"Psychical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the World in me whispered that from professional Believers I should get little sympathy, and probably less credence still. For to have my experience disbelieved, or attributed to hallucination, would be intolerable to me. Psychical investigators, I am told, prefer a Medium who takes no cash recompense for his performance, a Healer who gives of his strange powers without reward. There are, however, natural-born priests who yet wear no uniform other than upon their ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... Hamlet says, real mysteries in this dull, prosaic life of ours. One or two true tales may not come amiss. I am quite ready to give any member of the Psychical Society chapter and verse and authorities, and every ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... it is that I do not see my way to leaving London for Oxford. My reasons for arriving at this conclusion are various. I am getting old, and you should have a man in full vigour. I doubt whether the psychical atmosphere of Oxford would suit me, and still more, whether I should suit it after a life spent in the absolute freedom of London. And last, but by no means least, for a man with five children to launch into ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... the Science of the Soul, and the Phenomena of Nervation, as revealed by Mesmerism, considered Physiologically and Philosophically; including Notes of Mesmeric and Psychical Experience. By JOSEPH WILCOX HADDOCK, M.D. Second and enlarged Edition, illustrated by Engravings of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 82, May 24, 1851 • Various
... wind, and the "something" would doubtless bear fruit; for this elderly spinster aunt, with a mania for psychical research, had brains as well as will power, and by hook or by crook she usually managed to accomplish her ends. The revelation was made soon after tea, when she sidled close up to him as they paced slowly along ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... accounts of desolation, jealousy, weariness and despair. He would say "Your case is a very usual one," so that she did not feel ashamed of being like that. He reduced it all, dispassionately and yet not unsympathetically, and with clear scientific precision, to terms of psychical and physical laws. He trained his patient to use her mind and her will, as well as to remember her dreams and to be shocked ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... instruments of the soul." And even this is not sufficient; "for the gymnast, the ultimate aim of whose art is the beau ideal of humanity, must know what effects applied movements produce upon the corporeal and psychical condition of man; a knowledge which can be obtained only from the most careful and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... Bergson denies the identification of mind and body, saying:[FN181] "It (experience) shows us the interdependence of the mental and the physical, the necessity of a certain cerebral substratum for the psychical state-nothing more. From the fact that two things are mutually dependent, it does not follow that they are equivalent. Because a certain screw is necessary for a certain machine, because the machine works when the screw is there and stops when the screw is taken ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... words on occasion by some process psychically analogous to the condensation of moisture in the air. It is a natural phenomenon known to babes like Beth, but ill-observed, and not at all explained, because man has gone such a little way beyond the bogey of the supernatural in psychical matters that he is still befogged, and makes up opinions on the subject like a divine when miracles are in question, instead of searching for information like an honest philosopher, whose glory it is, not to prove himself right, but to discover ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... fought many fights and was hardened by many wounds. And so it came to pass that I went again to Lansdowne Road to ask about the Theosophical Society. H.P. Blavatsky looked at me piercingly for a moment. "Have you read the report about me of the Society for Psychical Research?" "No; I never heard of it, so far as I know." "Go and read it, and if, after reading it, you come back—well." And nothing more would she say on the subject, but branched off to her ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... with surprise. Was this the trivial Harry talking? Fact is, the pair we were talking about had by some psychical magic rarified the atmosphere for all of us until half our notes ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... even goes so far as to think it possible that we may find experimental evidence of personal persistence after death. This at least we might infer from his recent acceptance of the presidency of the British Society for Psychical Research. In his opening address before the Society, May 28, 1913, he discussed the question of telepathy and in that connection he explained his theory of the relation of mind and brain in the following language. I quote from the ...
— Dreams • Henri Bergson
... in any case, would not be a persona grata to the Society for Psychical Research. As he is violent in his enmities, so is he gullible in marvels. His impeachment of Adriano Lemmi must be ruled completely out of court; his thaumaturgic experiences are paltry trickeries; his account of Albert Pike is largely borrowed matter; the magical practices which he attributes ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... minds had the same index of refraction, so that thoughts flashed back and forth between them effortlessly and without distortion. He thought of her so often and wished for her so much during the first two days of his solitude that it seemed almost a case for the psychical research people when he got a ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... become for him the means of ventilating speculations on terrestrial movement, on the multiplicity of habitable worlds, on the principle of the universe, and on the infinite modes of psychical metamorphosis. Such topics were not calculated to endear him to people of importance on the banks of Isis. That he did not humor their prejudices, appears from a Latin epistle which he sent before him by way of introduction ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... MAX, distinguished German physiologist, born in Baden, and professor at Leipzig; distinguished for his studies on the connection of the physical with the psychical in the human organisation, and has written on psychology as ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... of receiving this or any symbol after the flesh, beware of interpreting it in any fashion that partakes of the character of the mere physical, psychical, or spirituo-mechanical. The symbol deals with things far beyond the deepest region whence symbols can be drawn. The indwelling of Jesus in the soul of man, who shall declare! But let us note this, that the dwelling of Jesus in us is the power of the spirit of God upon us; for 'the ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... as we begin to speak of "genius," we are involved in speculations, psychological, psychical, physical, and metaphysical; in difficulties of all sorts not at present to be solved either by physiological science or experimental psychology, or by psychical research, or by the study of heredity. When I speak ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... the higher sensitiveness of the lower class of animals. Nor need we hesitate to recognize the fine gradations from simple sensitiveness and volition to the higher instinctive and to the other psychical manifestations of the higher brute animals. The gradation is undoubted, however we may ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... Society for Psychical Research is not first in the field of curiosity concerning ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce
... its sphere widened. Hypnotism brought matter for the marvel-mongers, and there followed a long procession of words in limping Greek—a little difficult till practice had made perfect. Another fortunate terminologist hit upon the word "psychical"—the p might be sounded or not, according to the taste and fancy of the pronouncer—and the fashionable children of a scientific age were thoroughly at ease. "There must be something, you know; one always felt that there must be something." And now, if one may judge from what one ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... retort. "It simply means that in the attack on my brain the higher psychical centres are untouched. I can remember, I can think and reason. When that goes, I go. I ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... psychical theory connected with so singular a belief? [14] I think it might be this: The Soul, within its own body, always remains viewless, yet may reflect itself in the eyes of another, as in the mirror of a necromancer. Vainly you gaze into the eyes of the beloved to discern her soul: you see there ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... dogs, of course there were many, and during their lives they were intimate and valued family friends, and their deaths were household tragedies. One of them, a large yellow animal of several good breeds and valuable rather because of psychical than physical traits, was named "Susan" by his small owners, in commemoration of another retainer, a white cow; the fact that the cow and the dog were not of the same sex being treated with indifference. Much the most individual of the ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... in this connection the writings of William James, the psychologist, the proceedings of the Psychical Research Society, the wonderful results of psycho-therapeusis dealing with the unconscious self, the subliminal 'consciousness,' or as Captain Hadfield prefers to call it, 'heightened personality' in his paper on this subject 'The Mind and the Brain' in Immortality, to ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... appear, on enquiry, that one common mind, or psychical nature, belongs to the whole human family, a very strong argument would thence arise, on the ground of analogy, for their community of species ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... psychical character perplexed them much more than my zooelogical. It seems that these islanders had been accustomed to call themselves, in their own tongue, "rational animals with sentiments of justice and piety,"—all which, be it remembered, is expressed in their wonderful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... of my own case have been declined on various pretests by every medical journal to which I have offered them. There was, perhaps, some reason in this, because many of the medical facts which they record are not altogether new, and because the psychical deductions to which they have led me are not in themselves of medical interest. I ought to add that a great deal of what is here related is not of any scientific value whatsoever; but as one or two people on ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... assimilation they have acquired certain periodical rhythms already pre-existing in the parental bodies, and that the communication of the characteristics of these rhythms determines at once the physical and psychical development of the individual in a course as nearly like that of the parents as changed ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... this but to confess that the Power manifested in the cosmos is identical with the Power manifested in life, that physical and psychical are ultimately one, that virtue and well-being are indissolubly associated? What is this but to confess the supreme synthesis, embracing all apparent contradictions, the ultimate harmony in which all discords are ultimately merged and lost for ever? What is ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... projection into some physical plane of her busy sub-consciousness. I mean, simply, that instead of materialising as a story, her preoccupation induced a set of actual and surprising circumstances. Why couldn't it? Let Sir Oliver Lodge or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Society for Psychical Research, anybody who knows about ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... by earliest daylight. Nocturnal bears in search of pork are not uncommon. But even though your interest meets nothing but the bats and the woods shadows and the stars, that few moments of the sleeping world forces is a psychical experience to be gained in no other way. You cannot know the night by sitting up; she will sit up with you. Only by coming into her presence from the borders of sleep can you meet her face to face in her ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... psychical characteristics and development of the child and all the interesting educational problems involved it is impossible to enter here, and reference must be made to the works cited above. But a knowledge of the more important features of normal ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... definition clear and brief. Spirituality is the Self-realisation of the One; psychism is the manifestation of the powers of consciousness through organised matter. Each word of that definition has its own value. We are far too apt, in our ordinary thought and talking, to limit the words "psychical," "psychic," or "psychism" in a quite illegitimate way, and the popular use of the term is illegitimate. It is generally used amongst us to mean unusual manifestations of the powers of consciousness, whereas, properly ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... contends with the mass, as when an author writes to expose the fallacies of social fashion; but unfair, and very frequently unsuccessful, when directed against partially developed truths, or even against such phenomena as we believe mesmerism presents, viz. novel and curious psychical truths, o'erclouded with the dense errors of sometimes enthusiasm, sometimes knavery. We shall soberly examine the subject, because we think that much good may be done by its investigation. The really skilful and judicious steer clear of it from a fear of compromising their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... him cold, objective, a pianist made, not born. But musicians and those with cultured musical palates discerned a certain acid quality in his playing. His gloomy visage, the reflex of a disordered soul, caused Baudelaire to declare that he had added one more shiver to his extensive psychical collection. In Paris the Countess X.—charming, titled soubrette—said, "Have you heard Racah play the piano? He is a damned soul out ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... from the earliest ages and has the unqualified condemnation of Scripture; yet in the last half-century it has taken new interest and dignity to itself under the modern title of "Psychical Research." With boldest assumption it claims to be the only safe exponent of truth, and to be working in the interests of science; changing science being accepted as more trustworthy than revelation. It offers as final evidence for its assumptions, what ...
— Satan • Lewis Sperry Chafer
... The psychical function of humor is to delicately cut the surface tension of consciousness and disarrange its structure that it may begin again from a new and strengthened base. It permits our mental forces to reform under cover, as it were, while the battle is still on. Then, too, it clarifies the field and reveals ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... true. And if it is true, there remains the further hypothesis of man's moral and social "perfectibility," which rests on much less impressive evidence. There is nothing to show that he may not reach, in his psychical and social development, a stage at which the conditions of his life will be still far from satisfactory, and beyond which he will find it impossible to progress. This is a question of fact which no willing on man's part can alter. It is a question bearing ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... he had bathed and completed his toilet, to write an account of the dream for the Psychical Research Society, in whose work he was interested. Half an hour later, as the movements of an awakened household began to proclaim themselves, he sat down at his ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... complex than the mere physical reactions were the psychical ones. When a boy I had, like every other, daydreamed of discovering new continents, of being first to climb a hitherto unscaled peak, to walk before others the shores of strange archipelagoes, to bring back tales ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... human, and that such other forms may be determined by the dominating thought and wish of the owner. For this Double, or astral body as you call it, is really the seat of the passions, emotions and desires in the psychical economy. It is the Passion Body; and, in projecting itself, it can often assume a form that gives expression to the overmastering desire that moulds it; for it is composed of such tenuous matter that ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... so! Let's send it to the Psychical Research, or whoever those people are who collect coincidences and say it's spooks. And a match please, one of you Georgies. Oh, how I should like never to see the inside of an Opera House again. Why mayn't I grow on the walls of a garden like this, or better still, why shouldn't ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... and controlled by the subliminal forces of the participators in the seance. Spirits are nothing but thought-forms. The painstaking investigation recorded in the Proceedings and Journal of the Society for Psychical Research has to a great extent been carried on by inquirers unencumbered by any bias towards "spookery." But the theories in elaboration of psycho-pathological vagaries and dissociation of personality which have been substituted ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... none, therefore, more in need of a land of liberty, none to whose future it is more vital that America should preserve that spirit of William Penn which President Wilson has so nobly characterised. And there is assuredly none which has more valuable elements to contribute to the ethnic and psychical amalgam of ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... and experimenting with mysteries unexplainable by the accepted laws of material science. They had discussed, argued and written grave books upon them. They had been doing all this before any society for psychical research had founded itself and the intention of new logic was to be scientific rather than psychological. They had written books, scattered through the years, on mesmerism, hypnosis, abnormal mental conditions, the ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... this gentleman? you will say. Sir Tiglath Butt, the great astronomer, Correspondent of the Institute of France, Member of the Royal College of Science, Demonstrator of Astronomical Physics, author of the pamphlet, "Star-Gazers," and the brochure, "An investigation into the psychical condition of those who see stars," C.B.F.R.S. and popular member of the Colley Cibber Club in ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... have seen that Buddha said that there was no atman (soul). He said that when people held that they found the much spoken of soul, they really only found the five khandhas together or any one of them. The khandhas are aggregates of bodily and psychical states which are immediate with us and are divided ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... illusions, and resembling the former in their structure and mode of origin. I have throughout endeavoured to keep to a strictly scientific treatment, that is to say, the description and classification of acknowledged errors, and the explanation of these by a reference to their psychical and physical conditions. At the same time, I was not able, at the close of my exposition, to avoid pointing out how the psychology leads on to the philosophy of the subject. Some of the chapters were first roughly sketched out in articles published in magazines and reviews; but these ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... decencies of life; on the contrary, they are relying on the fact that their hearers have, in the depths of their beings, a profound reverence for the object of their sallies. And so, by taking advantage of the moral shock they produce and linking it to the idea of an absurdity, they convert the whole psychical reaction into an explosion of humor. Thus the ring of raconteurs telling blackguardly stories around the stoves in Hooker's Bend stores, are, in reality, exercising one another in the more delicate sentiments of life, and may ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... impresses on so many men, the result of the subjection of the intellect to the will, and of the impossibility of grasping things except as they relate to self. In this respect the American cousin was his antipodes. His whole body had a psychical expression—slim, elastic, alert. Over his bright gray eyes the eyelids drew themselves horizontally, showing his dexterity and acuteness of mind; indeed, his ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... originality and fervor; unknown herbs furnish piquancy and mystery, and—but its crowning glory deserves a new sentence. Around it, above it, beneath it, in its vicinity—but never in it—hovers an ethereal aura, an effluvium so rarefied and delicate that only the Society for Psychical Research could note its origin. Do not say that garlic is in the fish at El Refugio. It is not otherwise than as if the spirit of Garlic, flitting past, has wafted one kiss that lingers in the parsley-crowned dish as haunting as those ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... page 148. "The ribbon of light." Still to be seen (and heard) spinning from one marae to another on Tahiti; or so I have it upon evidence that would rejoice the Psychical Society. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Arnold Schoenberg, its outer side, has thus far been uneventful, though doubtless rich in the psychical sense. He is still young, born in Vienna, September 13, 1874. He lived there till 1901, then in the December of that year he went to Berlin, where he was for a short time conductor in Wolzogen's Bunten Theatre, and also teacher of composition at Stern's Conservatory. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... is how my daughter dreamt Henry's death. I do not wish to insist unduly on the incident, and I have no intention of appealing to the Psychical Research Society to test, ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... is to be gained," she said severely, "by speaking with levity of serious subjects. And, after all, whatever your personal views may be, psychical research is ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... Constantine that they are extravagant, or against some of his notions that they are fantastic, I answer that this book attempts to describe a man and not one of these calculable little super men who, of late, have been taking up so much more of your attention than they deserve. Students who engage in psychical research, as it is called, often confess themselves puzzled by the behaviour of ghosts, it appears to them wayward and trivial. How much more likely are ghosts to be puzzled by the actions of real men? And we are surely ghosts if we keep nothing of the blood which ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... familiarity with Manifestations of every kind. Their letters dropped from the ceiling—unstamped—and Spirits used to squatter up and down their staircases all night; but they had never come into contact with kittens. Lone Sahib wrote out the facts, noting the hour and the minute, as every Psychical Observer is bound to do, and appending the Englishman's letter because it was the most mysterious document and might have had a bearing upon anything in this world or the next. An outsider would have translated all the tangle thus: 'Look out! You laughed at ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... that in what we may call the main line of ascent there has been, along with increasing anatomical complexity, the far greater emergence of mind. In its earliest manifestations, sentience, consciousness, the psychical in general, and the capacity for it, must be regarded merely as phenomena of the physical organism; the capacity to feel, as no more than a property of the living body; and such mind as there is exists for the body. But, as we may see it, there has been a gradual but infinitely real turning ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... medicines and alcoholic beverages has not resulted from an increased resort to surgical remedies. On the other hand, there has been a great increase in the utilization of baths (hydrotherapeutics), of massage, of mechanical treatment and of psychical treatment, all of which accounts no doubt for part of the falling off in the use of alcohol ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... to believe, that, on reaching home, he sat for a long time occupied with the thought of it, to the exclusion of his own anxieties. What! this woman had made of him an ideal such as he himself sought among the most exquisite of her sex? How was that possible? What quality of his, personal, psychical, had such magnetic force? What sort of being was he in Marcella's eyes? Reflective men must often enough marvel at the success of whiskered and trousered mortals in wooing the women of their desire, for only by a specific imagination can a person of one sex assume the emotions ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... unflinching recognition of physical and psychical facts which the average woman blinks over, Mary deceived herself as to the date of that final triumph which permitted her to observe Rhoda Nunn with perfect equanimity. Her outbreak of angry feeling on the occasion of Bella Royston's death ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... it, we are led on to journey through these very realms of fancy, into which I should like to conduct the reader. At the end of our journey we shall have acquired, with the understanding of the first example, the knowledge of certain psychical laws. ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... the fact that his curiosity about them could never be quite satisfied. Other mysteries come and go, but the gipsy mystery stays with us, and was to Borrow a source of endless content. For after sharpening his wits on the ethnological riddle, he could refresh himself with the psychical aspect of the matter, discovering in them the incarnation of one essential human quality, incompletely present in all men. They are the perfect vagabonds; but the germ of vagabondage inheres in mankind at large, and is the source of the changes that have resulted in what we call ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... her kind, to this day, use the number four in contempt, rather than three or five, is a mystery of what one might call the psychical side of the Italian language. ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... of memory is a variety of aphasia known as amnesia, and when the memory is recurrently lost and restored, we have alternating personality. The Society for Psychical Research and many eminent psychologists, among them the late William James, Dr. Weir Mitchell, Dr. Hodgson of Boston, and Dr. A. E. Osborn of San Francisco, have reported many ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... wonder what the lizard has to do with the Romans. For this he has been quite properly laughed at by Dr. Holmes, because he has resorted to an artifice and has failed to create an illusion. Indeed, Dr. Holmes is somewhere so irreverent as to remark that a gill of alcohol will bring on a psychical state very similar to that suggested by Emerson; and Dr. Holmes is accurately happy in his jest, because alcohol does dislocate the attention in a thoroughly ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... differences have followed mainly physical race lines, yet no mere physical distinctions would really define or explain the deeper differences—the cohesiveness and continuity of these groups. The deeper differences are spiritual, psychical, differences—undoubtedly based on the physical, but infinitely transcending them. The forces that bind together the Teuton nations are, then, first, their race identity and common blood; secondly, and more important, ...
— The Conservation of Races - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 2 • W. E. Burghardt Du Bois
... victims" would only depreciate the value of property to a point consistent with the support of an agricultural population. But Mrs. Drabdump's new lodger paid so much for his rooms that he laid himself open to a suspicion of special interest in ghosts. Perhaps he was a member of the Psychical Society. The neighborhood imagined him another mad philanthropist, but as he did not appear to be doing any good to anybody it relented and conceded his sanity. Mortlake, who occasionally stumbled across him in the passage, did ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, more than forty years ago tried some experiments which led him to believe that something then new to science, which he provisionally called "thought transference" and which is now known as ...
— Telepathy - Genuine and Fraudulent • W. W. Baggally
... the immortality of the soul; and it has an especial interest for English readers owing to the fact that much in it that seems to be pure fantasy is based on researches undertaken by the British Society for Psychical Research. The plot and the characters are of secondary importance; they are only used for the purpose of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... PSYCHICAL RESEARCH, SOCIETY FOR, a society founded in 1882 to inquire into the phenomena of spiritualism and kindred subjects of a recondite kind, the subject of Telepathy having engaged recently a good ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... other side, the Society for Psychical Research, while anxiously examining all the modern instances which Folklore rejects, has hitherto neglected, on the whole, that evidence from history, tradition, savage superstition, saintly legend, and so ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... the use of the terms psychical and psychological, we have observed the distinction which metaphysicians have recently made. They employ the term psychical to indicate the relation of the human soul to sense, appetite, propensity, etc., and psychological, as indicating the ultimates ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... subsequent period, when the mind is in a passive state, these impressions may suddenly revive owing to the phenomenon of recurrence. This observation may afford an explanation of some of the phenomena connected with ocular phantoms and hallucinations not traceable to any disease. In these cases the psychical effects produced appear to have no objective cause. Bearing in mind the numerous visual impressions which are being unconsciously made on the retina, it is not at all unlikely that many of these visual phantoms may be due ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... the Cardinal, with the patient air of one talking to a child, "there are hundreds of those; and they are very real indeed; but they are almost entirely mental—or psychical, as some call them. And there are specialists on all of these. Bad habits of thought, for example, always set up some kind of disease; and there are hospitals for ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... seems to me the answer to the second main question: What influence does the moon exercise upon the sleeper? It was earlier discussed, along with the various psychical overdeterminations, that the moonlight awoke first the infantile pleasure memories, among other things that that light shining everywhere lighted the way which led to the house and the dwelling of the earliest ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... are as accessible to invisible influences as man, while their embryos are vastly more so than the parents. If then we recognize the spiritual being in man, and the same spiritual being disembodied as a potential existence,—if, moreover, we recognize the illimitable and incomprehensible psychical power behind the universe, of which man is one expression, we cannot fail to see that the embryonic development of animals from a lower to a higher form is entirely possible and probable; and in the absence of any other practicable ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... than the habit of asking oneself, in question small and great,—Would I consent to be treated as I have just treated my child? If it were only remembered that the child generally suffers double as much as the adult, parents would perhaps learn physical and psychical tenderness without which a child's ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... scroll of hair on the organ of the beholder. Merely to maintain an attitude and gait which I notice in certain club men, and especially an inflation of the chest accompanying very small remarks, there goes, I am convinced, an expenditure of psychical energy little appreciated by the multitude—a mental vision of Self and deeply impressed beholders which is quite without antitype in what we call the effect ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... has been incited to its publication by the commendations of three of the most eminent critics and editors of magazines in the United States, to whom it was submitted in manuscript. In this essay, he discusses his subject from a physio-psychical standpoint, and believes that he has kept intact the canons of scientific ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... that school isn't much of a place, and that this is a great lark, and that he enjoys being here immensely," translated Mollie. "Some psychical phenomena!" exclaimed Young Outram, prancing ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... spiritually. They were much more attractive to me than those of many a splendidly beautiful girl, the immense superiority of whose beauty nobody knew better than I. Why should this have been so? That is one of the mysteries to the solution of which no moral or physical or psychical research has ever ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... demarcation, wider than that between the animals which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves; and I may add the expression of my belief that the attempt to draw a psychical distinction is equally futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life. [7] At the same time, no one is more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... phenomena, from whatever subtle molecular combinations their first manifestation may have arisen, until we reach the highest differentiated organism below man, we shall find the chasm between the physical and the psychical not a thousandth part spanned. And even if man, with the assistance of all the maleficent spirits that "walk the air both when we wake and sleep," could span this chasm, it would be only by another bridge of Mirza across which no daring mortal ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... time, in the right way, and that you will recognize it when it comes. Hold to this thought, never allow it to weaken, hold to it, and continually water it with firm expectation. You in this way put your advertisement into a psychical, a spiritual newspaper, a paper that has not a limited circulation, but one that will make its way not only to the utmost bounds of the earth, but of the very universe itself. It is an advertisement, moreover, which if rightly ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... in the world! Doubtless he is little versed in the utterance of the human soul, who does not recognize in many of the psalms a cry as true as ever came from depth of pain or height of deliverance; but it may all have been but now the jarring and now the rhythmical movement of the waves of the psychical aether!—I lay nothing upon testimony for my purpose now, knowing the things that can be said, and also not valuing the bare assent of the intellect. The sole assurance worth a man's having, even if the most ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... submit to the test of a scientific psychology, the function of which is to determine how far the same principles apply to all phases of mental life whether religious or non-religious. Moreover, in addition to the normal psychical life of man, there is that vast borderland in which the normal merges into the abnormal, and the healthy state into a pathologic one. That there is a physiology of religion is now generally admitted; but ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... after saying "good-night." He was not a man to be easily astonished. Not only was he one of the best-read amateur Egyptologists in Europe, but he was also an ex-President of the Royal Society, a Member of the Psychical Research Society, and, moreover, Chairman of a recently appointed Commission on Comparative Insanity, the object of whose labours was to determine, if possible, what proportion of people outside asylums were mad or sane according ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... was very happy as long as he was only second mechanic at the garage of Messrs. Smith Brothers, of High Street, Puddlesby. It was when he became a member of the Puddlesby Psychical Society that his troubles began. Up till then he had been as sober and hard-working a little man as ever stood four foot ten in his shoes and weighed in at seven stone four. But above all he was an expert in rubber tyres; he knew them, I had ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 18th, 1920 • Various
... makes Giovanni's blind foster-mother, Angela, foretell the tragedy in almost every detail, save that, in her vision, she cannot see the face of Francesca's lover. Mr. Phillips, I take it, is here reinforcing ancient tradition by a reference to modern "psychical research." He trusts to our conceiving such clairvoyance to be not wholly impossible, and giving it what may be called provisional credence. Whether the device be artistic or not we need not here consider. I merely point to it as ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... expeditious method, the Necrophorus is the first of the little purifiers of the fields. He is also one of the most celebrated of insects in respect of his psychical capacities. This undertaker is endowed, they say, with intellectual faculties approaching to reason, such as are not possessed by the most gifted of the Bees and Wasps, the collectors of honey or game. He is honoured by the two following anecdotes, ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... disproportion are not lacking. The study of the physical antedates the study of the mental always. In the history of the individual as well as of nations, knowledge of the psychical has dragged far behind mastery of tangible objects. We come in contact with our physical environment and adjust ourselves to it long before we begin to study the *acts by which we have been able to control objects ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... Tahiti Retrospect The Great Lover Heaven Doubts There's Wisdom in Women He Wonders Whether to Praise or to Blame Her A Memory (From a sonnet-sequence) One Day Waikiki Hauntings Sonnet (Suggested by some of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research) ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... of woman is far more complicated than that of man, as it must be for the function of child-bearing, and likewise the intelligence of woman matures more quickly than the intelligence of man.[44] Many of the physical and psychical differences between the two sexes must be attributed to the fact that man was formed from the ground and woman from bone. Women need perfumes, while men do not; dust of the ground remains the same no matter how long it is kept; ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... of the one of which may be counteracted and annulled in effect by the action of the other. This applies not merely to such physical processes as heart-beats and arterial contraction and relaxing, but to the most intricate functionings which have their counterpart in psychical processes as well. Thus the observation of the inhibition of the heart's action by a nervous impulse furnished the point of departure for studies that led to a better understanding of the modus operandi of the mind's activities than had ever previously been attained ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... of the publications of "The Society for Psychical Research" before him, was busied with the arguments of the spiritists and their bearings ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... constitution, and in which material conditions like those of the visible world should have neither place nor meaning. Such a world would not consist of ethers or gases or ghosts, but of purely psychical relations akin to such as constitute thoughts and feelings when our minds are least solicited by sense-perceptions. In thus marking off the "Unseen World" from the objective universe of which we have knowledge, our line of demarcation would at least be drawn in the right place. The distinction ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... another side to his personality and practice, and one with which we are now more directly concerned; for the cases that especially appealed to him were of no ordinary kind, but rather of that intangible, elusive, and difficult nature best described as psychical afflictions; and, though he would have been the last person himself to approve of the title, it was beyond question that he was known more or less generally as ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... of impermanency. The builders of the first Buddhist temples in Japan—architects of another race—built well: witness the Chinese structures at Kamakura that have survived so many centuries, while of the great city which once surrounded them not a trace remains. But the psychical influence of Buddhism could in no land impel minds to the love of material stability. The teaching that the universe is an illusion; that life is but one momentary halt upon an infinite journey; that all attachment to persons, to places, ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... power of secreting adjectives that they cannot speak the truth when they try. There is no moral obliquity in the case. It is psychical incapacity. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... consummation toward which organic evolution is tending is the production of the highest and most perfect psychical life.—JOHN FISKE. ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... dreams. Wagner and Chopin have a motor element in their music that is fiercer, intenser and more fugacious than that of all other composers. For them is not the Buddhistic void, in which shapes slowly form and fade; their psychical tempo is devouring. They voiced their age, they moulded their age and we listen eagerly to them, to these vibrile prophetic voices, so sweetly corrosive, bardic and appealing. Chopin being nearer the soil in the ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... 'unanalyzable fact' that the two senses function differently under the same objective conditions. But if, on the contrary, it should turn out that the illusions are not reversed for the two senses, then the theory of the ultimate uniformity of the psychical laws will have received an ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... revolt of women: that is, the revolt against compulsory barrenness. In this two classes of women are concerned: those who, though they have no desire for the presence or care of children, nevertheless feel that motherhood is an experience necessary to their complete psychical development and understanding of themselves and others, and those who, though unable to find or unwilling to entertain a husband, would like to occupy themselves with the rearing of children. My own experience of discussing this question leads me to believe that the one point ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... the excessive importance attached to a possible future state: he looks upon this as a psychical stimulant, a day dream, whose revulsion and reaction disorder waking life. The condition may appear humble and prosaic to those exalted by the fumes of Fancy, by a spiritual dram-drinking, which, like the physical, is ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... what have I found? A letter of thy name, O God, I have deciphered in the Vedas, another in the Zend-Avesta, another in the Bible, another in the Koran. Ay, even in the Book of the Royal Society and in the Records of the Society for Psychical Research, have I found the diacritical signs which the infant races of this Planet Earth have not yet learned to apply to the consonants of thy name. The lisping infant races of this Earth, when will they ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... do anything "arbitrarily," and everything of necessity, their feeling of freedom, of subtlety, of power, of creatively fixing, disposing, and shaping, reaches its climax—in short, that necessity and "freedom of will" are then the same thing with them. There is, in fine, a gradation of rank in psychical states, to which the gradation of rank in the problems corresponds; and the highest problems repel ruthlessly every one who ventures too near them, without being predestined for their solution by the loftiness and power of his spirituality. Of what use is it for nimble, everyday intellects, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the common people; and this accounts, in great measure, for the profound respect he always had for the collective wisdom of plain people—'the children of Nature,' he called them—touching matters belonging to the domain of psychical mysteries. There was some basis of truth, he believed, for whatever obtained general credence among these 'children ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... the end! With agonising shriek He turned and fled, the spectral perspiration Dewing his brow and coursing down his cheek; Fled, and was lost to man's investigation (For full discussion of his little tricks See Psychical Research ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... had gone down to the country with Mrs. More and her daughters; and now she was back once more, in a kind of psychical convalescence, at her aunt's new house ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... same way, the organic scaffolding is dominated from on high by the aptitudes of the animal, especially that superior characteristic, the psychical aptitudes. That the Chimpanzee and the hideous Gorilla possess close resemblances of structure to our own is obvious. But let us for a moment consider their aptitudes. What differences, what a dividing gulf! Without exalting ourselves as high ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... time especially is being called to various forms of psychic phenomena measurably through the efforts of the Society for Psychical Research in investigating and sifting the evidence for the stories of apparitions, hallucinations, forewarnings, etc., but more because so many who have heretofore scoffed at and doubted such stories, or who have been foiled in their efforts to obtain for themselves any satisfactory ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... chance has only sent across your way the people who were required to assist you." Chance! dear reader, is there such a thing as chance? Do you believe in chance? Do you attach any precise meaning to the word? Do you employ it at haphazard, allowing it to mean what it may? Chance! What a field for psychical investigation is at once opened up; how we may tear to shreds our past lives in search of—what? Of the Chance that made us. I think, reader, I can throw some light on the general question, by ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... movements and mine, indeed, coincided curiously. The moment I learned she was going anywhere, I discovered in a flash that I happened to be going there too. I commend this strange case of parallel thought and action to the consideration of the Society for Psychical Research. ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... who has offered himself to a master as a pupil to learn practically the "hidden mysteries of Nature and the psychical powers latent in man." The master who accepts him is called in India a Guru; and the real Guru is always an adept in the Occult Science. A man of profound knowledge, exoteric and esoteric, especially the latter; and one who has brought his carnal nature under the subjection ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... Evolution of Conscience Peace and the Fortification of the Panama Canal Peace and Public Opinion Peace Inevitable Peace is our Passion Peace on Earth Peace, our Great Ideal The Philosophy of Universal Peace Physical and Psychical Aspects of War A Plea for International Peace A Plea for Peace Popular Fallacies about War Popular Government and Peace Popular Sentiment and Purer Citizenship: The Right Road to Peace The Power of ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... this striking vision—unique in her experience—nor I, to whom she told it within eight hours, make any claim for it to a supernatural origin. It seemed to us an interesting example of the influence of mind and association on the visualizing power of the brain. A member of the Psychical Society, to whom I sent the contemporary record, classified it as "a visual hallucination," and I don't know that there is anything more to be said about it. But the pathetic coincidence remains still to be noted—we did not know it till afterward—that the seer of the vision was sleeping ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... popular works such as his "Popular Astronomy" (1877); of his text-books on astronomy, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus; of his books on political economy, which science he was accustomed to call his "recreation"; and of magazine articles on all sorts of subjects not omitting "psychical research," which was one of the numerous by-paths into which he strayed. He held at one time the presidency of the American Society ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... considered in connection with the effect on the home of the influences outside it, and the reaction of each on the other. These relations and influences are partly physical and material, partly ethical and psychical. ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... though it were a precious rarity. There lies the true source of their invention. Doubtless, to assert this pertinently, it would be necessary to establish the direct relations between their physical and psychical constitution and that of their work; to note even the particular states at the moment of the creative act. To me at least, it seems evident that the novelty, the strangeness of combinations, through its deep subjective ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot |
