"Volition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... opposite side to where I stood, and calmly crossed over whilst I went round. At last, by long and patient waiting, he, too, allowed me to come near and present my seductive food to his notice—the wiry proboscis was uncoiled and felt about for the honey; once plunged into that, all volition seemed to cease, he allowed me to coax him upon my finger, and he, too, was safely caged; but he behaved very differently from "fair Cynthia." The moment his repast was ended he flapped with desperate force against the bars, and in ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... side and then on the other, and weighs them until the two sides hang in equipoise, with no prepondering motive to enable him to decide. He is in stable equilibrium, and so does not move at all of his own volition, but moves very easily at ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... can lie to our supposing potential or elementary volition and consciousness to exist in atoms, on the score that their action would be less regular or uniform if they had free will than if they had not. By giving them free will we do no more than those who make them bound to obey fixed laws. They will be as certain to use their freedom of will only in ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... the people.[-12-] Caesar declared that with him he was angry, because Cato had grudged him the distinction attaching to the preservation of such a man, but released his son and most of the rest, as was his custom: for some came over to him immediately of their own volition, and others later, so as to approach him after time should have somewhat blurred his memory. So these escaped, but Afranius and Faustus would not come to him of their own free will, for they felt sure of destruction. They fled to Mauritania, where they were captured by Sittius. Caesar put them ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... live there. That region of burnt and fissured rock is tunneled and inhabited. The unlikely serrations and ridges with the smoke moving over them are porous, and a fluid life ranges beneath unseen. It is the beginning of Dockland. That the life is in upright beings, each with independent volition and a soul; that it is not an amorphous movement, flowing in bulk through buried pipes, incapable of the idea of height, of rising, it is difficult to believe. It has not been believed. If life, you protest, is really there, has any purpose which is better than that of extending worm-like through ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... garment. In an instant he became absolutely cool, steady, and self-possessed, and lifting his rifle to his shoulder with a lightning-like movement, while the sights of the weapon seemed to line themselves of their own volition upon the centre of the beast's broad forehead, right between the eyes, he pressed the trigger. There was a flash, a sharp, whip-like report, a faint puff of smoke, and the lion dropped stone dead where ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... the course of reproduction we have so far been concerned with what are commonly considered the blind operations of Nature in the absence of conscious and deliberate volition. We have seen that while at the outset Nature seems to have impressed an immense reproductive impetus on her creatures, all her energy since has been directed to the imposition of preventive checks on that reproductive impetus. The end attained by these ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... examined the face of the man. Then he took the head in both his hands and raised it. "What are you doing?" screamed Emma, hoarsely, shrinking back at the sight of the head that seemed to be rising of its own volition. ...
— The Dead Are Silent - 1907 • Arthur Schnitzler
... education of childhood may be doubtful; it is, at any rate, less automatic than the previous acts, for a man might by conscious effort learn to perform it more skilfully, or even to suppress it altogether. Actions of this kind, with which instinct and volition enter upon equal terms, have been called 'semi-reflex.' The act of running towards the train, on the other hand, has no instinctive element about it. It is purely the result of education, and is preceded by a consciousness ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... that face: he knew it as well as, far better than he knew his own; its oval curves, its dimpled sweetness, its laughing eyes. Just for such brief seconds of time as were necessary for perfect recognition he saw it; and then, impelled by his former purpose—no time now for a new volition—he got himself up and walked on, with his eyes in ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... I opened it, and the next door across the little passage, I saw the same thing repeated in the bedroom beyond—a door closing, apparently from its own volition. The same thing happened with the door ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... That it felt real affection for him there seemed little doubt, for now that the blacks were disposed of it walked slowly back and forth about the stake, rubbing its sides against the ape-man's legs and purring like a contented tabby. That it had gone of its own volition to bring the balance of the pack to his rescue, Tarzan could not doubt. His Sheeta was indeed a ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and horses of fire, no sudden rapture; but, as the narrative makes emphatic, a slow, leisurely, self-originated floating upwards. He was borne up from them, and no outward vehicle or help was needed; but by His own volition and power He rose towards the heavens. 'And a cloud received Him out of their sight'—the Shechinah cloud, the bright symbol of the Divine Presence which had shone round the shepherds on the pastures of Bethlehem, and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of here!" yelled the tall fellow, who had first challenged his right to remain in Pleasantville or its environs. As the crowd fell apart to make way for him, willing hands were extended to give him the needed impetus, and without special volition of his own. ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... are either to go home or not, does not prevent your freedom; because the liberty of choice between the two is compatible with that certainty. But if one of these events be certain now, you have no future power of volition. If it be certain you are to go home to-night, you must go home.' JOHNSON. 'If I am well acquainted with a man, I can judge with great probability how he will act in any case, without his being restrained by my judging. GOD may have this probability increased to certainty.' BOSWELL. 'When ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... over the prayer prayed itself without seeming thought or volition on his part, as he went from place to place, faithfully, keenly, step by step, searching out what he needed to know. At last toward six o'clock, his chain of evidence led him to the door ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... marked a share. It was by pure accident that she had joined the crowd assembled to see the King lay the foundation-stone of the proposed new Theatre. She had been as it were, entangled in the press of the people, and had got pushed towards the centre of the scene almost against her own volition. And while she had stood,—a passive and unwilling spectator of the pageant,—her attention had been singularly attracted towards the uneasy and restless movements of the youth who had afterwards attempted the assassination of the monarch. She had watched him narrowly; ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... grew harder with the lapse of years; the smile that took no radiance from a light within; the frown that blackened as the soul grew darker. He saw all these, and still for ever, amid a thousand distracting ideas, his thoughts, which were beyond his own volition, concentrated in the one plague-spot of his life, and held him there, fixed as a wretch bound hand and foot upon ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... disappearance, Peter stood for several minutes thinking. His brief crusade into Niggertown had ended in a situation far outside of his volition. That morning he had started out with some vague idea of taking Niggertown in his hands and molding it in accordance with his white ideas; but Niggertown had taken Peter into its hands, had threatened his life, had ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... glittering arch of her upper third, occasionally, and scrape it along behind the comblike row; sometimes a pinnacle stood straight up, like a statuette of ebony, against that glittering white shield, then seemed to glide out of it by its own volition and power, and become a dim specter, while the next pinnacle glided into its place and blotted the spotless disk with the black exclamation-point of its presence. The top of one pinnacle took the shapely, clean-cut form of a rabbit's ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the infant, for the most part, follow passively the traction exercised by nurses and mothers, sometimes consciously, but more often unconsciously. We have now to consider a period when the child becomes possessed of a driving force of his own, and moves in this direction or that of his own volition. In this new intellectual movement through life he will not avoid tumbles. He will feel the restraints of his environment pressing upon him on all sides, and he will often come violently in contact with rigid rules and conventions to which he must ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... would take drastic treatment to get under the hide of this sneering bully who had come within an ace of ruining the life of June Tolliver. The law could not touch him. He had not abducted her. She had gone of her own volition. Unfulfilled intentions are not criminal without an overt act. Was he to escape scot free? She had scoffed at the idea that June might die. But in her heart she was not so sure. The fever was growing on her. It would be days before ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... aspects of our psychic life that are so distinct, and it would be foolish to delay in order to enumerate the differences. The characteristic of novelty should by itself suffice, since it is the special and indispensable mark of invention, and for volition is only accessory: The extraction of a tooth requires of the patient as much effort the second time as the first, although it ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... blue, or gray, or black, as her feeling varies and the soul informing them is in a state of joy, or trouble. Her most bewitching feature is her mouth, which has two dangerous dimples near it that go and come, sometimes without her volition and sometimes, I fear, with her full accord and desire. Her hair is brown and falls in such a mass of ringlets that no cap has ever yet been found which can confine it and keep it from weaving a golden net in which to ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... knowledge by means of principles a priori [56]; the will, or practical reason; the faculty of choice (Germanice, Willkuehr) and (distinct both from the moral will and the choice,) the sensation of volition, which I have found reason to include under the head of single and double touch." To this, as far as it relates to the subject in question, namely the words (the aggregative and associative power) Mr. Wordsworth's "objection is only that the definition is too ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... and Mollie were alone in the tiny library. Babcock had been warmed, washed, fed. Seemingly without volition on his part, he was before the hard-coal blaze, his feet on the fender, the light carefully shaded from his ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... becoming supercilious—it had always been illogical; while the cote gauche was just beginning to discover that it had made a revolution for other people. Then it was happiness itself to be with Adrienne, and when I felt the dear girl pressing me to her heart, by an act of volition of which pocket-handkerchiefs are little suspected, I threw up a fold of my gossamer-like texture, as if the air wafted me, and brushed the first tear of happiness from her eye that ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... defensive, one clenched fist held menacingly before them. Sally tried to take her eyes away, but a morbid fascination held them. The anticipation of that first blow dragged her as the butcher drags his sheep to the shambles. Every glance she stole in their direction was reluctant; but all power of volition seemed to have left her. The sight of those two half-stripped bodies, gleaming in the gas-light, had concentrated in her eyes. At that moment they ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... trustworthy observer. (477/2. Mr. Wallace speaks of "a readiness to accept the most marvellous conclusions or interpretations of physiologists on what seem very insufficient grounds," and he goes on to assert that the frog experiment is either incorrectly recorded or else that it "demonstrates volition, and not reflex action.") If, indeed, any one knows a frog's habits so well as to say that it never rubs off a bit of leaf or other object which may stick to its thigh, in the same manner as it did the acid, your objection would be valid. Some of ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... so blended with their personal being, that we can hardly decide whether it is thought that wills or will that thinks. Their actions display the intensest intelligence; their thoughts come from them clothed in the thews and sinews of energetic volition. Their force, being proportioned to their intelligence, never issues in that wild and anarchical impulse, or that tough, obstinate, narrow wilfulness, which many take to be the characteristic of individualized ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... the flutter which Mr. Vandeford now answered, without any conscious volition. "There ought to be a great play out of the Klondike. Jack London could have done it, but—but—" the faithful gray eyes were raised to his with the ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... her with the demand for human sacrifice. Those devouring kisses sent unimagined apprehensions through her heart. They seemed to satisfy him so little while they sapped from her every atom of vitality, leaving her helpless as an infant, her body drawn to his as a needle to the magnet, not of her own volition, but simply by his strength. And ever the fire of his passion grew hotter till she felt as one bound on the edge of a mighty furnace which scorched her ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... of the usual course had happened; he and his crew having, seemingly, regarded the attempt to board them as men regard the natural phenomena of the planets, or in other words, as if the ship, of which they were merely parts, had escaped by her own instinct or volition. This habit of considering the machine as the governing principle is rather general among seamen, who, while they ease a brace, or drag a bowline, as the coachman checks a rein, appear to think it is only permitting the creature to work her own will a little more freely. It is ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... notions of Nature, however exalted or however grotesque, have their foundation in experience. The notion of personal volition in Nature had this basis. In the fury and the serenity of natural phenomena the savage saw the transcript of his own varying moods, and he accordingly ascribed these phenomena to beings of like passions with himself, but vastly ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... only a particular mode of thinking, like intellect; therefore (by Prop. xxviii.) no volition can exist, nor be conditioned to act, unless it be conditioned by some cause other than itself, which cause is conditioned by a third cause, and so on to infinity. But if will be supposed infinite, ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... her thoughts for a month past; he had come back to her. She had not to consider whether she should ever see him again; he was with her now. She had not to think whether he was there for good or evil, she had lost all volition in the will of the man who stood before her; she was the slave of his ring, rejoicing in her slavery, and ready to do his bidding as all the other ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... yawn, remarked that she should often drop in for a warm; the rest of the house seemed to her chilly. Celia gave the required invitation, and Lady Heyton stood looking about her vacantly, and as if she were waiting for the volition to go. ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... of kataplexy, so far as Spiders are concerned. "I have frequently watched Spiders in this condition," he observes, "to determine the point in question, and their behaviour always impressed me as being a genuine feigning of death, and therefore entirely within their volition. The evidence is of such indefinite nature that one can hardly venture to give it visible expression, but my conviction is none the less decided. I may say, however, that my observations indicate that the Spiders ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... necessary and innocent result of the relative position of sun, moon, and earth. The comets became bodies in space, unrelated to the beings who had imagined that all creation was watching them and their doings. By degrees caprice, volition, all symptoms of arbitrary action, disappeared out of the universe; and almost every phenomenon in earth or heaven was found attributable to some law, either understood or perceived to exist. Thus nature was reclaimed ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... shaking his head groggily. Then he realized what had been done to him. With a snarl of rage, he was on his feet, his knife in his hand. It was a Terran bowie knife. Without conscious volition, Howell's pistol was out and he was ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... Maxwell, who sent and asked the Battalion to supply picquets for duty in the disturbed area. This action rather raised the resentment of some units and created a certain amount of ill-feeling. So acute did this become that on one occasion the Battalion of its own volition was on the point of "standing to" with entrenching tool handles to repel a threatened raid. However, common sense prevailed and good feeling with the men of the Eastern States was soon re-established, but not before the title "J——'s Own" had been ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... the mind, to keep it in repair. By altering the state of the body, we are changing that of the mind, whenever the defects of the mind depend on those of the organization. The mind, or soul, however distinct its being from the body, is disturbed or excited, independent of its volition, by the mechanical impulses of the body. A man becomes stupified when the circulation of the blood is impeded in the viscera; he acts more from instinct than reflection; the nervous fibres are too relaxed or too ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... difficulty in imagining that, at some former period, this universe was not in existence; and that it made its appearance in six days (or instantaneously, if that is preferred), in consequence of the volition of some pre-existent Being. Then, as now, the so-called a priori arguments against Theism; and, given a Deity, against the possibility of creative acts, appeared to me to be devoid of reasonable foundation. I had not then, and I have not now, the smallest a priori objection ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... and kissed him with a sense of shame. Before morning all power of speech or volition left Anthony Thurston, and twelve hours later ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... Helen crossed herself hastily, pushing the magic ball towards him. But, as though endowed with life and volition of its own—or was it merely that Dick's hand was even yet not quite of the steadiest?—it evaded his grasp, fell off the table edge and rolled, gleaming moonlike, far across the floor, away behind the pedestal of the bronze Pompeian Antinous, into the ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... designed in the properties and successions of natural objects, intimates, nevertheless, a preconceived progress. Organisms may be evolved in orderly succession, stage after stage, towards a foreseen goal, and the broad features of the course may still show the unmistakable impress of Divine volition." ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... classification of mental phenomena, as revealed in consciousness, and not constructed in an "independent" and a priori method. The most careful psychological analysis has resolved the whole complex phenomena of mind into thought, feeling, and volition.[61] These orders of phenomena are radically and essentially distinct. They differ not simply in degree but in kind, and it is only by an utter disregard of the facts of consciousness that they can be confounded. Feeling is not reason, nor can it by any logical dexterity ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... organs of volition, the one part of the body that the mind can directly command and act on. The muscles are preeminently the mind's instruments, the visible and moving part of its machinery. They are thought carriers, and during the growth period their ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... and other well-known celebrities assisting). Then he describes me: "A muffled creature of sinister aspect. Short, auburn-locked, extinguished by a portentous hat, tripping and stumbling over a cloak, or robe, in whose dragging folds he conceals his identity as well as his power of volition, a weird and gruesome phantom. What—oh what—is this hovering ghost? He must be just defunct, for the purgatorial garments fit him not, he stumbles at every step, and when he trips an underdress is unveiled that's like a City waiter's. ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... with it something more, that is, than I had seen accomplished by the police of the District of Columbia since I had had the honor of being one of their number. Therefore, when I found myself plunged, almost without my own volition, into the Jeffrey Moore affair, I believed that the opportunity had come whereby I ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... sovereignty is not limitable (which is true) it cannot be surrendered (which is palpably untrue) involves the confusion of two distinct ideas. It is like arguing that because no man can while he lives give up, do what he will, his freedom of volition, so no man can commit suicide. A sovereign power can divest itself of authority in two ways. It may put an end to its own existence or abdicate. It may transfer sovereign authority to another person, or body of persons, of which body it may, or may ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... more amazed. She had thought him handsome before; he was glorious now. Arrayed in fashionable, well-fitting clothes, wearing only a mustache, and with his hair properly cut, he was a vision of manly beauty. Instantly, without any volition on her part, her heart went out to him; she knew that ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... this peculiar diffidence that finally controlled the situation. I mean that if they had failed for the first year or two because they couldn't help it they kept up the habit because they had—what shall I call it?—grown nervous. It really took some lurking volition to account ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... worshipped my mother, but I rarely kissed her or expressed my love for her in words. My love for Dicky terrifies me sometimes, it is so strong, but I cannot go up to him and offer him an unsolicited kiss or caress. Respond to his caresses, yes! but offer them of my own volition, never! There is something inside me that makes ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... the character of Ophelia has a relative beauty and delicacy when considered in relation to that of Hamlet, which is the delineation of a man of genius in contest with the powers of this world. The weakness of volition, the instability of purpose, the contemplative sensibility, the subtlety of thought, always shrinking from action, and always occupied in "thinking too precisely on the event," united to immense intellectual power, render him unspeakably interesting: and yet I doubt whether any woman, who would have ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... delicacy. If we have not half an hour to spare to lie quietly and breathe we can practice the breathing while we walk. It is wonderful how we detect strain and resistance in our breath, and the restfulness which comes when we breathe so gently that the breath seems to come and go without our volition brings new ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... to his own volition. He might as well try to lift himself up by his hair as determine that now he would be a human being by himself. It was an awakening of new powers. He no longer let sunshine and rain pass unnoticed over his head. A strange thing happened to him—he looked wonderingly ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... anything! We didn't take in society papers, because father does not care for gossip or grandees. He has other pursuits. I can show you some of dear mother's articles. There's one called 'Unconscious Volition,' and another on the 'Progress of Species.' I'll bring them ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... He loved Henrietta Temple. She should be his. Who could prevent him? Was he not an Armine? Was he not the near descendant of that bold man who passed his whole life in the voluptuous indulgence of his unrestrained volition! Bravo! he willed it, and it should be done. Everything yields to determination. What a fool! what a miserable craven fool had he been to have frightened himself with the flimsy shadows of petty worldly cares! He was born to follow his own ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... but speedily dropped it to cast a quick glance around the room. Had I heard anything? No. The house was perfectly still, save for the sound of conversation in the drawing-room. Yet I found it hard to keep my eyes upon the page. Quite without my volition they flew, first to one corner, then to another. The room was light, there were no shadowy nooks in it, yet I felt an irresistible desire to peer into every place not directly under my eye. I knew it to be folly, and, after succumbing to the temptation of ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... not expressly allege that the assumption of power and authority which it condemns was intentional and corrupt is no answer to the preceding view of its character and effect. The act thus condemned necessarily implies volition and design in the individual to whom it is imputed, and, being unlawful in its character, the legal conclusion is that it was prompted by improper motives and committed with an unlawful intent. The charge is not of a mistake in the exercise of supposed powers, but of the assumption ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... moral discipline consciously undertaken by personal effort. "The making of mind" is not an art of youth alone. It is an art of middle age and of the older years. Says William James: "The man who daily inures himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition and self-denial in unnecessary things, will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast." Such a one also will resist the decay ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... and things, that imputes a quasi-personal character to facts. To the archaic man all the obtrusive and obviously consequential objects and facts in his environment have a quasi-personal individuality. They are conceived to be possessed of volition, or rather of propensities, which enter into the complex of causes and affect events in an inscrutable manner. The sporting man's sense of luck and chance, or of fortuitous necessity, is an inarticulate or inchoate animism. ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... early and slipped up to the boat-deck to cool off before dinner. He sat down on a bench and half closed his eyes. When he opened them again he saw a woman—the woman, Folly Delaires—standing with her back to him at the rail. He had not heard or seen her come. Almost without volition he arose and stepped to the rail. He leaned on it beside her. ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... up? I think it's happening to me. Please send Louis away," she wrote, and folded the note into an envelope which she fastened down. That moment she found herself crying out without her own volition. She slammed the door and lay down on the floor inside it, to barricade it against Louis. She heard his steps coming along the verandah and clenched her hands fiercely over ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... Manifestation in the most beautiful language and soaking up all the credit of it for himself. The Englishman, said the letter, was not there at all. He was a backslider without Power or Asceticism, who couldn't even raise a table by force of volition, much less project an army of kittens through space. The entire arrangement, said the letter, was strictly orthodox, worked and sanctioned by the highest Authorities within the pale of the Creed. There was great joy at this, for some of the ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... sounds, and I shall plunge with joy into the unsatisfactory pleasures. To-day, however, all these have passed from mind, and I settle down another notch, head snuggled on knees, and sway, elephant-fashion, with sheer joy, as a musky, exciting odor comes drifting, apparently by its own volition, down through the ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... to his mind they were neither more nor less god-inflicted than all others. The doctrine of abstract entities was a kind of instinctive conciliation between the observed uniformity of the facts of nature, and their dependence on arbitrary volition; since it was easier to conceive a single volition as setting a machinery to work, which afterwards went on of itself, than to suppose an inflexible constancy in so capricious and changeable a thing as volition ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... observable in his fierce and desperate countenance no attempt at the insinuation of the other, only a fearful resolution that made her feel like a puppet before him, and drove her, almost without her volition, to ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... when she did not blench, he began to accuse her as men were used to accuse their daughters in the bright days of the Sailor King. He invented enormities which she had committed, and there would have been no obscene infamy of which Maggie was not guilty, if Edwin—more by instinct than by volition—had not pushed open the door ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... merely conforming to the customary is no more moral than an automaton. Given a certain situation, he makes a certain response. It makes no difference that the act happens to have fruitful consequences. It is not a matter of individual choice, of conscious volition. Aristotle long ago stated the ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... Borealis from heaven?" Crossman cut in. He spoke unconsciously. He had not wished to say that, he had not wanted to speak at all, but his subconscious mind had welded the thought of her so fast to the great mystery of the Northern Lights that without volition he had ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... which I shall simply record without attempting to explain. On the hall-table a scarf, evidently the property of the servant before alluded to, was lying. As Ah Fe tried the lock with one hand, the other rested lightly on the table. Suddenly, and apparently of its own volition, the scarf began to creep slowly towards Ah Fe's hand; from Ah Fe's hand it began to creep up his sleeve slowly, and with an insinuating, snake-like motion; and then disappeared somewhere in the recesses of his ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... spontaneity! You, the most deliberate thing that ever walked or crawled! You'd be verily deliberately spontaneous—that's you. Because you want to have everything in your own volition, your deliberate voluntary consciousness. You want it all in that loathsome little skull of yours, that ought to be cracked like a nut. For you'll be the same till it is cracked, like an insect in its skin. If one cracked your skull perhaps one might get a spontaneous, passionate woman out of you, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... impatiently until, presently, the music stopped and they came to us. Then Ned's parted lips said something, and then—as the music recommenced, I was in his arms and, almost without my own knowledge or volition, ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... of the missing were found, save that of Cary—Cary, who, having been given up for lost, turned up most unexpectedly the very day that Fitzroy, applicant for reenlistment, was summarily turned down. But Cary came not of his own volition. He marched with a file of the guard. Cary's story was simple enough. Rawdon and Lowndes had hardly got away on the train when Sergeant Stowell and his party came searching. Cary hid. He was still half drunk. Some one told him of Kelly's arrest, and charged him with ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... countenances and movements of his three guides, so far as Duncan could discover, except that the strokes of their paddles were longer and more in unison, and caused the little bark to spring forward like a creature possessing life and volition." ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... utterly unexplainable and unaccountable accident. He felt as he had done once when, younger, he had stuck his own knife, with which he was whittling, into his eye, to the possible loss of it. It seemed to him as if something had taken place without his volition. He was like a puppet in a show. He looked at Maria, and realized that he hated her. He wondered how he could ever have thought her pretty. He looked at Gladys Mann, and felt murderous. He had a high temper. As the train approached, ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... proper time, if the enemy formed for attack. Only one of those three brigades—Opdycke's—came in at the proper time and took its appropriate place; and that, it was asserted, and no doubt truly, was by the brigade commander's own volition, he having been a soldier enough to know his duty in such a case, without the necessity for any orders. The other two brigades remained in their advanced position until they were run over by the enemy. Much ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... this whitish substance is the centre of the nervous system and the seat of consciousness and volition, and, from the constant study of character by type or by phrenology, one may even go on to deduce with reason that in this protoplasmic substance—in each of the numerous cells into which it is divided and subdivided—are located the human faculties. Hence, it would seem that one may rationally ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... proposition, but only for the briefest possible moment. His gentle, dreamy, wistful countenance seemed almost to light up from within. His answer was given in one breath and as if entirely without conscious volition. ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... these sullen glances. Cries of "Traitor!" "Godless gallows-bird!" "Down with the damned renegade!" dispelled what doubt remained. A shade of melancholy deepened the expression of the sweet, thoughtful mouth; then, as by volition, the habitual look of pensive cheerfulness came back, and he ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... practical unity for its possessor, and that from this practical point of view we can class a field with other fields similar to it, by calling it a state of emotion, of perplexity, of sensation, of abstract thought, of volition, and the like. ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... never leave the house with her lover? Why does a man never kill a man? Why does a man never kill himself? Why is nothing ever accomplished? In real life murder, adultery, and suicide are of common occurrence; but Mr. James's people live in a calm, sad, and very polite twilight of volition. Suicide or adultery has happened before the story begins, suicide or adultery happens some years hence, when the characters have left the stage, but bang in front of the reader nothing happens. The suppression or maintenance of story in a novel is a matter of personal taste; some prefer ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... these differences of power and function? According to the Higher Space Hypothesis they are due to varying potencies of movement in the secret causeways and corridors of space. The higher functions of consciousness—volition, emotion, intellection—may be in some way correlated with the higher powers of numbers, and with the corresponding higher developments of space. Thus would the difference between physics and metaphysics become a difference of degree and not of kind. Evolution is to be conceived of as a continuous ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... are still unable to define the limits of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. "Plants have been described by naturalists, who would determine the limits of the two kingdoms, as organized living bodies, without volition or locomotion, destitute of a mouth or intestinal cavity, which, when detached from their place of growth, die, and, in decay, ferment, but do not putrefy, and which, on being subjected to analysis, furnish an excess of carbon and no nitrogen. The powers of ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... moment he perceived a curious phenomenon a short distance before him—another Christmas-tree, but one which moved, apparently of its own volition, along the sidewalk. As Mr. Carter overtook it, he saw that it was borne, or dragged, rather by a small boy who wore a bright red flannel cap and mittens of the same peculiar material. As Mr. Carter looked down at him, he looked up at Mr. ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... nearly happened. There was no warning of approach now as the creature passed over the grass. Suddenly, like a dark, drifting shadow, the huge bulk loomed up once more before me, making for the entrance of the cave. Again came that paralysis of volition which held my crooked forefinger impotent upon the trigger. But with a desperate effort I shook it off. Even as the brushwood rustled, and the monstrous beast blended with the shadow of the Gap, I fired at the retreating ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... earliest period of its existence the embryon would seem to consist of a living filament with certain capabilities of irritation, sensation, volition, and association, and also with some acquired habits or propensities peculiar to the parent; the former of these are in common with other animals; the latter seem to distinguish or produce the kind of animal, whether man ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... War, without instructions of any kind, committed to Colonel Lafayette C. Baker, of the secret service, the stark corpse of J. Wilkes Booth. The secret service never fulfilled its volition more secretively. "What have you done with the body?" said I to Baker. "That is known" he answered, "to only one man living besides myself. It is gone. I will not tell you where. The only man who knows is sworn to silence. Never till the great trumpeter comes shall the grave of Booth ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... with the Test." And then, as he depresses the Elevator, the Aeroplane with relief assumes its normal horizontal position. Then, almost closing the Throttle, the Thrust dies away. Now, the nose of the Aeroplane should sink of its own volition, and the craft glide downward at flying speed, which is in this case a hundred miles an hour. That is what should happen if the Designer has carefully calculated the weight of every part and arranged for the centre of gravity to be just the right distance in front ...
— The Aeroplane Speaks - Fifth Edition • H. Barber
... Deity. With what awe does the first acquaintance with death impress us! What a thrill passes through the living, as it bends over the inanimate body, from which the spirit has departed! The clay that returns to the dust from which it sprung, the tenement that was lately endued with volition and life, the frame that exhibited a perfection of mechanism, deriding all human power, and confounding all human imagination, now an inanimate mass, rapidly decomposing, and soon to become ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... can look further for victims. I believe that only a small proportion of the women who are in the houses of ill-fame—only a small proportion—make their way there of their own volition, and that small proportion are of the degenerate class who are born with a screw loose somewhere. From their babyhood they who are born with this taint—and we could, perhaps, trace that taint back—but born with that taint, they gradually go into that ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... I look at it, the more I am convinced that you came on board of your own volition. You had two or three good opportunities to ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... are occasionally exerted, and produce all the motions of the fibrous parts of the body; these are the faculties of producing fibrous motions in consequence of irritation which is excited by external bodies; in consequence of sensation which is excited by pleasure or pain; in consequence of volition which is excited by desire or aversion; and in consequence of association which is excited by other fibrous motions. We are hence supplied with four natural classes of diseases derived from their proximate causes; ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... for treason has gone by. We must look at things as they are. Even in battle the white flag must be respected. Let this subject be frankly discussed in a conciliatory manner. If any State has the right to go out of the Union at its own volition, then this Government, in my opinion, is not worth the trouble of preserving. The President is sworn to protect and uphold the Government. So long as there is a navy, an army, and a militia, it is his sworn duty to uphold it—to uphold it as well against an attack from States as from individuals. ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... one's life of one's own volition is one thing. To permit another to take it in a fashion of his own arbitrary selection is quite another. Hamilton Burton had never been submissive. He meant to die as he had lived—"captain of his soul," and so he turned quietly toward the window ledge where he had laid the automatic ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... Almost without volition he half arose to his feet. The girl followed his action, still clinging to his shoulder. Dan inclined his head to speak to her, when with a shriek the wind came again. There was a dull crash forward, a splintering and rearing ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... is now lying at the foot of my bed thinking matters out, and bids me tell you that after various attempts to escape Home Rule, not being (like her mistress) one of those natures made perfect through suffering, she is only 'kept alive by the force of her own volition,' in this house that is full of old maids and has nothing better in it than one old cat, and he isn't worth hunting, being destitute of a tail. Naturally she is doing her best (like somebody else) to keep herself unspotted from that world which is a source of so much ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... the injury resulting from an indefinite continuance of this state of things. It was stated that at this juncture our Government was constrained to seriously inquire if the time was not ripe when Spain of her own volition, moved by her own interests and every sentiment of humanity, should put a stop to this destructive war and make proposals of settlement honorable to herself and just to her Cuban colony. It was urged that as a neighboring nation, with large interests ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • William McKinley
... are taken from the nest and reared by hand, they insist for a long time on being fed in the juvenile manner. However, by and by they begin of their own volition to pick up food after the manner of the adults. At first they are very clumsy about it, but they persevere until they acquire skill, and presently they refuse entirely to open their mandibles for food. Here ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... balloon, even before these gentle impulses; occasionally collapsing, it is true, as the ground-swell swung the yards to and fro, but, on the whole, standing out and receiving the air as if guided more by volition than any mechanical power. The effect on the hull was almost magical; for, notwithstanding the nearly imperceptible force of the propelling power, owing to the lightness and exquisite mould of the craft, it served to urge her through the water at the rate of some three or four knots in the ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... new-found joy, it seemed as though she were borne along on the waves of the music without effort or volition of her own. She dared not trust herself to speak. Once or twice she raised her eyes to meet the dark ones whose gaze she felt upon her face, but the love-light shining in their depths overpowered her glance and she turned her eyes away. She knew that he had seen and recognized the woman, and ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... where women arrest all their feelings and wait. The splendid house, the light, the warmth, all the evidences of a luxurious life about, moved her no more than if she was in a dream. A great sorrow had put her far above these things. She followed the servant who met her at the door without conscious volition. A woman going to execution could hardly have felt more indifference to the mere accidentals of the way of sorrow. And when a door was swung softly open, she saw no one in the room but Roland. Roland helpless, unconscious. Roland even ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... it struck him. Then, alone as he was, he colored to the temples, and gave a little gasp. Like an overwhelming tidal wave there swept over him the realization that his will was mastered by a power above it, mightier than itself; that his seeing Winifred Anstice again was hardly a question of volition any longer, any more than breathing was a matter of will—that he must see her—that the chief question of his future was whether she cared ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... copied from any internal impression. It may be said, that we are every moment conscious of internal power; while we feel, that, by the simple command of our will, we can move the organs of our body, or direct the faculties of our mind. An act of volition produces motion in our limbs, or raises a new idea in our imagination. This influence of the will we know by consciousness. Hence we acquire the idea of power or energy; and are certain, that we ourselves and all other intelligent ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... term is often extended to include panthelism or animatism, the doctrine that a great part, if not the whole, of the inanimate kingdom, as well as all animated beings, are endowed with reason, intelligence and volition, identical with that of man. This latter theory, which in many cases is equivalent to personification, though it may be, like animism, a feature of the philosophy of peoples of low culture, should not be ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... marble springs to life under the workman's hands: we can almost see it happening in these Essays: and we know how often enough a writer finds his own creation kicking over the traces, as it were, and becoming almost independent of his volition. There is no original for Sir Roger or Falstaff or Mr. Micawber: they may not have sprung Athena-like fully armed out of the author's head, and they may have been suggested by some one he had in mind. But once created they ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... carriage, I more than once detected the fragrant sigh of some astonished cow, whose ruminating repose upon the highway we had ruthlessly disturbed. But in the darkness our progress, more the guidance of some mysterious instinct than any apparent volition of our own, gave an indefinable charm of security to our journey that a moment's hesitation or indecision on the part of ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... affairs exists," he went on smoothly, "when its chief magistrate can be abducted and kept hidden, without—or with?—her own volition for a whole week. Only in the extravaganzas of modern romance could we look for similar happenings. Just what is our duty in the premises, gentlemen, is a serious question. The citizens' committee ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... being, to man—the lord of the animal kingdom,—he displayed it, to use his own words, "as plainly as if it were written in our mother-tongue." His discovery consisted in the fact, that the spinal nerves are double in their function, and arise by double roots from the spinal marrow,—volition being conveyed by that part of the nerves springing from the one root, and sensation by the other. The subject occupied the mind of Sir Charles Bell for a period of forty years, when, in 1840, he laid his last ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... the talent for insuring its continuity. Like Arthur Rimbaud, he suffered from the nostalgia of the open road. He disappeared frequently. His whereabouts was a mystery to his friends. He did not care for money or for honours. He was elected without volition on his part as a member of the Academy. Yet he did not use this powerful lever to further his welfare. Silent, a man of continent speech, he never convinced his friends that his art was chaste; yet he never painted an indelicate stroke. His personages, all disillusionised, vaguely suffer, make love ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker |
