prompted him, but otherwise almost without volition, in a state of dispassionate indifference. Nothing more, he fancied, could well ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... minds in proportion to their greatness. To be without it, would be to live a minor in point of intellect, not much removed from imbecility. It is not a waste of energy, rather it furnishes the motive-power to all human volition. It comes of the natural working of the understanding that discerns good, and other good above that, and so still higher and higher good without limit; and of the natural working of the will, following up and fastening upon what the understanding discerns as good. ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... what strength supported her from the Monday morning to the Saturday midnight she could not tell. Acting and refraining, speaking and holding silence, these things were no longer the consequences of her own volition. She wished to break free from her slavery, but had not the force to do so; something held her voice as often as she was about to tell Mrs. Tubbs that this week would be the last. Her body wasted so that all the garments she wore were loose upon her. The only mental process of which she was capable ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... consciously undertaken by personal effort. "The making of mind" is not an art of youth alone. It is an art of middle age and of the older years. Says William James: "The man who daily inures himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition and self-denial in unnecessary things, will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast." Such a one also will resist the decay of powers and be able ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... the things that make for its peace; and that mind slights this merciful interference, and stifles down these inward teachings, then God withdraws, and whether He will ever return again to that soul depends upon His mere sovereign volition. He has bound himself by no promise to do so. He has established no uniform law of operation, in the case. It is true that He is very pitiful and of tender mercy, and waits and bears long with the sinner; and it is also true, that He is terribly ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
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