"Perceptive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were obviously not well off as regards material goods? Copplestone had the faculty of seeing things at a glance, and refined and cultivated as the atmosphere of Mrs. Greyle's parlour was, it had taken no more than a glance from his perceptive eyes to see that he was there confronted with what folk call genteel poverty. Mrs. Greyle's almost nun-like attire of black had done duty for a long time; the carpet was threadbare; there was an absence of those little touches of comfort with which refined women of even modest ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... we have here to consider is the part which heredity has played in forming the perceptive faculty of the individual prior to its own experience. We have already seen that heredity plays an important part in forming memory of ancestral experiences, and thus it is that many animals come into the world with their power of perception ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... English professional laughed good-humouredly, and Sherringham was struck with the pleasant familiarity he had established with their brave companion. He was knowing and ready and he said in the first entr'acte—they were waiting for the second to go behind—amusing perceptive things. "They teach them to be ladylike and Voisin's always trying to show that. 'See how I walk, see how I sit, see how quiet I am and how I have le geste rare. Now can you say I ain't a lady?' She does it all as if she had ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... style is the final fruit of long experience." In the measured utterances of Mr. Asquith we recognise the speech of a man to whom all that is old and good is familiar, and in whom the art of finished expression has become a habit. No more elegantly balanced, no more delicately perceptive mind than his has appeared of recent times in our midst, and there is something in the equipoise of his own genius which points Mr. Asquith out as a judge peculiarly well fitted to sit in judgment upon rival ages. In his Romanes lecture there was but one thing to be ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... peace; that restless passions had found their dwelling-place around his heart. Mrs. Hamilton only saw him in society: it was uncharitable perhaps to judge him thus; but the feelings of a mother had rendered her thus acute, had endowed her with a penetration unusually perceptive, and she rejoiced that Caroline gave him only the meed of politeness, and that no sign of encouragement was displayed ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... at the successive crossings. Then he strolled back the way he had come. He was a shadow of a man, sliding noiselessly and without undue movement through the semi-darkness. Also he was very alert, like a wild animal in the jungle, keenly perceptive and receptive. The movement of another in the darkness about him would need to have been more shadowy than he to ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... when they met at breakfast. He made no attempt to conceal his devotion; his eyes scarcely left her face, and his voice took a different tone in addressing her. Fortunately for Bluebell's peace of mind, she was not present. Mrs. Rolleston noticed it, and rejoiced; the Colonel was equally perceptive, ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... appearances to me!" She spoke in her high way. "I'll make them all right. Aunt Maud, moreover," she added, "has her so engaged that she won't notice." Densher felt, with this, that his companion had indeed perceptive flights he couldn't hope to match—had for instance another when she still subjoined: "And Mrs. Stringham's appearing to respond just in order to ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... as blank as any perceptive when it comes to reading minds. I was hoping to collect him whole enough to ask questions, but he forced my hand." I looked to where some of the clean-up squad were tucking the corpse into a basket. "It was one of the few times I'd have ...
— Stop Look and Dig • George O. Smith
... this stratagem perpetrated by a creature so low in the scale of animal life, and living amid surroundings so free from ordinary dangers, that, at first, I was loath to credit the evidence of my own perceptive powers; and it was only after long-continued observation that I was finally convinced that it was really ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... at it here as usual, though with an audience so finely perceptive that the labour is much diminished. I have got together in a very short space the conclusion of "Oliver Twist" that you suggested, and am trying it daily with the object of rising from that blank state of horror into a fierce and passionate rush for the end. As yet I cannot make a certain ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... it is found that all these, and the many other artificial breeds or races of animals and plants, have been produced by one method. The breeder—and a skilful one must be a person of much sagacity and natural or acquired perceptive faculty—notes some slight difference, arising he knows not how, in some individuals of his stock. If he wish to perpetuate the difference, to form a breed with the peculiarity in question strongly marked, he ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... not to be regretted. Nothing is more diverting to the perceptive playgoer than these little dramatic-simplicities; as when, the great Suez deal having been completed—a fact that it was enormously important to conceal from the Press and the country (and the adventuress)—a telegram with full details in the plainest of plain English is despatched from the local ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 12, 1916 • Various
... that you are capable of developing all the essential mental equipment of the successful salesman. You only need to comprehend a few elemental laws of mind science; and then to train yourself to the utmost of your particular ability—in perceptive power, alertness, accuracy, punctuality, memory, imagination, concentration, adaptability to circumstances, stability, self-control, determination, ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... time, now that she had gained her own way and was actually all alone in the heart of the country, she did not permit such a thought to trouble her peace. The grave tranquillity of the old house was already beginning to exert its influence on her always quick and perceptive mind,—the dear remembrance of her father whom she had idolised, and whose sudden death had been the one awful shock of her life, came back to her now with a fresh and tender pathos. Little incidents of her childhood and of its affection, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... sat upright again, her own face, as she lifted it, would have struck a perceptive onlooker as being, as it were, the face of another girl. It was tear-stained and wild, but this was not the cause of its change. The soft, bird eyes were different—suddenly, amazingly older than they had been when she had ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the Irishman said, unthinkable. From the third volume, when LEECH got really into his stride, until his lamented early death in 1864, LEECH'S genius was at the service of his young friend: his quick perceptive kindly eyes ever vigilant for humorous incident, his ears alert for humorous sayings, and his hand translating all into pictorial drama and by a sure and benign instinct seizing always ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various
... it, all this has been but a prelude to the play. Were it not so I should not now stand in such pressing want of the services of a confidential agent,—that is, of an experienced man of the world, who has been endowed by nature with phenomenal perceptive faculties, and in whose capacity and honour I can place the ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... have propelled a people onward in their progressive career, have proceeded from a few gifted souls. Sometimes these have been "self-made" men, so-called, whose best powers were evoked by rare opportunities. Oftener, they have been men of thoroughly disciplined minds, of sharpened perceptive faculties, trained to analyze and to generalize; men of well-balanced judgments and power of clear and ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 6, June 1896 • Various
... also remnants of old-fashioned ingenuity. In such fantasy Hawthorne found a better channel for that play of his mind which had earlier sought expression in the grotesque; oddity of thought he had in plenty, and the sense of oddity was often as far as his humorous faculty reached, for it was perceptive ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... to the opposite side of the head. Paralysis, if not dependent on the spinal cord, is dependent on the basilar region of the opposite side of they brain; and conditions of the right eye affect the lower margin of the left front lobe, in which the perceptive organs are situated. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... united every quality of the moral and intellectual pill-doctor. He lived in an artificial and highly intellectualised society. He was a contemporary and friend of great wits. He haunted salons, and was graciously received by perceptive ladies, who never made a boredom of virtue. He mingled in a chaos of political intrigue, and was involved in burlesque rebellion. He was intimate with something below the face-value of public men, and ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... errant channels are united in one current—life assumes a purpose, a direction—but the waters are yet pure, and mirror on their face the thousand forms and flashing colors of Creation's beauty—as happy boyhood, rapidly perceptive of all loveliness, gives forth, in radiant smiles, the glad ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... annihilation, nor a power to annihilate itself, nor can be annihilated by any being finitely powerful only, without an immediate act of the omnipotent Creator to annihilate it, it must endlessly abide an active perceptive substance, without either fear or hopes of dying through all eternity, which is, in other words, to be immortal as to the agency of all natural or second ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... brain toward which all kaldanes were striving. It would be deaf, and dumb, and blind. A thousand beautiful strangers might sing and dance about it, but it could derive no pleasure from the singing or the dancing since it would possess no perceptive faculties. Already had the kaldanes shut themselves off from most of the gratifications of the senses. Ghek wondered if much was to be gained by denying themselves still further, and with the thought ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... mildly drawn caricatures, and is not predisposed toward the homes or characters of those "cousins" across the Atlantic. A few that he had met in England strengthened this prejudice. Shallow attempts to ape everything English had disgusted this frank, open-hearted, perceptive Briton, with his innate abhorrence ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... perceptive faculty of undergraduates, it ought to be said that the classmates and contemporaries of Richard Harding Davis knew perfectly well, while he and they were young together, that in him Lehigh had a son so marked ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... was not wholly unsuccessful, since by dint of steady gazing he heightened his perceptive powers, whether it were for Notre Dame, the Sistine Madonna, or the Alps, each of which he took with the same seriousness. What eluded him was precisely that human element which was the primary ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... should be celebrated in advance, because the armistice ended on the 10th. The rejoicings of Saint-Napoleon's day then took place in the cantonments. This was the last time that the French army celebrated the birthday of its Emperor! There was not much enthusiasm, for even the least perceptive of officers was aware that we were on the brink of a catastrophe, and the worries of the commanders affected the morale of their subalterns. However each one prepared to do his duty, though with little hope of success, in view of the great inferiority in numbers of our army as opposed to the ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... is not perhaps singular that, even after the appearance of mankind on the earth, the greater importance of the mother element in human society should have been recognized; nor, as the power to bring forth coupled with perceptive wisdom originally constituted the Creator, that the god-idea should have been female ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... what they can't do! I don't deny that you may be correct in the broad, vulgar sense, but that is not enough for me. I expect you to grasp the inner meaning. Now the real answer to this question is that there can be no answer! To a perceptive mind it would be impossible to reply without further information. It entirely depends on how the paper is cut out, and the amount of waste incurred in ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... enhance the energy of each. The excellence of Europe and Asia is in his brain. Metaphysics and natural philosophy expressed the genius of Europe; he substricts the religion of Asia as the base. In short, a balanced soul was born, perceptive of the two elements.... The physical philosophers had sketched each his theory of the world; the theory of atoms, of fire, of flux, of spirit,—theories mechanical and chemical in their genius. Plato, a master of mathematics, studious of all natural laws and causes, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... shall arise in the States, They shall report Nature, laws, physiology, and happiness, They shall illustrate Democracy and the kosmos, They shall be alimentive, amative, perceptive, They shall be complete women and men, their pose brawny and supple, their drink water, their blood clean and clear, They shall fully enjoy materialism and the sight of products, they shall enjoy the sight of the beef, lumber, bread-stuffs, of Chicago ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... gradation observable in their activities. Plants have no work to do beside nutrition, growth, and reproduction; they possess only the nutritive soul. Animals possess in addition sensation and the sensitive or perceptive soul—"their manner of life differs in their having pleasure in sexual intercourse, in their mode of parturition and rearing their young" (Hist. Anim., viii., trans. Cresswell, p. 195). Man alone has the rational soul in addition to ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... all the perceptive faculties, *prompts to action in accordance with its perceptions*. In this respect it differs not in the least from sight, hearing, taste. Our natural proclivity is to direct our movements with reference to the objects within the field of our vision, to govern ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... floats it. One reads with the poetic prestige of the knowledge that every scene is trans-terrestrial; and, at the same time, every scene is presented with a physical realism, a visual and audible vividness, which captivates and holds the perceptive faculty; so that the reader finds himself grasped, as it were, in a vice, whose double handle is mortised on one side in the senses, and on the other in the ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... does it all himself; and if it wasn't that the poor devil of a fellah sees what he's doing, and cottons to him, and the dervishes and Arabs feel he's right, he might as well leave. But it's just there he counts. There's something about him, something that's Quaker in him, primitive, silent, and perceptive—if that's a real word—which makes them feel that he's honest, and isn't after anything for himself. Arabs don't talk much; they make each other understand without many words. They think with all their might on one thing at a time, and they think things into happening—and so does ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Indian appears, it is evident that he has cultivated his perceptive powers to the neglect of his spiritual and moral qualities. His senses are remarkably acute. His memory is good; and when aroused, his imagination is vivid, though wild in the extreme. He is warmly attached to hereditary customs and ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... may be drawn upon the blackboard, which the pupils will eagerly copy; and though this exercise may not be valuable in a high degree, as preparation for the systematic study of drawing, yet it trains the perceptive and reflective faculties in a manner that is pleasant to the great majority of children. It is also in the power of the teacher, at any point in the exercises, and with reference both to variety and usefulness, to give the most apparent facts, which to children are the ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... instrument, according to Kant, is the human mind. Space and Time and the Perceptive Faculties are the parts of the instrument. Everything that reaches the senses must submit to the laws of Space and Time, that is, to the Laws of Mathematics, because Space and Time are forms of the mind itself, and, like the kaleidoscope, arrange all things on their way ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... Beethoven, Schumann, and Mendelssohn, or an extended commentary, as in the symphonic poems of Liszt and the symphonies of Berlioz and Raff, the programme has a distinct value to the composer as well as the hearer. It can make the perceptive sense more impressible to the influence of the music; it can quicken the fancy, and fire the imagination; it can prevent a gross misconception of the intentions of a composer and the character of his composition. Nevertheless, in ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... goodness is of so communicative a nature, that it seems to delight in the conferring of existence upon every degree of perceptive being. As this is a speculation, which I have often pursued with great pleasure to myself, I shall enlarge further upon it, by considering that part of the scale of beings which ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... sorts:—1. The perception of ideas in our minds. 2. The perception of the: signification of signs. 3. The perception of the connexion or repugnancy, agreement or disagreement, that there is between any of our ideas. All these are attributed to the understanding, or perceptive power, though it be the two latter only that use allows us to ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... consciousness, but which are now set in motion automatically on a mere touch, as it were, from consciousness- -if it were not able to reproduce them the more quickly and easily in proportion to the frequency of the repetitions—if, in fact, there was no power of recollecting earlier performances? Our perceptive faculties must have remained always at their lowest stage if we had been compelled to build up consciously every process from the details of the sensation-causing materials tendered to us by our senses; nor could ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... World War II, some of the possibilities of kinematic synthesis were recognized in the United States, a few perceptive teachers fanned the tinder into an ...
— Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt • Eugene S. Ferguson
... and upon the gravest affairs, were taking place, Charles would never suffer him to be considered superfluous or intrusive. There seemed to be no secrets which the Emperor held too high for the comprehension or discretion of his page. His perceptive and reflective faculties, naturally of remarkable keenness and depth, thus acquired a precocious and extraordinary development. He was brought up behind the curtain of that great stage where the world's dramas were daily enacted. The machinery and the masks which produced the grand delusions ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... ninety-nine of those who hold only to the egotistic interests of their own individuality. This dark saying means (if it mean anything), that the so-called moral faculties of man, fancy and ideality, must lord it over the perceptive and reflective powers,a simple absurdity! It produced a Turricremata, alias Torquemada, who, shedding floods of honest tears, caused his victims to be burnt alive; and an Anchieta, the Thaumaturgist of Brazil, who beheaded ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... saying that there were three processes through which God led the soul: the first was that of external faith, which assents to all things presented by the accustomed authority, practises religion, and is neither interested nor doubtful; the second follows the quickening of the emotional and perceptive powers of the soul, and is set about with consolations, desires, mystical visions and perils; it is in this plane that resolutions are taken and vocations found and shipwrecks experienced; and the third, mysterious and inexpressible, consists in the re-enactment in the purely spiritual sphere of ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... To those perceptive of "atmosphere" there is a subtle difference in silence. There is the silence of woods, the silence of plains, the silence of death, the silence of sleep, and the silence of wakefulness. This silence was ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... course, nature is always the same, never changing and never subservient to the whims or perceptive powers of the individual, there are painters who will aver that they alone see her correctly and that all the world that differs from them is wrong. One man from natural defects may see all her greens or reds stronger or weaker than another ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... The perceptive power, with the widest exterior range, is at the median line, where we find clairvoyance; and the interior meditative power, such as Invention, Composition, Calculation, and Planning, belongs to the lateral or exterior surface of the forehead, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... President! You're going to have to make a speech pretty soon; you'll need a bracer!" He handed the second one to the physician. "Here you go, Doc! Congratulations! It isn't everyone who's got a President in the family!" Then his perceptive brain noticed something in the doctor's expression. "Hey," he said, more softly, "what's the trouble? You look as though you expected sickness ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... receptive side, the sensibility, the most prominent. His senses are alert. He handles and examines objects about him. He sees more, and he learns more from the seeing, than he will in later years unless his perceptive powers are definitely trained and observation made a habit. His judgment and his will are weak. He reasons imperfectly. He chooses without appropriate motives. He needs the building up and development ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... Retina. The third and innermost coat of the eyeball is the retina. This is the perceptive coat, without which it would be impossible to see, and upon which the images of external objects are received. It lines nearly the whole of the inner surface of the posterior chamber, resting on the inner surface of the choroid. It is with the ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... sole conception of a superhuman being always been the impossible one of a man with wings? Yet we know that there is a higher being, higher life with more exalted beauties; but clear reflection must also teach us that its form remains imperceptible and unimaginable as long as our perceptive faculty and our knowledge have not, in a manner at present quite inconceivable, increased in a higher sphere, and that therefore all their awarded shapes, though formed by Dantesque phantasy, must ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... danger of the sensibilities and perceptive faculties becoming blunted by exposure to and familiarity with offensive effluvia. "The General repeatedly called the attention of the officers at Fort George to the filthy state and foul effluvia of their camp, but they perceived no ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... and harmonizes the mind, dispels lassitude and relieves fatigue, awakens thought and prevents drowsiness, lightens or refreshes the body, and clears the perceptive faculties.—CONFUCIUS. ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... believe in the immortality of the soul what, in their opinion, survives death. The brain, the nerves and the sense organs obviously decay: the soul, you may say, is not a product of them, but when they are destroyed or even injured, perceptive and intellectual processes are inhibited and apparently rendered impossible. Must not that which lives for ever be, as the Hindus think, independent of thought and ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... Sally had the one subject, the one series of speculations, hammering at her attention. She was again sensible; she was shrewd and perceptive. Gaga was a funny old stick, she thought; funny and weak and nice. She could play upon him with ease. A touch, and he was thrilled; a kiss, and he was beside himself. And yet what did he want—what did he think he wanted? And what did Sally herself want? She did not know. ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... is clear, and is so far valid as to excuse, if not to justify, such works as the present. The novel, as soon as it is legibly written, exists, for what it is worth. The page of black and white is the sole intermediary between the creative and the perceptive brain. Even the act of printing merely widens the possible appeal: it does not alter its nature. But the drama, before it can make its proper appeal at all, must be run through a highly complex piece of mechanism—the theatre—the precise conditions of which are, to most beginners, ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... was a perceptive darkening of the sky, followed by a light, preliminary shower. I'd anticipated that, and was considering heading back for the bug ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker
... place to another, I have always made it a point, if possible, to be accompanied by one or more natives, and I have often found great advantage from it. Attached to an exploring party they are frequently invaluable, as their perceptive powers are very great, and enable them both to see and hear anything at a much greater distance than a European. In tracking stray animals, and keeping on indistinct paths, they display a degree of perseverance ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... Mistress Winthrop, and his glance was oddly perceptive. He observed those matters of which Mr. Craske had seemed to make sardonic comment: the erect stiffness of her carriage, the eyes that looked neither to right nor left, and the pallor of her face. He observed, too, the complacent ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... the noise, as a physical stimulus, comes to me, my hearing it is my own act, my sensory reaction to the stimulus. I recognize the noise as the whistle of a steamboat—this recognition is clearly my own doing, dependent on my own past experience, and may be called a perception or perceptive response. The boat's whistle reminds me of a vacation spent on an island—clearly a memory response. The memory arouses an agreeable feeling—an affective response, this may be called. In its turn, ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... taste, or odor exist, there must be matter to produce these impressions. Destroy, then, if it were possible, this sense of touch, and our absolute perception of objects is entirely lost—the connection between the outer world and the perceptive faculties of the mind is dissolved forever. The truth of this position is seen in the fact that in a swoon, when all the senses are benumbed, the mind is utterly ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... warm, poetic imagination, Nature had given him quick perceptive powers, and the faculty of expressing his thoughts without apparent effort, in simple, strong language, as well defined, and sharply cut as a cameo. Beyond this, and better than all, was a tender, sympathetic sensibility; which, if it sometimes overmastered ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... wisest course,—as it seems to me,—is not to introduce too many appliances as aids to mental activity, but rather to see what the animal subject thinks and does by its own initiative. In the testing of memory and the perceptive faculties, training for performances is the ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... clayey soil, but since the police had been coming and going over it, I was unable to see how my companion could hope to learn anything from it. Still I had had such extraordinary evidence of the quickness of his perceptive faculties, that I had no doubt that he could see a great deal ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... traits of character required and cultivated by good team work are invaluable in business and social life. They are among the best possible traits of character. This class of games makes maximal demands upon perceptive powers and ability to react quickly and accurately upon rapidly shifting conditions, requiring quick reasoning and judgment. Organization play of this sort begins to acquire a decided interest at about eleven ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... industrious and painstaking in whatever he undertook to do, therefore always employed. Early in his struggle he realized the need of an education, in the acquirement of which he applied himself with eager diligence. Nature had endowed him with keen perceptive powers, a retentive memory and great mental vigor, by means of which he soon accumulated considerable knowledge. Every moment that could be spared from his daily toil was spent in reading books of science, philosophy, history, ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... this system of principles, because it has a direct tendency to destroy the just and necessary distinction that ought to be maintained between the perceptive and providential will of God, and necessarily jumbles and confounds these together, in such a manner, as a man is left at an utter uncertainty to know when he is accepted and approven of God in his conduct, and when not. That this is the scope of their principles, ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... trouble they are to take care of. The movements of exaltation which belong to genius are egotistic by their very nature. A calm, clear mind, not subject to the spasms and crises which are so often met with in creative or intensely perceptive natures, is the best basis for love or friendship.—Observe, I am talking about MINDS. I won't say, the more intellect, the less capacity for loving; for that would do wrong to the understanding and ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... perceptive faculties were tolerably developed. That Roy was endeavouring to blind him, he had no doubt. They had not met "accidental," and the topic of conversation had not been Robin's work—of that he felt sure. Roy and Robin Frost might meet and talk together all day long. It was nothing ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... irregularity of its surface may be minutely examined, though it continues to be heard and felt vibrating at that enormous rate. I have made several experiments in this direction, and some very curious facts connected with the sensation of Motion are brought to light by means of this increase in perceptive power. If the sense of sight is increased to 125 units per second, motion at the rate of one inch per second is barely visible; taking the common house-fly, whose wings vibrate about 400 times per second, its units of ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... Phelps is one great, clear, infallible argument—demonstration itself. Jocelyn is full of heavenly-mindedness, and feels and speaks and acts with a zeal according to knowledge. Follen is chaste, profound, and elaborately polished. Goodell is perceptive, analytical, expert, and solid. Child (David L.) is generously indignant, courageous, and demonstrative; his lady combines strength with beauty, argumentation with persuasiveness, greatness with humility. Birney is collected, courteous, dispassionate—his fearlessness excites admiration, ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... induce her to comport herself like a Scriptural woman, humbly wakeful to the surpassing splendour of the high fortune which had befallen her in being so selected, and obedient at a sign. But she was, it appeared that she was, a maid of scaly vision, not perceptive of the blessedness of her lot. She could have been very little perceptive, for she did not understand his casual allusion to Beauchamp's readiness to overcome 'a natural repugnance,' for the purpose of making her ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was silent; he had quickly penetrated his father's thought, for, dethroned from the high seat of an obvious and uncomplicated view of things, he had become both perceptive and subtle. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... now meets us, On the roll of public servants, He, a living illustration Of the might of patient progress. With a mind of varied talent, With a keen perceptive power, With true pride and high ambition, He endowed his human storehouse, He provided ample weapons For the world's unsafe arena, For "the bivouac" of fortune. He was lawyer, Police Judge, and In Dacotah Territory ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... as a bridegroom is supposed to meet his bride. Therefore whenever my reasoning faculties obtruded themselves, I knapp'd 'em o' the coxcombs with a stick, and cry'd 'Down, wantons, down.' Briefly, I kept my ratiocinative gear strictly quiescent, with only the perceptive apparatus unrestrained, thus observing all things through the hallowed haze of a mental sabbath. There is a positive felicity in this attitude of soul, comparing most favorably with the ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... fairness of mind, for the future wisest exercise of the elective franchise and most just administration of the highest judicial office. It may be said that the mother-in-law is the highest development of the supernaturally perceptive and positive woman, since she usually has superior opportunities to study man in all the stages from marriage to madness; but with her whole sex, particularly after certain sour turns in life, inheres an ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... exchanging of ideas so intimately as has happened splendidly between Picasso and Braque, which is in the nature of professional dignity among artists, there is bound to be more or less confusion even to the highly perceptive artist and this must therefore confuse the casual observer and layman. So it is, or was at that time with the painting of Robert Delaunay and Mme. Delaunay Terck; what you learned in this instance was that the more vigorous of the pictures were hers. She showed the same strength and style in her ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... these lines gives the following instructive comments regarding the practice of psychometric power: "Persons of a highly-strung nervous organization, with large perceptive faculties make the best psychometrists. Phlegmatic people seldom psychometrize clearly, and usually lack receptivity to the finer forces. Letters, clothes, hair, coins, ornaments, or jewels—in fact, almost any article which has belonged to, ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... note here. We have just seen that the sum of the perceptive faculty is expressed in those words of Aristotle's "to take pleasure rightly" or straightly—[Greek: chairein orthos]. Now, it is not possible to do the direct opposite of that,—to take pleasure iniquitously or obliquely—[Greek: ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... met in a quick sympathy. She saw that his poetic susceptibility, the romantic and dramatic elements in him were all alive to his sister's case. How critically, sharply perceptive he was—or could be—with regard apparently to everybody in the world—save one! Often—as they talked—her heart stirred in this way, far out of sight, like a fluttering ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... could have pleased Sylvie more. Madame Vinet endured her airs, and bent before them like one accustomed to subjection. On the poor woman's rounded brow and delicately timid cheek and in her slow and gentle glance, were the traces of deep reflection, of those perceptive thoughts which women who are accustomed to suffer bury ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... had admitted, reduced by a perceptive impatience and the sense of having been wholly, wilfully, misunderstood, carried him over to her. He took Fanny, with her face strained away from him, into his arms. "Don't be an idiot," he begged softly; "you ought to be used to my talking by now. Let me go on, it can't ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... other plastic; the one by which it takes in truth, the other by which it works it up into shape. By the one it obtains the substance of thought, by the other the form of thought. The one may be called the perceptive state, the other the reflective state. Thus, too, we see that the perceptive faculty may be exercised in two directions, outwardly and inwardly. It is the same intellectual faculty which, through the senses, looks at and perceives the outward material universe, and through the mind itself, the ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... the first volume of 'Capital,' and as such, is invaluable to the beginner in economics. It places him squarely on his feet at the threshold of his inquiry; that is, in a position where his perceptive faculties cannot be deceived and his reasoning power vitiated by the very use of his eyesight; whereas, by the very nature of his capitalist surroundings, he now stands on his head and ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... not trace the tale;—nor the one weakness of his so mighty love; nor the inferiority of his perceptive intellect to that even of the second woman character in the play, the Emilia who dies in wild testimony against ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... nothing ever did strike the stout commander-in-chief of the forces. All new ideas came to him by slow degrees, and did not readily find admission to his perceptive faculties. But when they did gain an entrance into his thick head, nothing was ever known to drive them out again. As he did not seem inclined to comment on the hint thrown out by his companion, Montague continued, in a ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... and flung it into the rye. Good heavens! I am carrying away such a mass of memories that if I could gather them together into a whole it would make a good nugget of gold! I don't understand why clever, perceptive people crowd into Petersburg and Moscow and don't come here. Is there more truth and freedom in the Nevsky and in the big damp houses than here? Really, the idea of artists, scientific men, and journalists all living ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... art is imitative, its non-artistic emotional capacities are due (with a very few exceptions) to association; for the feelings traceable directly to fatigue or disintegration of the perceptive faculty usually, indeed almost always, prevent the object from affecting us as beautiful. It is quite otherwise when we come to music. Here the coincidence of other emotion resides, I believe, not in the musical thing itself, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... Perdita, and Evadne. We talked of what might arise on this desert earth, if, two or three being saved, it were slowly re-peopled.—We talked of what was beyond the tomb; and, man in his human shape being nearly extinct, we felt with certainty of faith, that other spirits, other minds, other perceptive beings, sightless to us, must people with thought and love this beauteous and ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... concentrate his attention more perfectly; therefore his memory or understanding of the subject read or thought of will be increased. Very many people think and commit to memory by this method of concentrating attention; they probably do not belong to the quick, perceptive, imaginative class, but rather to those who have power of application and who have educated their minds by close voluntary attention. Galton found a large proportion of the Fellows of the Royal Society were of this ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... direct effect of breeding and perpetuating sectarian hate, served in an economic sense to unfit Catholics for employment, and to persuade those who in fact were least unfitted and retained their perceptive faculties, that the scope for their energies was to be found only abroad, and so tended to leave behind a residue of labourers rendered unfit for employment as against the time when the prejudice of the richer classes was removed. The non-application in the more purely Protestant parts of Ulster ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... a vara gude forehead—vara gude indeed. Causative organs large, perceptive ditto. Imagination superabundant—mun be heeded. Benevolence, conscientiousness, ditto, ditto. Caution—no that large—might be developed," with a quiet chuckle, "under a gude Scot's education. Just turn your head into profile, laddie. Hum, hum. Back o' the head a'thegither ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... study, seized the suggestion in all innocence. He had gone to Paris as he had wandered through life, with the mind of a child, eager, receptive, open to impression. Such minds pass by much that is of value, but to one or two conclusions they bring a perceptive comprehension which is photographic in ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... became actively aware that a subtle change was growing manifest in the ordinary manner of Mr. Andrew Bush. She shrugged her shoulders at the idea at first. But she was a woman; moreover, a woman of intelligence, her perceptive ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... before me, as he turned over the sweet-potatoes and pea-nuts which were roasting in the ashes, listened with reverence to the wiles of the ancient Ulysses, and meditated the same. It is Nature's compensation; oppression simply crushes the upper faculties of the head, and crowds everything into the perceptive organs. Cato, thou reasonest well! When I get into any serious scrape, in an enemy's country, may I be lucky enough to have you at my elbow, to pull me out ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... produce it, a rudimentary appreciative sense will commonly suffice for its apprehension. The chances are, when any foreigner fails to catch the point of an American joke or story, that it is due to something other than a lack of perceptive capability. ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... and friends as if I had known them all my life, and loved them dearly. Nay, what was more, I couldn't in my heart of hearts help liking them. They were really sweet people—so kind and sympathetic, so perceptive of my sensitiveness. They asked no questions that could hurt me in any way. They showed no curiosity about the object of my visit or my relation to Dr. Ivor. They were kindness and courtesy itself. I could see Mr. Cheriton was a gentleman in fibre, and Elsie was as sweet as ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... can idealise every kind of activity, which can see what we call poetry in every commonplace, which can read destiny in apparently petty desires, which widens the vision of life by seeing in every action man in relation to the Universe. In art and in life passions are limited by the bounds of our perceptive imagination; by the extent to which we are capable of seeing and feeling things intensely. If we only see or feel ambition as a petty and sordid thing, in a petty and sordid person, we cannot make a tragic passion of ambition; if jealousy is a little vice with ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... is specifically the insanity of disease, as in acute fevers. Dementia is a general weakening of the mental powers: the word is specifically applied to senile insanity, dotage. Aberration is eccentricity of mental action due to an abnormal state of the perceptive faculties, and is manifested by error in perceptions and rambling thought. Hallucination is the apparent perception of that which does not exist or is not present to the senses, as the seeing of specters ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... the divine Adrastia, are condemned to be scourged by the Furies, in order that they may be excited by a dissonance as corporeal through seditions, destructions, and plagues, as it is spiritual, through the forfeiture of harmony between the perceptive and enjoying powers; but it is aglow kindled by the intellectual sun in the soul, and a divine impetus which lends it wings, with which, drawing nearer and nearer to the intellectual sun, and ridding itself of the rust of human cares, it becomes a gold tried and pure, has the perception ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno |
