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More "Volition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... glittered on its summit, and sweeping slowly down, held it within reach of Animula. The sylph took it in her delicate hand, and began to eat. My attention was so entirely absorbed by her, that I could not apply myself to the task of determining whether this singular plant was or was not instinct with volition. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... remembered a book he could show Robin tomorrow and he thought of that. There was also a game in a little box which could be easily carried under his arm. His mother was "thinking" and he was used to that. It came on her sometimes and of his own volition he always, on such occasion, kept as quiet as ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... as coolly as if nothing out 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 ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... quite prompt. "I'm not giving anything—or doing anything. What has happened seems to me to have come about simply and naturally, like the sunrise or the seasons, because it's the fullness of time and what God means. I can't say more about it than that. If it depended on my own volition I shouldn't be able to speak of it so frankly. But now—if you want ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... far back in an overlooked corner of Eden, and I prefer the forceful father influence that teaches one to overcome rather than the mother cult which is to bear, for so much is cumbrously borne in self-glorified martyrdom by women of their own volition. ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... than a mere human reaction, I believe. I have not the power of writing myself at all, though I have felt the pencil turn in my hand—a peculiar spiral motion like the turning of the tables, and independent of volition, but the power is not with me strong enough to ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... OF THE, the doctrine that in and under the dominion of pure reason the will is free, and not free otherwise; that in this element the Will "reigns unquestioned and by Divine right"; only in minds in which volition is treated as a synonym of Desire does this doctrine ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... capabilities of magnetism was entertained at the same time. It was believed that a sympathetic alphabet could be made on the flesh, by means of which persons could correspond with each other, and communicate all their ideas with the rapidity of volition, although thousands of miles apart. From the arms of two persons a piece of flesh was cut, and mutually transplanted, while still warm and bleeding. The piece so severed grew to the new arm on which it was placed; but still retained so close a sympathy with its native ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... that she is about to die. With her head resting on her shoulder, she has glided before the smoking altar. Her body has lost all rigidity on her bending legs, her arms hang down at her side; her glance is distracted; she has lost all volition in the use of her limbs; and she is there, sinking motionless, her throat scarcely distending with a breath, turning white under her crown of roses, which the painter's brush has made to pale in sympathy. Between her body and the altar a young priest is leaning in horrified ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... not give account of all sides of our laboratory work. An essential part of the investigations every year has been the study of the active processes, such as attention, apperception, and volition. During the last year several papers from these fields have been completed, but we were unable to include them in this volume on account of the space limits; they are kept back for the second volume, in which accordingly the essays on the active functions ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... parable and that of the lost sheep there are certain notable differences, though the lesson in each is in general the same. The sheep had strayed by its own volition; the coin[963] had been dropped, and so was lost as a result of inattention or culpable carelessness on the part of its owner. The woman, discovering her loss institutes a diligent search; she sweeps the house, and perhaps learns of dirty corners, dusty recesses, cobwebby nooks, ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... figure swaying, more than shoulder high, and disappearing up above into the darkness. For me, under my cowl, it was suffocatingly hot; but I seemed to move forward, following, swept along without any volition of my own. It appeared an immensely long journey; and then, as we went at last up the cathedral steps, a voice cried harshly, "Death to the heretic!" My heart stood still. I clutched frantically at the handle of a pistol that ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... answer to his hail, and Stevens paused in shocked amazement. He knew that never of her own volition would she be out so late—Nadia was gone! A rapid tour of inspection quickly confirmed that which he already knew only too well. Forgotten was his hunger, forgotten the power plant, forgotten everything except the fact that ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... 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 a heap ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... how it is that women possess tenacity of will in precise proportion to the frivolity of their lives? All these butterflies have a volition of iron." ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... 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 ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... swaying flowers, changed by one written word into a desert of silence. It is the sudden annihilation of purpose and significance in a body and mind vital with it; so that as we close the poem we seem to see for ever moving up and down the garden path a stiff, brocaded gown, moving with no volition. The days will pass: the daffodils will change to roses, to asters, to snow; but the unbroken pattern ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... Nell Darrel there not more than twenty minutes since, drugged into complete insensibility. She could not have gone from the seat of her own volition. ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... this blind obedience the text of her entire character. It is difficult for those who think very earnestly for their children to know when their children are thinking on their own account. The exercise of their volition we construe as revolt. Our love does not like to be invalided and deposed from its command, and here I think yonder old thrush on the lawn who has just kicked the last of her lank offspring out of the nest to go shift for itself, much the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... gathered on its way sea-birds and birds from the land; there were gulls, electric white and black man-of-war birds, butterflies, and they all seemed imprisoned under a great drifting dome of glass. As they went, travelling like things without volition and in a dream, with a hum and a roar the south-west quadrant of the cyclone burst on the island, and the whole bitter business ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... of Lady ——. Her sister, who is thought handsomer, and is a lovely creature (and morally and mentally as worthy of that epithet as physically), has not this severely sweet expression, or sweetly stern, if you prefer it, though this implies a shade of volition, which falsifies the application of it. This is what I especially admire in Lady ——, who adds to that faultless Greek outline, which in its integrity and justness of proportion seems the type of truth, an eye whose color deepens, and a fine-textured cheek, where the ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... worked upon by the Jansenists, suddenly refused to appear. In a statement drawn up before a notary, we read: "To-day appeared before me, the Sieur Jean Ramponneau, cabaretier, living in the basse Courtille, who has of his own free will and volition declared that the serious reflections which he has made upon the dangers and the obstacles to the salvation of those persons who appear upon the stage of a theatre, and upon the justness of the censures which the ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... log in a tideway; others, without appendages, were as inert and helpless as the huge red-and-gray disks. He saw four ball-shaped creatures float by, clinging together; then a group of eight, then one of twelve. All these, to the extent of their volition, seemed to be in a state of extreme agitation ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... we can draw an extremely practical conclusion. If, namely, we wish our trains of ideation and volition to be copious and varied and effective, we must form the habit of freeing them from the inhibitive influence of reflection upon them, of egoistic pre-occupation about their results. Such a habit, like other habits, can be formed. ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... than to start with inanimate molecules and smuggle life into them; and that, therefore, what we call the inorganic world must be regarded as up to a certain point living, and instinct, within certain limits, with consciousness, volition, and power of concerted action. IT IS ONLY OF LATE, HOWEVER, THAT I ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... obligations. Our text is not only a remonstrance on the grounds of prudence, showing God-neglecting men that they are foolish, but it is an appeal to conscience, convincing them that they are sinful. God loves us and cares for us. We are bound to Him by ties which do not depend on our own volition. And so there is punishment for the sin, and the evils experienced in a godless life are penal ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... day, wearing a strange metallic apparatus over ear and mouth, watching small lights that wink significantly at her and perpetually pulling out and slipping in and releasing little flexible strings that seem to have a resilient volition of their own. They hunted out Mrs. Barnet and heard her ideas about conjoint homes for spinsters in the Garden Suburb. And then they went over a Training College for elementary teachers and visited the Post Office and then came back to more unobtrusive contemplation, ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... doctrine that the state's promise to pay is payment, and Napoleon was one of these. He was equally childish in regard to the knotty social question which confronted him, apparently believing that his personal volition, as the expression of political power, was or ought to be equivalent to popular spontaneity. The mixture of the old and new aristocracies had, in spite of all efforts, been mechanical rather than chemical, except so far as that the former was rather the preponderating ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... above hers. This was a naked savage with hawk-like face. Yet the eyes were the ones that she had come to know so well, half tragic, somber, but clear and, toward her, tender, very, very tender. With a shuddering sigh, Rhoda looked away. But against her own volition she ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... the moist odour of the river and the reeds; an atmosphere now hot, now cold; profound silence. Suddenly, unaccountably, she lost all power of volition and of thought; her limbs relaxed, and she ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... to instinct is reason. They are the negative and positive of mental volition. The man who retains the animal gift of unreasoning divination, preserving that clear power against the handicaps which mind training and education impose, is necessarily psychic, or, as they say ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... on yoga it is laid down that the main duct should be brought under the control of the will. The soul may then, by an act of volition, be withdrawn from the whole physical system into the convolutions of the brain in the head. The brain, in the language of yogins, is a lot us of a thousand leaves. If the soul be withdrawn into it, the living creature will ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... has a listener to bother about Pierrot? What's Pierrot to him or he to Pierrot? Perhaps Schoenberg had caught his fish in the musical net he used, and what more did he want, or what more could his listeners expect?—for to be hooked or netted by the stronger volition of an artist is the object of ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... viewed death afar off, but not until the past three days had it threatened her own loved ones. In that hour she was experiencing the extremity of sorrow, and each aching nerve in her body seemed to possess a stabbing volition of its own, for again and again the torturing points ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... in the heart of the maiden? 'Where it had died!'—it had not died. Seventy years had passed, and the love-story was presently enacting itself, as all past and all future must for ever be enacting to beings for whom time is not. Then, too, where was he who, by some means, whether of his own volition or not, had become so much a part of the pulsing life of a young girl that, when all else of life passed from her with the weight of years, her heart still remained obedient to him? Where was he? Had his life gone out like the ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... her 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 ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... implies that the taking of the census had been so well established a custom that it was a long time before Rome itself had cared to enact a law which changed the year of census taking in those towns which had not of their own volition made their census ...
— A Study Of The Topography And Municipal History Of Praeneste • Ralph Van Deman Magoffin
... behind them, stirred to life at last, but the horsemen did not hear. What were those looming up ahead? Not naked slingers—armoured cavalry! Hasdrubal with his Gauls and Spaniards were before them—upon them; and all sense and volition were lost ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... proved a drain upon the Vanderbilt fortune, although, thanks to their large share in the control of laws and industrial institutions, the Vanderbilts possess at all times the power of recouping themselves at volition. The American marriages, on the other hand, contracted by this family, have interlinked other ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... Royal Family advances us to the most marked of all the superficial English characteristics; or, perhaps, loyalty is not superficial, but is truly of the blood and bone, and not reasoned principle, but a passion induced by the general volition. Whatever it is, it is one of the most explicitly as well as the most tacitly pervasive of the English idiosyncrasies. A few years ago—say, fifteen or twenty—it was scarcely known in its present form. It was not known at all with many in the time of the latest and ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... 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 the ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... of a lump of reef falling from the roof somewhere far down the drive brought Dick sharply to his feet. His work was not yet accomplished. The scheme that had come to him without volition was nevertheless clearly set forth in his mind. He started dragging at Hardy again, and gradually drew him to the ordinary level of the drive. Once the water attained this height it would flow away towards the shaft, and do the young man no harm. Dick feared Harry was dead; but he did not reason, ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... mind too dulled to be conscious of more than a despairing dejection. As he scarcely expected to reach the post, it did not matter how soon he fell. Yet, by instinctive effort stronger than conscious volition, the struggle for life continued; and Lisle's keen anxiety concerning him diminished as the hours went by. Every step brought them nearer warmth and shelter, and made it more possible that help could be obtained if the lad collapsed. That was the only course that would be available because ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... always yield to the strongest motive; and motives are not of our own creation or choice, but are brought to bear upon us independently of our own action. There has been, from the creation until now, an unbroken series of causes and effects, and we can trace every human volition to some anterior cause or causes belonging to this inevitable series, so that, in order for the volition to have been other than it was, some member of this ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... of volition is the life of action. Now all our actions represent a resultant of the forces of impulse and inhibition, and by constant repetition of actions this resultant may become almost habitual and unconscious. Such ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... upward along the rough door all the forces of his being down to the last shred of vitality. At once the indomitable spirit of the woods-runner answered the call. Regis Brugiere concentrated his will on a pinpoint. Like a sprinter his volition was fixed on a ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... human affairs; or, as Mr. Buckle expresses it, that social phenomena 'are the results of large and general causes which, working on the aggregate of society, must produce certain consequences, without regard to the volition of the particular men of whom the society is composed.' Now, though free agency may co-exist with invariable regularity, it obviously cannot co-exist with necessary regularity, which, consequently, is incompatible likewise with moral responsibility. If men ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... time when the little party arrived there happened to be a circle gathered around one of the most accomplished performers to witness an exhibition of his skill, and surely nothing could be more graceful. Without sensible effort, and as if by mere volition, he seemed to glide over the glossy surface, now forwards, now backwards, now sideways, now swiftly, now slowly, whirling like an eagle in rapid or dilatory curves, describing all the lines that Euclid ever drew or imagined, and cutting such ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... familiar curly ringlets skipped past on the opposite side of the street. When she had gone perhaps fifty yards, John walked down the steps and followed not too rapidly. He must catch up quite as if by accident, for it would never do to have the meeting occur seemingly of his own volition. ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... information. I believe it scarce will be asserted, that the first species of reasoning alone is ever the cause of any action. As its proper province is the world of ideas, and as the will always places us in that of realities, demonstration and volition seem, upon that account, to be totally removed, from each other. Mathematics, indeed, are useful in all mechanical operations, and arithmetic in almost every art and profession: But it is not of themselves they have any influence: Mechanics are the art of regulating the motions ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... of the bar, Clara panted fever-stricken. The weeks went on; what strength supported her from the Monday morning to the Saturday midnight she could not tell. Acting and refraining, speaking and holding silence, these things were no longer the consequences of her own volition. She wished to break free from her slavery, but had not the force to do so; something held her voice as often as she was about to tell Mrs. Tubbs that this week would be the last. Her body wasted so that all the garments she wore were loose upon her. The only ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... a Frog a Soul? and if so, of what Nature is that Soul?" (1870), a physiological discussion as to the seat of those purposive actions of which the animal is capable after it has lost ordinary volition and consciousness by the removal of the front part of its brain. Are these things attributes of the soul, and are they resident not even in the brain, but in the spinal marrow? If metaphysics starts from psychology, psychology itself depends greatly upon physiology; current ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... 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 ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... raining, but the fire of filial love was in her heart, and its flame rendered her impervious to creature discomforts. At length the dawn came, and the sun's bright beams soon dispersed the mists of the night, his revivifying rays inspiring the girl with new courage. The horse, of his own volition, struck into a brisker gait, and Francis was obliged to control her emotion as each succeeding moment brought her ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... powerful frame and lowering aspect, and as he came forward and stood in the doorway there was observable in his fierce and desperate countenance no attempt at the insinuation of the other, only a fearful resolution that made her feel like a puppet before him, and drove her, almost without her volition, ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... who could give confidence to her shy spirit to forget the limitations of this world, and to stray forth to meet invisible comrades from other spheres. Sometimes it has been given to an artist to rise, not by his conscious volition, above his wonted power; to portray one beloved face with the force of his emotion rather than that of his capacity, transcending the limits of his ordinary skill, just as a horse will put forth his last ounce of effort in response to the magnetism of one ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... property-holders, who knew that their possessions would double in value the day the United States Constitution was signed. "Thus, in the first place, by the encouragement of our people, and latterly, apparently, by its own volition, the Union has increased enormously in power, till it now embraces 10,000,000 square miles, and has a free and enlightened population of 300,000,000. Though the Union established by Washington and his contemporaries ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... inquisitor, that I do not enter politics of my own volition. In pushing myself in this unexpected manner into the electoral breach, I merely follow an inspiration that has been made to me. A ray of light has come into my darkness; a father has partly revealed himself, and, if I may believe appearances, he ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... Arabs[4]," seems to doubt if the Slave-Trade can be abolished or civilization advanced, in Central Africa, because of the neighbourhood of The Desert. This, however, is transferring the guilt of slavery and of voluntary barbarism, if barbarism can be crime, from the volition of responsible man to a great natural fact, or circumstance of creation—The Desert; and is a style of observation perfectly indefensible, as well as contrary to philosophy and facts. First, we cannot limit ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... 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. ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... human welfare is deeply involved in the operations of nature, man's chief interest is in the gods. In this interest religion originates. Man, impelled by his own volition, guided by his own purposes, aspires to a greater happiness, and endeavor follows endeavor, but at every step his progress is impeded; his own powers fail before the greater powers of nature; his powers are pygmies, nature's powers ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... and universality in all our 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 ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... powerful stimulus to exertion, and the best means of attaching the people to the institutions under which they live. It is apparent that this political effect upon the character of society cannot have any action upon slaves. Having no choice or volition, there is nothing for stimulus to act upon; they are in fact no part of society. So that, in the language of political economy, they are, like machinery, merely capital; and the productions of ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... that saturates the soul with despair, and blights it with the negation which seems the only possible truth in the circumstances; so that one questions whether the Russian in which Turgenieff and Tolstoy, and even Dostoyevsky, could animate the volition and the expectation of better things has not sunk to depths beyond any counsel of amelioration. To come up out of that Bottomless Pit into the measureless air of Mr. White's Kansas plains is like waking from death to life. We are still among dreadfully ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a tall, raw-boned young man, with high jutting cheek-bones, low forehead, and close knees; to his shoulders, which were very high, hung a pair of long bony arms, whose motions seemed rather the effect of machinery than volition. His hair, which was a bad black, was cropped close, and trimmed across his eye-brows, like that of a Methodist preacher; the small-clothes he wore were of the same web which had produced Father Ned's, and ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... Maistre's mind was of the highest type of those who fill the air with the arbitrary assumptions of theology, and the abstractions of the metaphysical stage of thought. At every point you meet the peremptorily declared volition of a divine being, or the ontological property of a natural object. The French Revolution is explained by the will of God; and the kings reign because they have the esprit royal. Every truth is absolute, not relative; every explanation is universal, not historic. These differences in method ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... things, Howard saw, in a moment like that. He went down and met them in the hall, and had that strange sense of unreality in moments of crisis, when one hears one's own voice saying courteous things, without any volition of one's own. The big doctor looked at him kindly. "It is all quite simple and straightforward!" he said. "You must not let yourself be anxious; these times pass by and one wonders afterwards how one could have ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... calculating egoist— which seems to flatter grossly the drunkard and the excited man laying about him in blind fury. But one may hold that egoism is inevitable without going so far. [Footnote: Psychological Hedonism, the doctrine that "volition is always determined by pleasures or pains actual or prospective," need not be thus exaggerated. See SIDGWICK's Methods of Ethics, ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... of Naples who essayed to galvanize volition through my paralyzed limbs, but those who knew the utmost resources of their art. And so I lived,—lived, too, by reason of my inextinguishable vitality, by reason of this spark that will not quench,—and so I came to Hellberg. It would have been mockery to give this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... seashore, how experiments are carried on, the results of these special studies, and much of controversy with other observers. It combines science and description in a happy manner. Another result of his physiological studies was a paper "On the Spinal Cord as a Centre of Sensation and Volition," read before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in 1858. This was followed the next year by three published addresses on "The Nervous System," in which he presented those theories which were more carefully ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... of Europe combined against him, could not fail to realise that the first condition which a peace would demand of him would be the re-installment of the Bourbons on the throne of Spain. He decided therefore to do of his own volition what he would be forced to do later: he set free King Ferdinand, who had been detained at Valancay, and ordered Suchet's army to retire behind ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... returns, for the soul, which is immortal, is composed of the four higher spiritual essences that surround the ego, and are carried on into the next life. These astral bodies, therefore, fail to terrify the Buddhists, who know them only as shadows, with no real volition. The Japs, in point of fact, have learned ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... imperative, Maurice asked himself, that the accident of noble blood should paralyze a man's volition, and that the bearing of a noble name should render his life inertly ignoble? He recognized that, in the seeming curse which condemned man to "work," God had hidden the richest blessing, even as he buried golden veins in the dark bosom of the earth. "Labor was privilege," ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... is every where subject to laws, fixed in their weight, measure and duration, capable of the most exact calculation, and which in no case admit of variation and exception. Whatever is not thus to be accounted for is of mind, and springs from the volition of some being, of which the material form is subjected to our senses, and the action of which is in like manner regulated by the laws of matter. Beside this, mind, as well as matter, is subject to fixed laws; and thus every phenomenon ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... exposure. He considered the vulgar passenger as so much troublesome freight, which, while it brought the advantage of a higher remuneration than the same cubic measurement of inanimate matter, had the unpleasant drawback of volition and motion. With this general tendency to bully and intimidate, the wary patron had, however, made a silent exception in favor of the Italian, who has introduced himself to the reader by the ill-omened name of Il Maledetto, or the accursed. This formidable personage had enjoyed ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... know him better, you find that he is a marvel of muscular power and swiftness. I have seen a "school" of porpoises in the Pacific swimming for hours alongside one of our fleetest ocean-steamers, darting a few yards ahead now and then, as if by mere volition, cutting their way through the water with the directness of an arrow. The porpoise is playful at times, and his favorite game is a sort of leap-frog. A score or more of the creatures, seemingly full of fun and excitement, will chase one another at full ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... He thrust human beings onto this earth against their will, without their volition, to suffer the tortures ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... down their arms. As to your other objection, it falls to the ground the moment you agree with me that all the nations of the world must ultimately become democracies. At first, it is true, men fought of their own volition, but it was to secure food, to guard their homes, or to replenish their supply of women. But since those very early days, all wars have been wars not of the people, but of their rulers. They were wars of revenge or of ambition, in which the people joined because ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... traces the various confusions which have obscured the true nature of this belief. He insists especially that we can no more discover power in mental than in physical sequences. The will had been supposed to be the type of causal power; but volition, according to Brown, reveals simply another succession of desires and bodily actions. The hypothesis of 'power' has been really the source of 'illusion.' The tendency to personify leads us to convert metaphor into fact, to invent a subject of this imaginary 'power,' and thus to create ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... 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 ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • William McKinley
... to please. He was the most cuddlesome cat, Madame Jolicoeur unhesitatingly asserted, that ever had lived; and he had a purr—softly thunderous and winningly affectionate—that was in keeping with his cuddlesome ways. When, of his own volition, he would jump into her abundant lap and go to burrowing with his little soft round head beneath her soft round elbows, the while gurglingly purring forth his love for her, Madame Jolicoeur, quite justifiably, at times was moved to tears. Equally ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... all her members, and her brain was clear. Along with this well-being came again appreciation of the dreadfulness of her case. She grew rigid under the shock of dire realization, tensing her muscles, without volition, as if to repel attack. Her eyes went fearfully to Hodges, who sprawled at ease on a heap of spruce boughs across the cavern from her. The man was puffing lazily at a corncob pipe. The rank, acrid smell of the tobacco-smoke ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... of love and hope, and to evoke good even from the meanest and wickedest of mankind. Passing through life, the soul is to be a happiness producer and a joy distributer. Without conscious thought the violets pour forth perfume; without volition the magnet pulls the iron filings; with no purpose the candle pushes its beams of light into the darkness; and such is to be the weight of goodness in each man, that its mere presence will be felt. For the soul carries power to bless or blight; it can lift up its faculties ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... sort the cab started off, seemingly of its own volition. Mr. Leary's gait became a desperate gallop, and as he galloped he ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... had hoped, to mellow things. Indeed, the succeeding weeks brought more trouble, and most of it came through the organ. Some of the rattling panels, in spite of every effort to make them fast, rattled the more. One night when the servants were alone in the house, of its own volition the organ sent forth, to break the still hours, a blood-curdling basso-profundo groan that suggested ghosts to their superstitious minds. The housemaid came to regard the instrument as something uncanny, and, even as the ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... 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. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... worthy of notice in this remarkable account of the intellectual powers. In the first place the Reviewer ignores emotion and volition, though they are no inconsiderable "kinds of action to which the nervous system ministers," and memory has a place in his classification only by implication. Secondly, we are told that the second "kind of action to which the nervous system ministers" is "that in which stimuli from without result ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... it becomes this country to take on a question of this sort, so far as it is called upon to take any part, cannot be doubtful. Our side of this question is settled for us, even without our own volition. Our history, our situation, our character, necessarily decide our position and our course, before we have even time to ask whether we have an option. Our place is on the side of free institutions. From the earliest settlement of these States, their inhabitants were accustomed, in ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... placed the aesthetic faculty under the jurisdiction of the 'judgment', which he regarded as a sort of connecting link between the pure reason and the practical reason, that is, between cognition and volition. A judgment is teleologic, according to his scheme, if it implies a pre-existing notion to which the object is expected to conform; it is aesthetic when pleasure or pain is produced directly by the object itself. In the good and the agreeable we have an interest,—we will the former and desire ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... down-town—Madison Square, Union Square, then westward by Jefferson Market and West Tenth Street. Ever edging a little closer to the river, you observe, and yet, upon my honor, I was not conscious of any definite volition in the matter; it was as though some one were gently pushing me along. Then Abingdon Square and your entrance upon the boards of my little drama—you and Mr. Bardi. Gentlemen, I thank you for ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... 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, ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sanctifying grace cannot reveal its presence through our inner consciousness. Having no intuitive knowledge of our own Ego, we are compelled to specify the different acts of the soul by means of their respective objects and their various tendencies (cognition, volition). To our consciousness the supernatural love of God does not present itself as essentially different from ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... mother, with her pleading, wistful eyes, spoke day after day of Julia, of her dutiful love toward her, and her growing love for me, I drifted, almost without an effort of my own volition, into an engagement with her. You see there was no counter-balance. I was acquainted with every girl on the island of my own class; pretty girls were many of them, but there was after all not one that I preferred to my cousin. My old dreams and romances about love, common ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... Ross, his eyes ablaze with scorn and rage. He had already shed his coat and vest. Now he rolled up his shirt-sleeves. "Will you go into that tube of your own volition, conscious, so that you may take a long breath before I flood the tube, or unconscious, and pushed in like a bag of meal, to drown before ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... Adam; 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. What is he—the arch conspirator—doing himself? ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... later we were sitting together on deck. I had offered to read to him. I noticed that he got up out of his chair. Suddenly I saw the chair move. It gave me a great shock, for the chair twisted apparently of its own volition, so that when he sat down again the sunlight was at his back and not in his eyes, as I knew it had been previously. But I reasoned with myself and managed to satisfy myself that he must have turned the chair round with his foot. It was just possible that he could ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... that of memory. It grows out of the biological discussion of instinct, heredity, etc. Included in the subject of memory is that of association. Following this come imagination, imitation, training of the senses, apperception, formal discipline, feeling, volition, motor training, induction, etc. Periods of mental development and the specific topics of childhood and adolescence should receive definite consideration, though more exhaustive treatment should be reserved for a distinct course in child study. The genetic point of view ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... hurriedly drying her eyes, and rising to her feet with a motion so easy, and an effort so slight, that it appeared like the power of mere volition,—the superiority of the spirit over her light frame,—"father, do not let a thought of me distress you at this awful moment. You have known me only in happiness and prosperity,—an indulged and indolent ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... had no right attempting to advise men like Burleigh, who proclaimed himself an old campaigner. The aide-de-camp was getting both sleepy and impatient, but he, too, was much the quartermaster's junior in rank. As for Dean, he had no volition whatever. "Escort the party," were his orders, and that meant that he must govern the movements of his horses and men by the wishes of the senior staff official. And so they jogged along perhaps twenty minutes more, and then there was a sudden ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... by no choice of Harriet's that she was born of a woman who valued children as a kind of social collateral, high-class investments to mature after long periods with at least reasonable profits for the original investors. Nor was it by any volition of hers that she had commended herself to her mother in the beginning by being a beautiful and healthful child: initial pledge that she could be relied upon to turn out lucrative in the end. The parent herself ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... only by some desperate chance he could hope to meet her in his random wanderings, it seemed to him that he was more likely to be successful by resigning as far as possible all volition, and leaving the guidance of the search to chance; as if Fortune were best disposed toward those who most entirely abdicated intelligence and trusted themselves to her. He sacredly followed every impulse, never making up his mind an hour ...
— Lost - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... the face of urban conditions impressed him,—he would have stood gossiping, as in New Babylon's sluggish streets,—and almost without volition he obeyed. ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... lay down their lives to uphold the fair fame of England. Braver soldier never drew sword. He had no hatred of the enemy. His spirit did not need that ugly stimulant. Tenderness and pity filled his heart and yet he had the overflowing enthusiasm and contempt of death which alone can give troops the volition to attack when they have been crouching so long under a pitiless fire. Doughty Wylie was no flash-in-the-pan V.C. winner. He was a steadfast hero. Years ago, at Aleppo, the mingled chivalry and daring with which he placed his own body as a shield between the Turkish soldiery and their victims during ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... than the place. Here were no whirlwind, no chariots 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 enwrapped ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... form the foundation masses, leverage-bars, and protection plates for the higher tissues of the body. Here the cells, in consideration of food, warmth, and protection guaranteed to themselves and their heirs for ever by the body-state, have, as it were, deliberately surrendered their rights of volition, of movement, and higher liberties generally, and transformed themselves into masses of inorganic material by soaking every thread of their tissues in lime-salts and burying themselves in a marble tomb. Like Esau, they have sold their birthright for a mess of "potash," or rather lime; and if such ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... extraordinarily brave acts by individual burghers, but it was extremely difficult to hear of them owing to the Boers' disinclination to discuss a battle in its details. No Boer ever referred to his exploits or those of his friends of his own volition, and then only in the most indefinite manner. He related the story of a battle in much the same manner he told of the tilling of his fields or the herding of his cattle, and when there was any part of it pertaining to his own actions he passed it over without comment. It seemed ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... a rapidity that surprised the skilful man of herbs. Love fed and nourished the fire of life. The will often effects the deed, and say as you may, volition has its power upon the body. The wish to be well, to live, an object to live for, are often the speediest restoratives. ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... impressions and also, in his mild surprise over the pertinency of reviving them, wondering whether he had better pass them on. Or would they knot another tangle in the snarl he and Dick seemed to be, almost without their volition, making? ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... direction of any man or woman who may pass a hand, with faith, backwards and forwards over the skull. The extremities of the body—the fingers—send forth and radiate certain electric, or galvanic, or invisible influences, and thus one has full power over another's organization and volition! But as to any influence beyond the sensible world, that Miss Martineau stoutly denies. The following passage is not an uninteresting specimen of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... ladyship," said Jeeves, "it is more reasonable to suppose that a gentleman of his lordship's character went to prison of his own volition than that he committed some breach of the law which ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... searching party of her own volition, was the only one of the Martians whose face had not been twisted in laughter as I battled for my life. She, on the contrary, was sober with apparent solicitude and, as soon as I had finished the monster, rushed to me and carefully examined my body for possible wounds or injuries. Satisfying ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... look at the picture, which had been faintly showing in my imagination from time to time, the eyes, more anxious than ever, looking at me from out the silent air? But no; I passed the door of that room swiftly, moving, it seemed, without any volition of my own, and before I knew where I was going, went into my father's library with my ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... mind or temper were not known to depend, in many instances, on preputial irritation; children were, accordingly, worried and punished for something over which they had no earthly control or the least volition. Humanity cannot, at present, sufficiently appreciate what Louis A. Sayre has done in its behalf. It is here that we realize the hidden wisdom of the Mosaic law and the truth of the assertion of the ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... years of this secret relationship, in which the ties of sympathy and understanding grew stronger instead of weaker, came the storm. It burst unexpectedly and out of a clear sky, and bore no relation to the intention or volition of any individual. It was nothing more than a fire, a distant one—the great Chicago fire, October 7th, 1871, which burned that city—its vast commercial section—to the ground, and instantly and incidentally ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... attempt to explain it, the fact remains that volition is the fundamental characteristic of Spirit. We may speak of conscious, or subconscious or super-conscious action; but in whatever way we may picture to ourselves the condition of the agent as contemplating his own action, a general purposeful lifeward tendency becomes abundantly evident ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... sacrifice, and retribution are here: neither Shelby, nor Eliza, nor the tall Kentuckian who aids her, nor John Bird, nor Uncle Tom himself in the final act of his drama, can help himself. For good or evil they are the products and results of the system; and yet they have and they give the illusion of volition. ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... still obey the strongest motive doubtless, but there is something in ourselves which makes it a motive and regulates its strength. We can drift like other animals, and often do; but we can also obey our own volition. ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... magician, who as often as the king cut off his head grew another in its place, as we see the machinery for a feat almost as wonderful in the exact anatomy of steel springs and leather ligaments made to fit upon the very nerves of volition themselves, till the halt walk and the maimed are made whole. In this spot is the jar into which the fisherman shut the afrite; in that are the great genii who gather in a harvest; and in still another there lies a tiny thing answering your touch with no louder noise ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... deeds? Of all the criminals we have encountered in doss-houses, shelters, and labour-colonies, scarce a single one. And the deed came nearly always like a flash from the blue. Implacable, dire, and for the most part unconscious compulsion, but no premeditated volition, drove them to it. And here Gorki is a true creator, even if as ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... in whose hands I now found myself, upon hearing that I had returned of my own volition to Phutra evidently felt that it would be safe to give me liberty within the building as had been the custom before I had escaped, and so I was told to return to whatever duty had been ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... but always apparently coming down hill with a slanting motion. So they rode in majestically, always just ahead of the breaker, carried shorewards by its mighty impulse at the rate of forty miles an hour, yet seeming to have a volition of their own, as the more daring riders knelt and even stood on their surf-boards, waving their arms and uttering exultant cries. They were always apparently on the verge of engulfment by the fierce breaker whose towering white crest was ever above and just behind them, but just as one expected ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... The Colonel Sahib would return; indeed, yes. There would be no further difficulty regarding the filigree basket of gold and gems. Still, he would pursue them, if only for the mere sport of it. If he failed to catch them all he had to do was to sit down and wait for them to return of their own volition. ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... Lee's army, outnumbered and exhausted, lay with the Potomac at its back. So serious was the situation that all the subordinate officers advised retreat. But Lee, though too maimed to attack, would not leave the field save of his own volition. "If McClellan wants a battle," he declared, "he can have it." McClellan hesitated, and through the whole of the next day kept his great army idle. The effect upon the morale of the two forces, and the two governments, ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... mind or spirit, consists of volition and intelligence; or, what is the same, of emotion or affection, and of the thoughts which are created by this affection. Nothing can be affirmed of man as a spirit which does not fall under one or other of these two parts. Now, a creature consisting solely of affections and thoughts must, of course, ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... education in bulls and their ways, I apprehended nothing. I never dreamed that bull was after me. Out of my respect for the law I was actually all ready to pause the next moment and let him cross in front of me. The pause came all right, but it was not of my volition; also it was a backward pause. Without warning, that bull had suddenly launched out at me on the chest with both hands. At the same moment, verbally, he cast the ...
— The Road • Jack London
... instinct has invaded the regions of politics and ethics, owing to defective analysis in theory, and in practice to over-confident reliance on personal ability. The individual has attained to freedom; but he has not learned the necessity of submitting his volition to law. At all points the development of the Italians strikes us as precocious, with the weakness of precocity scarcely distinguishable from the decay of old age. A transition from the point attained in the Renaissance ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... tide of anger was rising in him so terribly that it pressed against the skin of his forehead, drawn tight, and threatened to split it. What he wanted to do was to rise and assault the woman standing in front of him. His hands longed to take her! They seemed to have life and volition of their own and to move across the ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... list of books in our library, and the third one, indexed by subjects, the bulletins on horticulture coming from the various state experiment stations and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. These indexes are invaluable for their various purposes and may be used by the membership at their volition. ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... lies partly in the fact that they lead to a more correct account of scientific procedure, partly in the fact that they remove the analogy with human volition which makes the conception of cause such a fruitful source of fallacies. The latter point will become clearer by the help of some illustrations. For this purpose I shall consider a few maxims which have played a great part in ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... 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. ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... 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 she had ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... in which some trace of the original meaning of these auxiliaries cannot be found is the one in which the subject of will names something incapable of volition; as, The wind will blow. Even this may be a kind ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... the mind; anon, those figures which had before been called up only at will became the cause, instead of the effect, of the mind's employment; in other words, they came before me in the night-time, like real images, and independent of any previous volition of thought. I have often, after retiring to my bed, seen, looking through the thick wall of darkness round about me, the faces of those whom I had not known for years, nay, since childhood; faces, too, of the dead, called up, as it were, from the church-yard ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... palanquin and exhibited to the eyes of the crowd the "Good Mzimu." M'Rua and all the warriors fell on their faces so that their bodies formed a long, living deck. Not one of them dared to move, and fear prevailed in all hearts all the more when the King, either at Stas' order or of his own volition, raised his trunk and began to trumpet strongly; and after his example Saba emitted the deepest bass of which he was capable. Then from all breasts issued, resembling entreating groans, "Aka! Aka! Aka!" and this continued until ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... 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
... office into the yellow glare of the sun, her feet moving steadily forward, with no volition of hers, along the dusty road. And as steadily, with as little volition of hers, march, march, came . . . first what Eugenia had said, the advance from that to Mrs. Powers' words, from that to the stenographer's, to the name on the envelope . . . and then ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... triad, and the suspicious and unexplainable conduct of the prisoner in various respects, furnishes, in connection with other circumstances of this case, the strongest presumptive evidence of her guilt. These circumstances, far beyond the realm of human volition, smelted and shaped in the rolling mills of destiny, form the tramway along which already the car of doom thunders; and when they shall have been fully proved to you, by unassailable testimony, no ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... observed that something happened in the world. The world was not dark, nor still, nor dead. The sun rose, and man awoke, and asked himself and the sunshine. 'Whence?' he said; 'stop, what is there? who is there?' Such an object as the sun cannot rise of its own volition. There is something behind it. At first the sun itself was considered a labourer; it accomplished the greatest work on earth, gave light, heat, life, growth, fruits. It was quite natural, then, to pay great honour to the sun; to be grateful ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... nor prov'd But through effect, as vegetable life By the green leaf. From whence his intellect Deduced its primal notices of things, Man therefore knows not, or his appetites Their first affections; such in you, as zeal In bees to gather honey; at the first, Volition, meriting nor blame nor praise. But o'er each lower faculty supreme, That as she list are summon'd to her bar, Ye have that virtue in you, whose just voice Uttereth counsel, and whose word should keep The threshold of assent. Here is the source, Whence cause of merit in you ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... own volition Tomlinson and Fraser found themselves proceeding toward the pulpit—yet Sam's hands did not seem to be exerting any force. The force came from his own vigorous personality, which was one that invariably inspired confidence. If Burnett was going up to speak ...
— On Christmas Day In The Evening • Grace Louise Smith Richmond
... experiences of external Nature we meet with nothing but succession, never with Causality. The Uniformity of Nature is a postulate of Physical Science, not a necessity of thought. The idea of Causality derived from our consciousness of Volition. CausalityActivity, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... that the workers can, in truth, hardly be blamed for yielding to such overwhelming pressure. Drunkenness has here ceased to be a vice, for which the vicious can be held responsible; it becomes a phenomenon, the necessary, inevitable effect of certain conditions upon an object possessed of no volition in relation to those conditions. They who have degraded the working-man to a mere object have the responsibility to bear. But as inevitably as a great number of working- men fall a prey to drink, just so inevitably does it manifest its ruinous influence ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... Upanishads above), one, the northern road leading to brahma; one, the southern road to the moon, leading back to earth. At the end of a period of time all beings reenter the divine nature (Prakriti[11]), and at the beginning of the next period the Deity emits them again and again (they being without volition) by the volition of his nature. "Through Me, who am the superintendent, nature gives birth to all things, and for that cause the world turns about. They of demoniac nature recognize me not; they of god-like ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... storms—and it opened like the folds of a balloon, even before these gentle impulses; occasionally collapsing, it is true, as the ground-swell swung the yards to and fro, but, on the whole, standing out and receiving the air as if guided more by volition than any mechanical power. The effect on the hull was almost magical; for, notwithstanding the nearly imperceptible force of the propelling power, owing to the lightness and exquisite mould of the craft, ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... 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 ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... bonded debt might be refunded at a less rate of interest and the difference between the old and new security paid in cash, thus finding use for the surplus in the Treasury. The success of this plan, it is apparent, must depend upon the volition of the holders of the present bonds; and it is not entirely certain that the inducement which must be offered them would result in more financial benefit to the Government than the purchase of bonds, while the latter proposition ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... woman 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 in front of the reader nothing happens. The suppression ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... possessed 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
... his mind reasons for the abandonment of his useless pledge. It was a period in his history full of painful interest. Heaven was moving forward to aid and rescue him, and hell to claim another victim. But neither the one nor the other could act upon him for good or for evil, except through his own volition. It was for him to turn himself to the one, and live, or to the other, ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... from the idea of future destination, dependent upon the volition of the agent—will. Shall is simply predictive; will is ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... constant disturbance of national interests, and 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, ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • William McKinley
... welfare is deeply involved in the operations of nature, man's chief interest is in the gods. In this interest religion originates. Man, impelled by his own volition, guided by his own purposes, aspires to a greater happiness, and endeavor follows endeavor, but at every step his progress is impeded; his own powers fail before the greater powers of nature; his powers are pygmies, nature's powers are giants, ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... clash of instincts, the struggle between different foci of the vegetative system competing for the possession of the brain, is a common everyday process in conduct. Which will win means which will will. And so we have an energetic basis for volition. ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... excited, the sheep were running wildly; but the girl's exquisite voice was as clear and calm as ever, and the big horse cantered over the broken ground, taking a big boulder now and again with lilting jump, as if he were going by his own volition and was well up in all the points of the game. After a time the dogs got the sheep into a heap, and the young girl rode round them; but something still seemed to be wrong, for she got down, and, leaving the horse quite free, made ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... gradually decreasing in width' (very much as Fuseli depicted the wings of his Satanic Majesty, though H.S.M. would seem to have the advantage of the lunar Bat-men in not being influenced by gravity[48]). 'The wings seemed completely under the command of volition, for those of the creatures whom we saw bathing in the water spread them instantly to their full width, waved them as ducks do theirs to shake off the water, and then as instantly closed them again in a compact form. Our further observation of the habits ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... stirred. To move hand or foot, or even so much as one finger, would have been an exertion beyond the powers of either volition or motion. She was so tired, so stunned, that she thought she never slept at all; her feverish thoughts passed and repassed the boundary between sleeping and waking, and kept their own miserable identity. She could not be alone, prostrate, powerless as she was,—a cloud of ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... of the day dawdling helplessly about her; wherever she went he was near, as near as possible, but of no deliberate volition of his own. Something seemed to tie him to her, and Milla was nothing loth. He seldom looked at her directly, or for longer than an instant, and more rarely still did he speak to her except as a reply. What few remarks he ventured upon his own initiative nearly ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... our acts. We still obey the strongest motive doubtless, but there is something in ourselves which makes it a motive and regulates its strength. We can drift like other animals, and often do; but we can also obey our own volition. ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... easy to deride martinets and pipe-clay: all the drill in Christendom will not make a good soldier out of a weakling or a coward; but, unless you can turn men into machines, so far as to make them act independently of individual thought or volition, you can never depend on a body of non-fatalists for advancing steadily, irrespective of what may be in their front; nor for keeping their ranks unbroken under a hail of fire, or on a sinking, ship. As skirmishers, the Federal soldiers act admirably; and in ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... 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 ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... them, and "conquered all along from Mexico" to Virginia.[329] He was now an extremely aged man. Being unable to walk he was carried from place to place upon a litter. His eyelids were so heavy that he could not of his own volition move them, and attendants stood always ready to raise them whenever it became necessary for him to see.[330] But his mind was clear, his force of will unshaken, and the Indians paid him the reverent obedience ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... interest in religion has emphasized this truth. How, then, may we describe it in terms of certain constant conditions of human life, and yet escape the abstractness of the facultative method? Modern psychology suggests an answer in demonstrating the interdependence of knowledge, feeling, and volition.[58:2] The perfect case of this unity is belief. The believing experience is cognitive in intent, but practical and emotional as well in content. I believe what I take for granted; and the object of my belief is not merely known, but also felt and acted upon. What ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... 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, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the body, but were most acute in the mouth, nose, ears, and eyes. He showed some disposition to maintain the popular notions of the Greeks and Romans, that the rivers and streams are endowed with reason and volition; and endeavoured to prove that some of their windings and deviations from a straight line, cannot be explained ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... never can know 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
... Hawk turned to go, his eye took in a little slip on the desk, a radio memo, with the name of Ku Sui at its top. Almost without volition he glanced over it, hoping to discover useful information about Ku Sui's asteroid—and with the passing of those few extra seconds his chance for escaping out the ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... fortunes in the tens of thousands camped on the ruins of their homes, eating as primitive men ate—gnawing; thinking as primitive men thought. Ashes and the dull pain of despair were their portions. They did not have the volition to help themselves, childlike as the men of the stone age, they awaited quiescent what the next ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... the soldiers now close upon us. It darted at their throats, striking, coiling, and striking again; coiling and uncoiling with incredible rapidity and flying from leverage points of throats, of faces, of breasts like a spring endowed with consciousness, volition and hatred—and those it struck stood rigid as stone with faces masks of inhuman fear and anguish; and those still ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... had passed, and the love-story was presently enacting itself, as all past and all future must for ever be enacting to beings for whom time is not. Then, too, where was he who, by some means, whether of his own volition or not, had become so much a part of the pulsing life of a young girl that, when all else of life passed from her with the weight of years, her heart still remained obedient to him? Where was he? Had his life gone out like the flame ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... scoundrel," said Ross, his eyes ablaze with scorn and rage. He had already shed his coat and vest. Now he rolled up his shirt-sleeves. "Will you go into that tube of your own volition, conscious, so that you may take a long breath before I flood the tube, or unconscious, and pushed in like a bag of meal, to drown before you know ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... it is hard work to write a poem?—said the old Master.—I had an idea that a poem wrote itself, as it were, very often; that it came by influx, without voluntary effort; indeed, you have spoken of it as an inspiration rather than a result of volition. ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... well—resolves to play the Nereid, and takes her little ones in fancy down among the slopes and dells of Ocean to watch the lovely growths and the strange creatures in which, through plant and mineral, or what seem such, Life is yearning upward toward the higher individuality of Volition. She tells us (for we seemed among her hearers as we read, and drew our stool nearer) all about the sea-anemones and corals, the coral-reefs, the jelly-fishes, star-fishes, and sea-urchins,—which last are not to be confounded with the buoys so frequently to be met with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... had no hatred of the enemy. His spirit did not need that ugly stimulant. Tenderness and pity filled his heart and yet he had the overflowing enthusiasm and contempt of death which alone can give troops the volition to attack when they have been crouching so long under a pitiless fire. Doughty Wylie was no flash-in-the-pan V.C. winner. He was a steadfast hero. Years ago, at Aleppo, the mingled chivalry and daring with which he placed his own body as ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... arises from internal causes, without any external impulse. To this source may be referred consciousness, memory, imagination, volition, and other affections of the mind. These are called the internal senses. The senses, whether internal or external, have never been accurately reduced to classes, orders, or genera; the external indeed are generally referred to five orders; namely, seeing, hearing, smelling, ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... 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 a minute he was out and on the ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... is one of the most specious and imposing of birds. Its flight in the upper regions of the air is really sublime, extending its immense wings, and wheeling slowly and majestically to and fro, seemingly without exerting a muscle or fluttering a feather, but moving by mere volition, and sailing on the bosom of the air, as a ship upon the ocean. Usurping the empyreal realm of the eagle, he assumes for a time the port and dignity of that majestic bird, and often is mistaken for him by ignorant crawlers upon the earth. It is only when he descends from the clouds ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... through these pathless regions over which she was now compelled to pass; she could only feel her way. The thoughts which began to course through her mind did not originate in any efforts of the will, but issued spontaneously from the depths of her soul, and as they arose without volition, so did they flow on until they finally became as pure and clear as the waters of the brook by ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... 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 life—but ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... divine existence. He first proves the existence of personality and will,(569) and uses this idea for the purpose of exploring the outer world; arguing that matter is inert and not self-active, he regards matter in motion as indicating force, and therefore volition; uniformity in its motion as proving a law, and therefore an intelligent will,(570) in which wisdom, power, and goodness combine.(571) This being is God, to whom man is subject. The universe is universal order. The physical evil therein originates ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... he seemed to say, to act rashly. The irony of it all was that Adelle, who acted so rarely of her own initiative, should be exposed to this charge in the two most important instances when she had acted of her own volition ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... Idiot, with an irritating shake of his head, as if he were confidentially hinting to the School-Master to keep quiet—"really you pain me by these futile denials. Nobody forced you into the confession. You made it entirely of your own volition. Now I ask you, as a man and brother, what's the use of saying anything more about it? We believe you to be a person of the strictest veracity, but when you say a thing before a tableful of listeners one minute, and deny it the next, we are forced ...
— The Idiot • John Kendrick Bangs
... had been legally passed prior to the Coup d'etat of the 4th November, 1913. But Yuan Shih-kai's first care after that coup d'etat had been to promulgate with the assistance of Dr. Goodnow and others, a bogus Law, resting on no other sanction than his personal volition, with an elaborate flummery about three candidates whose names were to be deposited in the gold box in the Stone House in the gardens of the Palace. Therefore since the provisional nature of this prestidigitation had always been clear, the ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... had completely thrown her off her balance; but at the same time they had wonderfully developed her intellect, and made her what she could not otherwise have become. It was a very singular phenomenon: a system of philosophy growing up in this woman's mind without her volition,—contrary, in fact, to the determined resistance of her volition,—and substituting itself in the place of everything that originally grew there. To have based such a system on fancy, and unconsciously elaborated it for herself, was almost as wonderful as really to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... impossible, manacle the arm of God. Comte may not put his extinguisher upon the great underlying verities of our being, nor Tyndall jump the iron track of his own principles to smuggle into matter a 'potency and promise' of all 'life.' Huxley cannot play fast and loose with human volition, nor juggle the trustiness of memory into a state of consciousness, to save his system; nor may Haeckel lead us at his own sweet creative will through fourteen stages of vertebrate and eight of invertebrate life up to the ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... that the question was deciding itself apparently without any volition whatever on his part. His fate was sealed; he had lost his heart and his appetite to his neighbor. Having come to this conclusion, it was wonderful how the thought excited him. He took a bath and changed his clothes, ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... the question fell from his lips without volition. The man did not believe his own ears. He thought that he must have ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... while your attention is concentrated upon the artistic character of the music. If somebody thoughtlessly interrupts you with a question about Egyptian politics, you go on playing while you answer him politely. That is, where you had at first to make a conscious act of volition for each movement, the whole group of movements has now become automatic, and volition is only concerned in setting the process going. As the delay involved in the perception and the movement disappears, so does ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... live out their lives, three stages. First, the personality of the man develops, powerfully influenced by the restricting environment. It tries to reconcile incompatibilities, while in the depth of his soul ideas and convictions are gradually translated into volition. At last they burst forth in a definite action, and the solitary individual enters upon the contest with the world. Then follows a period of greater activity, more rapid growth, and larger victories. The influence of the one man upon the masses grows ever greater. Mightily ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... death: the mother, the wife, the children. I struggled to get away from the question, but the vagaries which had lightly dispersed themselves before clung persistently to the theme now. I felt that it was like a bad dream. That was a promising diversion. Had one any sort of volition in the quick changes of dreams? One was aware of finding a certain nightmare insupportable, and of breaking from it as by main force, and then falling into a deep, sweet sleep. Was death something like waking from a dream such as that, ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... 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. ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... the elephant stopped of its own volition close to a great iron picket which was being driven into the soft earth, and by which a truss of hay had been placed ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... fetching and carrying for Lady Brotherton, was yet, in virtue of a poor-relationship, allowed an uneasy seat at the table. Her obedience was mechanically perfect. One wondered how the mere nerves of volition could act so instantaneously upon the slightest hint. I saw her more than once or twice withdraw her fork when almost at her lips, and, almost before she had laid it down, rise from her seat to obey some ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... from the direct line is the cause of our liberty of will. But, I say, this declination of atoms in their descent was itself either necessary or voluntary. If it was necessary, how then could that necessity ever beget liberty? If it was voluntary, then atoms had that power of volition before; and what becomes then of the Epicurean doctrine of the fortuitous productions of worlds? The whole business is contradiction and ridiculous nonsense."—Bentley's Works, Vol. III., pp. ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... still for a moment as if robbed of all volition. Then, with a suppressed cry, she dragged out the accusing document and carried it to the light. Who could do such a thing! Who would be such a lying coward! Her helplessness made her rage. Oh, to be ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... 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 remained ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... had streamed by her; by night she had seen nothing but the dull, stuffed walls of her sleeping compartment, and it was an exquisite physical pleasure to have the firm, unshaken floor underfoot, to be surrounded by the appointments of a beautiful house, to be able to move of one's own volition again, and not to be taken like a parcel in a van from one end of Europe to the other. And how delicious also it was to be clean, to have revelled in soap and water, instead of being coated and pelted at by dust and coal-grime! On the surface of life ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... to Maurice that he was being swept away by the simple power of the emotion of Frontford. He felt the tears in his eyes, and almost without his volition his hand responded to the pressure of the hand that clasped it. He made a strong effort to call back ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... 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 and entered ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... of differentiation and manifestation begins. The disturbance of equilibrium is due to the action of the individual Purushas or souls on Prakriti, but this action is mechanical and due to proximity not to the volition of the souls and may be compared to the attraction of a magnet for iron.[744] Thus at the beginning of the evolutionary process we have quiescent matter in equilibrium: over against this are souls innumerable, equally quiescent but exerting on matter a mechanical force. This upsets ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... convey it to others. To make the machine requires a vast amount of labor expended upon matter; to get the thought requires the awakening of a human spirit. The work of the machine is done when the crank stops; the mental work, through internal volition, goes on to ever ...
— Friends in Feathers and Fur, and Other Neighbors - For Young Folks • James Johonnot
... shades of grey. Neither are we sheep or goats, but moral alpacas, all of us,—something between a sheep and a goat. But no less are we divided into two clear-cut classes. Each of us puts himself of his own volition into the class of the self-centred, or the self-forgetting, and in the act marks himself as happy ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... regular form, the disease is said to be put under (not into) the patient. The assertion that the chairs "have swiftly moved away" would seem from analogy to mean that the disease has been placed upon the seats and thus borne away. The verb implies that the seats move by their own volition. Immediately afterward it is declared that relief is accomplished. The expression "us[^u][']hita nutan[^u][']na" occurs frequently in these formulas, and may mean either "let it not be for one night alone," or "let it not stay a single night," ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... at these fantastic views, although I admit, that we women ought to be more masters of our fates than we are. In my own case I suppose it would have been better if I had left Julian of my own volition, because it was right to leave him, instead of waiting for an automobile accident to ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... expresses much of the "time-spirit" of our modern day. It is a doctrine with no God in it, and no invisible world. It assumes that man has no vision and no volition; that he is a mere billiard-ball in the game of existence, which goes whithersoever the cue of blind fate sends it. That one man rises, and another falls, is neither the virtue of one nor the vice ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... titled foreigners have proved a drain upon the Vanderbilt fortune, although, thanks to their large share in the control of laws and industrial institutions, the Vanderbilts possess at all times the power of recouping themselves at volition. The American marriages, on the other hand, contracted by this family, have interlinked other great ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... refused. In respect of them he set his jaw and sternly averted his eyes. Yet, though the will may be steady to resist and to abstain, the tides of feeling ebb and flow, contemptuous of control as those of some unquiet sea. They defy volition, notably in illness when vitality is low. Refuse as he might to go behind the fact, it remained indisputable that the Lady of the Windswept Dust had given him his dismissal. Out of his daily life a joy had ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... or whither, or by what volition; Borne now here, now thither, in blind inanition. Out of this abysmal, nebulous dim distance, Haunted by a dismal, ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... leave untouched. Muller is then taken off the case, and left idle for a while if he persists in his opinion as to the true facts. And at other times, Muller's own warm heart gets him into trouble. He will track down his victim, driven by the power in his soul which is stronger than all volition; but when he has this victim in the net, he will sometimes discover him to be a much finer, better man than the other individual, whose wrong at this particular criminal's hand set in motion the machinery of justice. Several ...
— The Case of the Registered Letter • Augusta Groner
... she was told, without much volition of her own; and she quitted the carriage, and was drawn into her place by Norman, trusting that Meta would not let her do wrong, and relieved that just in front of her were the little ones, over whose heads she could see her father, with Flora's ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... he might wonder and doubt, Lanyard would never question her. Never of his own volition would he probe more deeply into this mystery, take one farther step into ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... her eyes with a steady, inquiring glance, and Joan experienced a new emotion. Joe had never looked like that; nor yet her father. She felt a will stronger than her own was busy with her inclinations. Volition remained free, and yet she doubted whether under any circumstances could she refuse his petition. As it happened, however, she already liked the man. He was so respectful and polite. Moreover, she felt sad to hear that he suffered in health. He would not ask her ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... art, is an impossible thing. It was not my purpose to flatter you. I only expressed half consciously my knowledge that the representative alone is the true artist. Our creations as poets and composers are in reality volition, not power; representation only is power—art. [Footnote: In the German original there is here a play upon the word "konnen" and its derivative, "kunst," which cannot be translated.] Believe me, I should be ten times happier if I were ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... word, is perfectly conceivable. I find no 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 ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... the canoe floated almost of its own volition into a dead and distorted strip of country. Black water which gave off an evil odor covered almost half an acre of ground. From this arose the twisted, gaunt gray skeletons of dead oaks. To complete the drear picture a row of rusty-black vultures sat along the broad naked limb of the nearest of these ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... was by nature, but during Sir Jovian Belamour's lifetime she had been kept within bounds. Then came a brief widowhood, when debt and difficulty hurried her into accepting Mr. Wayland, a thoughtful scientific man, whose wealth had accumulated without much volition of his own to an extent that made her covet his alliance. Enthralled by her charm of manner, he had not awakened to the perception of what she really was during the few years that had elapsed before he was sent abroad, and she refused to ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... well known, Kant placed the aesthetic faculty under the jurisdiction of the 'judgment', which he regarded as a sort of connecting link between the pure reason and the practical reason, that is, between cognition and volition. A judgment is teleologic, according to his scheme, if it implies a pre-existing notion to which the object is expected to conform; it is aesthetic when pleasure or pain is produced directly by the object itself. In the good and the agreeable we have an ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... have brought upon the Pope himself an amount of hatred greater than he deserved. Gregory XIII. appears as a pale figure between the two strongest of the modern Popes, without the intense zeal of the one and the ruthless volition of the other. He was not prone to large conceptions or violent resolutions. He had been converted late in life to the spirit of the Tridentine Reformation; and when he showed rigour it was thought to be not in his character, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... ends of the long line of watchers curled a little inward, almost imperceptibly, a half step taken without volition. The crippled boy, swaying upon his crutch, his lips parted, trembling in every limb, edged forward hesitantly, fearfully, now a foot, now another, now the bare space of a single inch. And now down the entire length of the line from end to end that wavering, rocking movement in ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... their time on the other side. During the past decade it has come about that every European city of any consequence has its "American Colony," a society no longer composed of poor art students or those whose residence abroad is not a matter of volition, but consisting now of many of the wealthiest Americans. By these expatriates money is spent extremely freely, their drafts on London and Paris requiring the frequent replenishment, by remittances of exchange from this side, of their bank balances ...
— Elements of Foreign Exchange - A Foreign Exchange Primer • Franklin Escher
... hypothesis quite unnecessary, by showing that similar results must be produced by the action of principles constantly at work in nature. The powerful retractile talons of the falcon- and the cat-tribes have not been produced or increased by the volition of those animals; but among the different varieties which occurred in the earlier and less highly organized forms of these groups, those always survived longest which had the greatest facilities for seizing their prey. Neither ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... went on relentlessly, her face growing colder and harder with every word. "Hear me through and then decide for yourself. Let no opinion of mine bias your judgment. I stood there a moment longer, and then, when suspended volition came back to me, I fled from the place. Margie, words cannot express to you my distress, my bitter, burning anguish! It was like to madness. But sooner than have divulged my suspicions, I would have killed myself! ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... gesture, perhaps by dealing a blow at that bust which stood there so placidly before him, just as the poor youth did at the British Museum, who threw a stone at the Portland vase, to prove that he also was a man, and had volition, and was not to be looked into stone by the Gorgon of society. Fortunately, however, Sir John Steventon himself ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... the alleged wrongdoer, resides, which means generally where no part of the transaction giving rise to the action took place. What could be more irrational? "Granted that no state can of its own volition make its process run beyond its borders * * * is it unreasonable that the United States should by federal action be made a unit in the ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... another instant, in a wide stare comprehending the incredible, the utterly impossible fact of his presence there. The one conceivable explanation voiced itself without her volition: ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... mind—not of thinking. The unparticled matter, or God, in quiescence, is (as nearly as we can conceive it) what men call mind. And the power of self-movement (equivalent in effect to human volition) is, in the unparticled matter, the result of its unity and omniprevalence; how I know not, and now clearly see that I shall never know. But the unparticled matter, set in motion by a law, or quality, existing within ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... did he not feel and know that he could command and control the action of his brain, and even of every part of it? Now, I said, if the brain is only dumb matter, which you admit, and cannot create thought, where is this volition, or what is it? It is not cerebral, for then matter would create thought; that is, be the creator and the created at the ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... is the apprehension of the end; then the desire of the end; then the counsel about the means; then the desire of the means. Now the appetite tends to the last end naturally: wherefore the application of the appetitive movement to the apprehended end has not the nature of consent, but of simple volition. But as to those things which come under consideration after the last end, in so far as they are directed to the end, they come under counsel: and so counsel can be applied to them, in so far as the appetitive ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... conscious, and voluntary, but in a large measure simply yielding to inclination and temptation. Then there is the coin that trundles away under some piece of furniture, and is lost—that is a picture of the manner in which a man, without volition, almost mechanically sometimes, slides into sins and disappears as it were, and gets covered over with the dust of evil. And then there is the worst of all, the lad that had full knowledge of what he was doing. 'I am going into a far-off country; I cannot stand this any longer—all ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
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