"Volition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... 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 ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... phenomena, as revealed in consciousness, and not constructed in an "independent" and a priori method. The most careful psychological analysis has resolved the whole complex phenomena of mind into thought, feeling, and volition.[61] These orders of phenomena are radically and essentially distinct. They differ not simply in degree but in kind, and it is only by an utter disregard of the facts of consciousness that they can be confounded. Feeling is not reason, nor can it by any ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... regret upon the hidden fruits of his best effort. Rossetti—in all love of his memory be it spoken—was after all a frail mortal; of unstable character: of variable purpose: a creature of impulse and whim, and with a plentiful lack of the backbone of volition. With less affection he would not have buried his book; with more strength of will he had not done so; or, having done so, he had never wished to undo what he had done; or having undone it, he would ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... 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 upon the body ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... she knew that the light which glimmered at the window must come from an open fire, and the thought of a fire warmed her. She hallooed, and receiving no answer, fastened the horses and entered the house. The door swung to behind her, as if of its own volition it wished to make her ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... not comprehend.... Labor had been willing to be friendly, but now it hated him. Orders given in his name, but not originating in his will, had caused this. His attitude became fatalistic—he was being moved about by a ruthless hand without regard to his own volition. He might as well close his eyes and his mind and submit, for Bonbright Foote VII did not exist as a rational human individual, but only as a checker on the board, to be moved from square to square with such success or error as ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... 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
... 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 table of their ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... instead of preparing for sleep, she sat down in the window, and tried to analyze the charm which drew her towards this stranger, without any volition of her own. She could not do it—it was intangible, evasive and subtle. The effect of his presence was like the sun-burst on the landscape, the moment of his arrival. The dark places of her soul seemed suddenly illumined; the massy columns of her intellect turned ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... and excites the instinct of rhythm that a strong volition is required to repress its physical expression. The universality of this is well illustrated by the legend, found in some shape in many countries and languages, of the boy with the fiddle who compels king, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... thought of an object may still have true and useful consequences in regard to the exercise of reason by the subject. But as this exercise of reason is not always directed on the determination of the object, in other words, on cognition thereof, but also on the determination of the subject and its volition, I do not intend to treat of it ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... Why does a man never kill a man? Why does a man never kill himself? Why is nothing ever accomplished? In real life murder, adultery, and suicide are of common occurrence; but Mr. James's people live in a calm, sad, and very polite twilight of volition. Suicide or adultery has happened before the story begins, suicide or adultery happens some years hence, when the characters have left the stage, but bang in front of the reader nothing happens. The suppression or maintenance of story in a novel ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... come of my own volition," she said icily. "And I will not bother you if you want ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... must therefore consider: (1) those acts of the will whereby it is moved to the end; and (2) those whereby it is moved to the means. And since it seems that there are three acts of the will in reference to the end; viz. "volition," "enjoyment," and "intention"; we must consider: (1) volition; (2) enjoyment; (3) intention. Concerning the first, three ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... as pigs, but later assume human form (p. 116). Kanag becomes a snake when he tries to secure the perfume of Baliwan, but is restored to human form when he bathes in a magic well (p. 137). These and other mysterious happenings, many of which are not explained as being due to their own volition, befall them; thus Ingiwan, while walking, is confronted by an impassable hill and is compelled to cross the ocean, where he finds his future wife, but upon his return the hill has vanished (p. 86). In other instances the finger rings of people ...
— Traditions of the Tinguian: A Study in Philippine Folk-Lore • Fay-Cooper Cole
... perhaps her finest virtue as it is certainly her greatest charm: that, until she set the example, woman in literature as a self-suffering individuality, as an existence endowed with equal rights to independence—of choice, volition, action—with man, had not begun to be. That of itself would suffice to make Clarissa memorable; and that is the least of its merits. Consider it from which point you will, the book remains a masterpiece, unique of its kind. It has ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... so. What then? Here's now the sceptre of Alroy. What's that without his mind? The legend said that none should free our people but he who bore the sceptre of great Solomon. The legend knew that none could gain that sceptre, but with a mind to whose supreme volition the fortunes of the world would bow like fate. I gained it; I confronted the spectre monarchs in their sepulchre; and the same hand that grasped their shadowy rule hath seized the diadem of the mighty caliphs by the broad rushing of their ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... act at times. "All-powerful," thought Tarzan. "The little bugs say that God is all-powerful. It must be that God made me do these things, for I never did them by myself. It was God who made Teeka rush upon Histah. Teeka would never go near Histah of her own volition. It was God who held my knife from the throat of the old Gomangani. God accomplishes strange things for he is 'all-powerful.' I cannot see Him; but I know that it must be God who does these things. No Mangani, no Gomangani, ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... matter out of my volition, out of my planning. And, oh, the wonder, and sweetness, and sacredness of it! I thought, even in the instant; and, oh, the pity that, after ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... the various cunning tacks in which his career abounds, were any sign of genuine versatility or resource or political growth and expansion. They were, in fact, the resort of a man whose nerves were weaker than his volition. Robespierre was a kind of spinster. Force of head did not match his spiritual ambition. He was not, we repeat, a coward in any common sense; in that case he would have remained quiet among the croaking frogs of the Marsh, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... derived from the idea of future destination, dependent upon the volition of the agent—will. Shall is simply predictive; will is predictive and promissive ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... whether Cochose lunged forward of his own volition, or was pressed on from behind, yet suddenly he was within reach of me, and the battle was on. It was short and fierce, his object evidently being to crush me in his giant grip, mine to oppose science to strength, and avoid his bear-hug. We swayed back and forth to the sharp pitching of ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... but it would take drastic treatment to get under the hide of this sneering bully who had come within an ace of ruining the life of June Tolliver. The law could not touch him. He had not abducted her. She had gone of her own volition. Unfulfilled intentions are not criminal without an overt act. Was he to escape scot free? She had scoffed at the idea that June might die. But in her heart she was not so sure. The fever was growing on her. It would be days ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... stood 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 able to confront this traducer, this libeler. ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... mark of volition is that the personality as a whole, or the central feature or nucleus of the personality, the man himself, is thrown upon the side of the weaker motive."—McDougall: Introduction ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... enough wood to feed them, but because the fire itself was old and tired. Blinking at the flames, he stood still, unaware of the fact that he was swaying on feet planted a little apart. He could not move, not of his own volition. ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... I've learned to wait. [Sits. A bachelor at sixty, I found myself Encumbered with a ward—nay, not that— Enriched with female loveliness and grace Bequeathed unto me by a dying friend. Volition had no part in that, nor in My sudden recrudescency of love. I willed our marriage; but 'twas fate bestowed The joys I long had fled. Then came our life In Amsterdam; each day so filled with bliss It overflowed into the next, and days Of joy grew into weeks and months ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... 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 down ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is conscious, is synonymous with state of consciousness. It is commonly confined to the sensations and emotions, or to the emotions alone; but it is properly a genus, having for species, Sensation, Emotion, Thought, and Volition. By thought is meant all that we are internally conscious of when we think; e.g. the idea of the sun, and not the sun itself, is a thought; and so, not even an imaginary thing like a ghost, but only the idea of it, is a thought. In like manner, a sensation differs both from the object causing ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... the back of the laboratory slowed down. Smithers was obeying orders. Tommy hung close by the vision instrument, his hands moving vaguely and helplessly, as one makes gestures without volition when anxious for someone else to duplicate the movements for which ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... England. It was conscience that made cowards of us all. The white-lipped generation of Edward Everett were victims, one might even say martyrs, to conscience. They suffered the most terrible martyrdom that can fall to man, a martyrdom which injured their immortal volition and dried up the springs of life. If it were not that our poets have too seldom deigned to dip into real life, I do not know what more awful subject for a poem could have been found than that of the New England judge enforcing the ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... 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 this was all pleasant; it all added to her ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... also an unpurposed influence. Power goes forth without his distinct volition. Like all centers of energy, the soul does its best work automatically. The sun does not think of lifting the mist from the ocean, yet the vapor moves skyward. Often man is ignorant of what he accomplishes upon his fellows, but the results ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... man calling upon a lady either takes his hat and stick into the reception room with him, or deposits them in the hall; she does not instruct him what disposition to make of them. He removes his overcoat of his own volition, or retains it, as he pleases; the lady does not suggest its removal. This is the strict letter of etiquette. As a matter of fact, many a man would feel snubbed, and the hostess that she failed in cordiality, if she failed to invite him to lay ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... a dead calm; the sea was like a mirror, and the advancing boats, as their oars rose and fell in the water, gave you the idea of creatures possessed of life and volition, as they rapidly forced their way through the yielding fluid. The vessel's stern was towards the line-of-battle ship, and the boats were pulling up a little on the starboard quarter. The guns which I had hoisted on board had, for want of any other means, been sufficiently secured by ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... irritability, or willful moral perversion. Perversion, stupidity, and irritability of the 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 late Dr. Edward Clarke, that, "The instructors, the houses and schools ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... truth, I do some wrong to my character; I was but little under the influence of such cunning cognisance at that moment. I acted not by volition, but rather under pressure of a passion that held complete mastery over my will, and compelled me to the declaration I ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... without a motive; we 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
... from the 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 like the door to a ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... of his volition, in all directions save one, has been clogged, through persistent neglect, due to over-specialization. His mind needs to be cleared, and it can be cleared—it will clear itself—if regular periods of repose are enforced upon it. As things are, it practically never gets a holiday from business. ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... 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 ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... flickering points of fire—primrose-pale, in the half light; deepening to orange, as night rolled up out of the East, and the little blown flames seemed to flit along of their own volition, so skilled and swift were the invisible ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... 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
... 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
... equal in their consequence. We look aside from the true question. We cannot blame others at all; we can only punish them; and ourselves we blame indifferently for a deliberate crime, a thoughtless brusquerie, or an act done without volition in an ecstasy of madness. We blame ourselves from two considerations: first, because another has suffered; and second, because, in so far as we have again done wrong, we can look forward with the less confidence to what remains of our career. Shall we repent this failure? It is ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with the tension of eternally being shunted across distances, anxious to experience once more that sense of restful finality which comes with a journey's end. But, in a measure her movements were no longer dependent upon her own volition. ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... NATURAL, and are involved in the structure of the cord and the properties of its constituents. By the help of the brain we may acquire an affinity of ARTIFICIAL reflex actions. That is to say, an action may require all our attention and all our volition for its first, or second, or third performance, but by frequent repetition it becomes, in a manner, part our organisation, and is performed without volition, ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... was the fact that his overmastering sensation came without the slightest volition of his own. He had had nothing to do with it, his will was powerless. He was betrayed like a fortified city whose gate had been thrown open by an unsuspected, a concealed, traitor inside. In an instant he had been invaded, his being levelled, his peculiar pride overthrown. ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... 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 ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... flexible; the habits of all the animals change more or less with changed conditions, but the range of the fluctuations in the lives of the wild creatures is very limited, and is always determined by surrounding circumstances, and not by individual volition, as it so often is in the case of man. In a treeless country birds that sing on the perch elsewhere will sing on the wing. The black bear in the Southern States "holes up" for a much shorter period than in Canada ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... and subsequent reflection have enabled me to trace, indeed, some remote connection between this passage in the English moralist and a portion of the character of Ligeia. An intensity in thought, action, or speech was possibly, in her, a result, or at least an index, of that gigantic volition which, during our long intercourse, failed to give other and more immediate evidence of its existence. Of all the women whom I have ever known, she, the outwardly calm, the ever-placid Ligeia, was the most violently ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... consider the disposition of the average man to evade payment of taxes, to recognize how far force daily enters into the maintenance and execution of law. Nations, on the contrary, since no force exists, or without their volition can exist, to compel them to accept the institution of an authority superior to their own conscience, yield a willing acquiescence to wrong, when they so yield in obedience to an external authority imposed by themselves. The matter is not helped by the fact ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... will probably be impressed with the fact that in the present Book the stress is upon the discipline of the will. The inner reactions of complaint, doubt, or despair turn against the deed, to which Ulysses has to nerve himself by a supreme act of volition. The world of Calypso is that of self-indulgence, inactivity, will-lessness, to which Ulysses has sunk after his sin against the source of light, after his negation of all intelligence. It is not simply ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... which my father had pointed out, with exactness, and soon with pleasure. I sacredly observed my hours of reading, and devoted myself to the study of the lives of what my father considered really great men—that is to say, men of great energies, and violent volition, who look upon their fellow creatures as mere tools, with which they can build up a pedestal for their solitary statue, and who sacrifice every feeling which should sway humanity, and every high work which genius should really achieve, to the short-sighted gratification of an ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... writers on the subject of varieties and species; . . . but the view here developed renders such an hypothesis quite unnecessary. . . . The powerful retractile talons of the falcon and cat tribes have not been produced or increased by the volition of those animals; . . . neither did the giraffe acquire its long neck by desiring to reach the foliage of the more lofty shrubs, and constantly stretching its neck for this purpose, but because any varieties which ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... had given Mrs. Ponsonby the advantage of his company; not so much through volition—albeit, he was well enough pleased with his quarters—as through submission to ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... force and insight. Facts and laws are so blended with their personal being, that we can hardly decide whether it is thought that wills or will that thinks. Their actions display the intensest intelligence; their thoughts come from them clothed in the thews and sinews of energetic volition. Their force, being proportioned to their intelligence, never issues in that wild and anarchical impulse, or that tough, obstinate, narrow wilfulness, which many take to be the characteristic of individualized power. They may, in fact, exhibit no ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... now first appears often, as well as in the smacking first heard in the sixty-fifth week (in contented mood). The tongue is, when the child is awake, more than other muscles that in the adult are subject to cerebral volition, almost always in motion even when the child is silent. It is in various ways partly contracted, extended, bent. The lateral bending of the edges of the tongue downward and the turning back of the tip of the tongue (from left to right) so that the lower surface lies upward, ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... a delighted laugh. Once Jim White began to talk of his own volition his discourse flowed on until hunger or weariness overtook him. His silences had the same quality—it was the way ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... big case came my way I should be found able to do something with it something more, that is, than I had seen accomplished by the police of the District of Columbia since I had had the honor of being one of their number. Therefore, when I found myself plunged, almost without my own volition, into the Jeffrey Moore affair, I believed that the opportunity had come ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... stumbling single skaters, the floor was cleared, and the darling of the rink glided upon the scene. He was a slender, handsome fellow, graceful and expert to the nicest perfection in his profession. He seemed not so much to skate as to float about the floor, with no effort except volition. His rhythmic movements were followed with pleasure, but it was his feats of dexterity, which were more wonderful than graceful, that brought down the house. It was evident that he was a hero to the female ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... But the next afternoon, after school, Ellen, to Granville Joy's great bliss and astonishment, insinuated herself, through the crowd of out-going scholars, close to him, and presently, had he not been so incredulous, for he was a modest boy, he would have said it was by no volition of his own that he found himself walking down the street with her. And when they reached his house, which was only half-way to her own, she looked at him with such a wistful surprise as he motioned ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... God, the rational God, is the projection to the outward infinite of man as he is by definition—that is to say, of the abstract man, of the man no-man; the other God, the God of feeling and volition, is the projection to the inward infinite of man as he is by life, of the concrete man, the ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... at the office of Colonel Mapleson an hour or so before the beginning of the opera. The arrangements perfected, he informed his client of what had been done. But there remained a kindly spot in the costumer's soul, and of his own volition he called on the manager in the afternoon of the day set apart for the coup in order to give him one more opportunity to save himself ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... by which the indifferent, unemotional, and sometimes unintelligent recruit is transmuted into the precious metal of the soldier who wins battles seems to be somewhat as follows: Of his own volition he has taken on a certain job and his dogged pride or obstinacy will not allow him to be beaten by it, however little enthusiasm it may arouse in him and however distasteful it may be to him at first. He offers no "ca' canny" service, but plods on and does his best ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... bloody day, Dennis Morolt's horse had kept pace for pace, and his arm blow for blow, with his master's. It seemed as if two different bodies had been moving under one act of volition. He husbanded his strength, or put it forth, exactly as he observed his knight did, and was close by his side, when he made the last deadly effort. At that fatal moment, when Raymond Berenger rushed on the chief, the brave squire ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 to every young fellow, had ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... The motion of the will which constitutes agreement was now completely insulated, and became the subject of separate contemplation; forms were entirely eliminated from the notion of contract, and external acts were only regarded as symbols of the internal act of volition. The Consensual Contracts had, moreover, been classed in the Jus Gentium, and it was not long before this classification drew with it the inference that they were the species of agreement which represented the engagements approved of by Nature ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... alarm, she raised herself up, and sat upon the edge, but her weight appeared to have no effect. As soon as she was seated in this way—for her feet still remained in the water—the shell moved rapidly along, and each moment increased its speed, with no other propelling power than that of her volition. ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... pivoting instant of the pause the musket swung slowly round as of its own volition, and through its sights I saw the slashings, gold on red, across the breasting of his captain's riding coat. One little crooking of the trigger-finger and the lead had gone upon its errand. But at the balancing instant that piteous ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... hours. And, at last, sitting in a cleared spot, we saw a man beside the trail. He was the first man we had seen in days. He was sitting there quite idly. Probably that man to-day thinks that he took himself there on his own feet, of his own volition. We know better. He was directed there for our happiness. It was a direct act of Providence. For we rode up ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... said, of his own volition, and not as an emissary from the White House. But in view of his close relation to affairs, his interview is significant as possibly reflecting an Administration attitude at that ,point ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... effect of my being so tired out last night. Why, it seems to me I was never half so tired. I wonder if a hard rubbing of your strong hands mightn't throw it off.' Long and strongly he plied with friction the parts affected, but no muscle responded. All seemed dead to volition and motion. Though thus crippled in a moment, she insisted upon rising, that she might be ready for breakfast at the usual hour. As the process of dressing went on, she playfully enlivened it thus: 'Well, here I am ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... saying, with extended arm, he grasped the three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre; while so doing, suddenly and nervously twitched them; meanwhile, glancing intently from Starbuck to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as though, by some nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life. The three mates quailed before his strong, sustained, and mystic aspect. Stubb and ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... confiscated are ruined. It is impossible to organize two armies and maintain a third without money. The royalists faced an embarrassing problem; the republic alone could pay for its enemies' troops and, it being improbable that she would do so of her own volition, the shady negotiation was abandoned, and it was adjudged quicker to take the money without permission than to ask ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... from heaven?" Crossman cut in. He spoke unconsciously. He had not wished to say that, he had not wanted to speak at all, but his subconscious mind had welded the thought of her so fast to the great mystery of the Northern Lights that without volition he had ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... impossible to lose. But I could not get a bid, and so I shifted along down-town—Madison Square, Union Square, then westward by Jefferson Market and West Tenth Street. Ever edging a little closer to the river, you observe, and yet, upon my honor, I was not conscious of any definite volition in the matter; it was as though some one were gently pushing me along. Then Abingdon Square and your entrance upon the boards of my little drama—you and Mr. Bardi. Gentlemen, I ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... dominion of principle. The less we live by impulse, and the more we live by intelligent reflection, the better it will be for us. The more we can get habit on the side of goodness, the better; but the more we break up our habits, and make each individual action the result of a special volition of the spirit guided by reason and conscience, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... any rate, are but children of a larger growth. In the main, their delinquencies may be classified under the heading of "naughtiness." They are mischievous and passionate, and they have a weakness for destroying things to discover the secrets of volition. A too prosperous nation mystifies less fortunate people, who demand of their elders and rulers some solution of the mystery of their rivals' progress. Such a ruler, unable to offer the necessary explanation, takes his spears to ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... 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 his Nadia, the buoyant spirit in whom centered ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... could not understand it all; but as for that matter, what could she understand? Nothing. For a few minutes her brain seemed in too great a whirl to comprehend anything but that she was being carried on in earth's diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees, with as little volition on her part as if she were dead. Then the room grew stifling, and instinctively she went to the open casement window, and leant out, gasping for breath. Gradually the consciousness of the soft peaceful landscape stole into her mind, and stilled the buzzing confusion. There, bathed ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... from all eternity, has been, and to all eternity, will be, immortal fire, glowing and fading in due measure. (Mullach, Heracliti Fragmenta, 27.) And the part assigned by his successors, the Stoics, to the knowledge and the volition of the "wise man" made their Divinity (for logical thinkers) a subject for compliments, rather than a power to be reckoned with. In Hindu speculation the "Arahat," still more the "Buddha," becomes ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... animated being, to man—the lord of the animal kingdom,—he displayed it, to use his own words, "as plainly as if it were written in our mother-tongue." His discovery consisted in the fact, that the spinal nerves are double in their function, and arise by double roots from the spinal marrow,—volition being conveyed by that part of the nerves springing from the one root, and sensation by the other. The subject occupied the mind of Sir Charles Bell for a period of forty years, when, in 1840, he laid ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... irritation, and uncertain whether I most loved or detested her, I drew her violently round towards me, bent over her and pressed my lips on hers, wet, ice-cold, and quivering. If there is anything in magnetism, or power to subdue another's volition, it ought to have acted fully then. I myself was at that moment the incarnation of will. My whole system was bowed to the intense effort to make her, by ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... Cinna and Rodogune, must surely be unsusceptible of love. But if in his principal characters, Corneille, by exaggerating the energetic and underrating the passive part of our nature, has departed from truth; if his heroes display too much volition and too little feeling, he is still much more unnatural in his situations. He has, in defiance of all probability, pointed them in such a way that we might with great propriety give them the name of tragical antitheses, and it becomes almost natural if the personages ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... moved, and spoke as if by a succession of continued efforts; and it seemed as if his will had in some degree lost the promptitude of command over the acute mind and goodly form of which it was the regent. His actions and gestures, instead of appearing the consequence of simple volition, seemed, like those of an automaton, to wait the revolution of some internal machinery ere they could be performed; and his words fell from him piecemeal, interrupted, as if he had first to think what he was to say, then how it was to be said, and as if, after all, it was ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... a particular mode of thinking, like intellect; therefore (by Prop. xxviii.) no volition can exist, nor be conditioned to act, unless it be conditioned by some cause other than itself, which cause is conditioned by a third cause, and so on to infinity. But if will be supposed infinite, it must also be conditioned to exist ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... be anything morbid or defective therein detect and explain it.... He can go from point to point without passing through intermediate space. He passes from Belfast [Maine] to Washington or from the earth to the moon ... swifter than light, by a single act of volition."[21] ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... assembly peculiarly sensitive to governmental influence. The second assembly met at St. Mary's, January 25, 1638, and consisted of the governor and council, freemen specially summoned, freemen present of their own volition, and proxies.[16] Governor Calvert submitted a code of laws sent from Lord Baltimore, and it was rejected by a vote of thirty-seven to fourteen; but twelve of the minority votes were in two hands, ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... Table," on which were written the decrees of all events between the morning of creation and the day of judgment. The burning core of Mohammed's preaching was the proclamation of the one true God whose volition bears the irresistible destiny of the universe; and inseparably associated with this was an intense hatred of idolatry, fanned by the wings of God's wrath and producing a fanatic sense of a divine commission to avenge him on his insulters and vindicate for him his rightful worship from every nation. ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... nervous, precipitate motion, he rose to his feet and drew in his breath, as if to throw a sudden load from his chest. He stood irresolute for a moment, then revolving slowly on his heel, walked, as if independently of his own volition, over to his desk. He felt very strangely; he did not remember to have ever felt so strangely before. His head had become suddenly confused, but at the same time he was aware that his brain had thrown open its doors ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... immense distress descended upon me. It has been observed that the routine of daily life, that arbitrary system of trifles, is a great moral support. But my toilet was finished, I had nothing more to do of those things consecrated by usage and which leave you no option. The exercise of any kind of volition by a man whose consciousness is reduced to the sensation that he is being killed by "that sort of thing" cannot be anything but mere trifling with death, an insincere pose before himself. I wasn't capable of it. It was then that I discovered that being ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... 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 in our harbors. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... writers for the stage must accept. Now, if we examine a collection of typical plays of every kind, tragedies and melodramas, comedies and farces, we shall find that the starting point of everyone of them is the same. Some one central character wants something; and this exercise of volition is the mainspring of the action. . . . In every successful play, modern or ancient, we shall find this clash of contending desires, this assertion of the human will against strenuous opposition ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... 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
... distinctly; the words were lost in the all-pervading clamor that buzzed and hummed in the young man's ears. He could not have told now whether he was afraid or not; he went forward because the others did, borne along with them in their headlong rush, without distinct volition of his own; his sole desire was to have the affair ended as soon as possible. So true was it that he was a mere drop in the on-pouring torrent that when the leading files came to the end of the trench ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... coal hung high and gloomy; then a stray sunbeam brought out their peacock colors; then came the fog again, driving hurriedly by, as if impatient to go somewhere and enraged at the obstacle. It seemed to have a vast inorganic life of its own, a volition and a whim. It drew itself across the horizon like a curtain; then advanced in trampling armies up the bay; then marched in masses northward; then suddenly grew thin, and showed great spaces of sunlight; then drifted across the low islands, like long ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... inadequate to restrain the inextinguishable laughter of the students, and sometimes even to repress his own. The long, sallow visage, the goggle eyes, the huge under-jaw, which appeared not to open and shut by an act of volition, but to be dropped and hoisted up again by some complicated machinery within the inner man,—the harsh and dissonant voice. and the screech-owl notes to which it was exalted when he was exhorted to pronounce more distinctly,— all added fresh ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... not thought or known. What she did was done scarcely by her own volition, and she seemed to wake with a start at last, to hear herself sobbing, and to feel the throb, throb, of a hot ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... which her nature and abilities are not fitted. But we ask for her, as for man, equality before the law, and freedom to exercise all her powers and faculties under the direction of her own judgment and volition. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... straight, her head thrown back; wherefore, reading her scorn of me in her eyes, seeing the proud contempt of her mouth, a very demon seemed suddenly to possess me, for certainly the laugh that rang from my lip, proceeded from no volition of mine. ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... this is certainly well, in my mind, but then there is something more than this, more 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
... fragrant sigh of some astonished cow, whose ruminating repose upon the highway we had ruthlessly disturbed. But in the darkness our progress, more the guidance of some mysterious instinct than any apparent volition of our own, gave an indefinable charm of security to our journey, that a moment's hesitation or indecision on the part of the ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... expressed my love for her in words. My love for Dicky terrifies me sometimes, it is so strong, but I cannot go up to him and offer him an unsolicited kiss or caress. Respond to his caresses, yes! but offer them of my own volition, never! There is something inside me that ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... exist; they are told they are delusions," I heard myself answering. I was surprised to hear my voice, for it came with no conscious volition on my part. ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... breathed no longer. The pulses were still. The heart had ceased to beat. Volition had not departed, but was powerless. The senses were unusually active, although eccentrically so—assuming often each other's functions at random. The taste and the smell were inextricably confounded, and became one sentiment, abnormal and intense. The rose-water with which ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... unless it is clearly proved that the mental unbalance was brought about by his own acts, performed in a state of conscious free will. The law clearly recognizes that the drunken man is insane, and holds him responsible for his acts committed while drunk, if he became drunk through his own volition. If the liquor is proved to have been forced down his throat or he has been drugged by some one else and his mental balance dethroned thereby, he is ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... great hall, did he relinquish possession of us, and we followed submissively, as he led the way past the winged bulls of Nineveh and the great seated statues, until we found ourselves, almost without the exercise of our volition, in the upper room amidst the glaring mummy cases that had witnessed the birth of my friendship ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... it was he, knelt down by me, and putting his arms round me, raised me from the ground, without any volition of my own. I know not what state I was in. I was perfectly conscious; but had no more power over the movement of a muscle than if I were dead. My eyes were closed, and my head drooped on his breast, as ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... reflection of it. This would have happened if no other influence had asserted itself. Without that influence, man would have become a being whose consciousness would not have reflected the world in pictures of cognition, through his own free volition, but through natural necessity. But things did not happen in this way. At the time when the moon split off, certain spiritual beings interposed in human evolution who had retained so much of their Moon nature ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... sort the cab started off, seemingly of its own volition. Mr. Leary's gait became a desperate gallop, and as he galloped he gave ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... life-lit eyes, pluck, volition, Flakes of breast-muscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby, good-sized arms and legs, And wonders within ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... I think it's happening to me. Please send Louis away," she wrote, and folded the note into an envelope which she fastened down. That moment she found herself crying out without her own volition. She slammed the door and lay down on the floor inside it, to barricade it against Louis. She heard his steps coming along the verandah and clenched her hands ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... a breath, back went his right hand over his shoulder. Something sang like an arrow through the air: I felt a blow and then a sharp pang, and there I was pinned by the shoulder to the mast. In the horrid pain and surprise of the moment—I scarce can say it was by my own volition, and I am sure it was without a conscious aim—both my pistols went off, and both escaped out of my hands. They did not fall alone; with a choked cry, the coxswain loosed his grasp upon the shrouds, and plunged head first ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 and ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... changing his course, and occasionally stumbling as if unaware of the character of the ground over which he passed. His head swung out slightly to either side and he snapped each time. There was something sinister in every move, as if his body was driven on without conscious volition, actuated by some dreadful, unclean force. Breed knew it for some sort of poisoning, and his muscles bunched for flight. Shady barked angrily as if to drive the thing away. Then Breed saw a hairless travesty of a coyote move out of a draw and halt directly in the path ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... us the means of attaining happiness or avoiding misery: Taste, as it gives pleasure or pain, and thereby constitutes happiness or misery, becomes a motive to action, and is the first spring or impulse to desire and volition. From circumstances and relations, known or supposed, the former leads us to the discovery of the concealed and unknown: after all circumstances and relations are laid before us, the latter makes us feel from the whole a new sentiment of blame or approbation. The standard of the one, being ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... 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 ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... mystery. Modern statesmen by the score have chosen to believe the occult 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
... was 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 his body-coat was a dark blue, with black buttons. Each wore a pair ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... 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 Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... their heads that these sorcerers may actually cause the death. And yet they will accuse a hostile sorcerer of causing the death by an exactly similar ceremony, and will go to war over the matter. Probably, however, it is rather a question of the sorcerer's assumed volition—that is, it is assumed that the friendly sorcerer does not want the chief to die, and the people rely upon him to confine himself to a divination ceremony, and not to engage in hostile sorcery; whereas a hostile sorcerer might do the latter. I may add that I was led ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... people could execute what you required: here, it was but to speak and it was done, well done, and done immediately; the vessel appeared to obey the will of the pilot as if endued with sense and volition, and the men at the lead gave quick and correct soundings; the consequence was that I had every confidence, and while the captain and officers sometimes appeared anxious at the decrease of the depth of water, I was indifferent, and I daresay appeared ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... character of sober sanity to the apostolic teachings on this subject—that a divine influence on the mind does not discharge one from the duty of self-control, but that "the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets"; that the divine inworking does not suspend nor supersede man's volition and activity, but that it behooves man to "work, because God worketh in him to will and to work." The lapse from these characteristically Christian principles into the enthusiastic, fanatic, or heathen ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... observatory might always be administered in the interests of science, of true science; of that science which rightly distinguishes between unlicensed liberty and true freedom; between the unrestrained volition and the freedom of the will. He became eloquent, he became noisy. He sat down. Then three other men spoke, on similar subjects. Then the executive committee which had appointed me was dismissed with thanks. Then a new executive committee was chosen, ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... Mollie were alone in the tiny library. Babcock had been warmed, washed, fed. Seemingly without volition on his part, he was before the hard-coal blaze, his feet on the fender, the light carefully shaded from his ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... link in the causal concatenation of forces, this can only be effected when the operations of both these impulses are presented quite equally in the world of appearances. It is only possible when, with every difference of form, the matter of man's volition remains the same, when all his impulses agreeing with his reason are sufficient to have the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... assailing him on every side brought him to the necessity of the moment. Men were pressing close upon him, jostling, abusing him, shaking fists in his face. Another crowd of men, as though fearing the car would escape of its own volition, were clinging to the ...
— The Scarlet Car • Richard Harding Davis
... her that the word, came to her lips by no volition of hers. As she had grown red but a moment gone, she now grew correspondingly pale, and her limbs shook. She had irrevocably committed herself. "No, no!" as she saw him start forward with outstretched arms, "not my ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... tact in 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
... engine-room, the fan-wheels rose from the deck, as if by their own volition, and, as soon as they reached their places, began to spin round faster and faster, until Colston could again hear the high-pitched singing sound that he had heard as the Ariel ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... full of clothing,—garments which might have formed the stock-in-trade of a costumier whose speciality was providing costumes for masquerades. A long dark cloak hung on a peg. My hand moved towards it, apparently of its own volition. I put it on, its ample ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... the sterner logic which forbade a nation to place shackles again upon hands which had been raised in her defence, which had fought for her life and at her request. So the slave was a slave no more. No other man could claim his service or restrain his volition. He might go or come, work or play, so far as ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... does now) that "creation," in the ordinary sense of the 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 I have not now, the smallest a priori objection ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... 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 before at what station he should leave the cars, and ...
— Lost - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... said the perplexed housekeeper. And these indiscreet words burst from her lips, almost without her own volition—"But the idea of the young Marquis of Arondelle marrying of you in downright earnest is beyond belief! It ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... incandescent and bleed freely, even if it should be necessary, prior to engaging your humble petitioner's services, to turn out one or more of your present contributioners crop and heels, and lay them on the shelf of their own incompetencies. Remember that the slightest act of volition on your part can exalt my pecuniary status to the skies, as well as confer distinguished and unparagoned ennoblement upon ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... however exalted or however grotesque, have their foundation in experience. The notion of personal volition in Nature had this basis. In the fury and the serenity of natural phenomena the savage saw the transcript of his own varying moods, and he accordingly ascribed these phenomena to beings of like passions with himself, but vastly transcending him in power. ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... former vainly strive to make exception to the irrevocable law, that "nature abhors a vacuum." This act of opposition between both forces constitutes the respiratory act, and thus the respiratory thoracic being (like a vibrating pendulum) manifests respiratory motion, not as an effort of volition originating solely with itself, but according to the measure of the force of either law; as entity is relationary, so is functionality likewise. The being is functional by relationship; and just as a pendulum is functional, by reason of the counteraction ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... unprepared for the sudden 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 ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... under which this journey of mine was performed were most painful. Still, through that remarkable power of the human mind, which seems to act independently of volition, that mysterious duality of being which observes, discriminates, and remembers, while at the same time preoccupied by an overwhelming grief, I was enabled to note each little incident with more ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... was the one who had the right to be the more amazed. She had thought him handsome before; he was glorious now. Arrayed in fashionable, well-fitting clothes, wearing only a mustache, and with his hair properly cut, he was a vision of manly beauty. Instantly, without any volition on her part, her heart went out to him; she knew that it ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... might be hope. Now there is none!! O God! how willingly would I place myself under Dr. Fox in his establishment; for my case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement, an utter impotence of the volition and not of the intellectual faculties. You bid me rouse myself. Go bid a man paralytic in both arms to rub them briskly together and that will cure him. "Alas!" he would reply, "that I can not move my arms is my ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... and immediately present work of 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 a dramatic representative instead of a dramatic ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... strange enough symptom to me of the bewildered condition of the world, to behold a man of this temper, and of this veracity and nobleness, self-consecrated here, by free volition and deliberate selection, to be a Christian Priest; and zealously struggling to fancy himself such in very truth. Undoubtedly a singular present fact;—from which, as from their point of intersection, great perplexities and aberrations in the past, and considerable confusions in the future might ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... the poet cannot. He can explain and qualify and analyze, whereas the creative artist can only hint or project. The poet must hasten on, he must infold and bind together, he must be direct and synthetic in every act. Reflection and qualification are not for him, but action, emotion, volition, the procreant blending and surrender. He works as Nature does, and gives us reality ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... this vegetable animula vagula, blandula, graduates into the higher sensitiveness of the lower class of animals. Nor need we hesitate to recognize the fine gradations from simple sensitiveness and volition to the higher instinctive and other psychical manifestations of the higher brute animals. The gradation is undoubted, however we may explain it. Again, propagation is of one mode in the higher animals, of two in ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... 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
... I lift a volume, but a sentence tires; Even a flimsy magazine requires From me more concentration and direct Volition than my vagrant wits elect To give the pages. All my soul desires Is to gaze without purpose on the fire's Crackle of glowing cinders, and detect Weird shapes of beasts and palaces and men In the red mass of photographic coal; Perchance my lazy mind may, now and ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... since that terrible ride began, and yet there was neither halt nor intermission. Blindfold, pinioned, and bound into the saddle, I sate almost mechanically and without volition, amidst the ranks of the furious Hulans, whose wild huzzas and imprecations rung incessantly in my ears. No rest, no stay. On we sped like a hurricane across the valley and ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... him. His presence in that little hut on the cliff seemed, now, a part of some plan that was not of his making. He was awed by the sudden conviction that he had not come to the Interpreter of his own volition, but had been led there by ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... ma," she said, barely able to control herself. "Don't you worry. I know how you feel, but we'll get along. Don't cry now." Then her own lips lost their evenness, and she struggled long before she could pluck up courage to contemplate this new disaster. And now without volition upon her part there leaped into her consciousness a new and subtly persistent thought. What about Lester's offer of assistance now? What about his declaration of love? Somehow it came back to her—his affection, his personality, his desire to help her, ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... but only for the briefest possible moment. His gentle, dreamy, wistful countenance seemed almost to light up from within. His answer was given in one breath and as if entirely without conscious volition. ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... way we may attempt to explain it, the fact remains that volition is the fundamental characteristic of Spirit. We may speak of conscious, or subconscious or super-conscious action; but in whatever way we may picture to ourselves the condition of the agent as contemplating his own action, a general purposeful lifeward tendency becomes ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... and 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 ...
— Friends in Feathers and Fur, and Other Neighbors - For Young Folks • James Johonnot
... help of the brain. If prior development in growth proved a superiority of rank, the ganglionic system which accompanies the arteries and precedes the evolution of the convoluted cerebrum would hold the highest rank, although it is destitute of consciousness and volition, which ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... 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 |
