"Prescience" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sudden keen prescience, took alarm. Noticing the two maids standing wide-mouthed in the hallway, she summoned her most commandatory tone, stepped into the hall, half closing the door behind her, and cowed the two handmaidens ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... frost and the bare cliffs. In the northern heavens played a soft light, and now and then a star shot. The man who marked its trail across the studded skies thought of himself as of one as far withdrawn as it from the world of lower lights in the forest at his feet. Already he felt a prescience of the loneliness of the morrow, and the morrow, and the morrow, of the slow drift of the days in the waning forest, the hopeless nights, the terror of that great solitude—and felt, too, a feverish desire to hasten that approach, to embrace that which was to be henceforth ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... the young Prince may have felt glowing in his heart a sweet prescience of the peculiar comfort and joy he afterwards found in the loving devotion and noble character of his firstborn, that little blessing that would ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... address to the volunteers, wherein he shows that although his instructions were to undertake a trading voyage and acquire information of the country, his real aim was far different, since he promises unimagined wealth to those who are true to him, and by a curious flash of prescience prophesies immortal renown to their enterprise. On February 10, 1519, he sailed to the conquest of Mexico, accompanied by some six hundred and fifty white men and a few Indians. Cortes was in his ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... Jack roused him by trying to push himself farther under the blanket and Chad rose to rebuild the fire. The third time he was awakened by the subtle prescience of dawn and his eyes opened on a flaming radiance in the east. Again from habit he started to spring hurriedly to his feet and, again sharply conscious, he lay down again. There was no wood to cut, no fire to rekindle, ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... colour and fell in straight masses nearly to her feet. Her eyes were of a deep grey fringed with dark lashes; they had a mysterious and pathetic look—a look caused by longing after something indefinite and yet desired, or by a prescience perhaps of ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... anxious to see the subject treated with as little reference as possible to the divine predestination and foresight; the argument from the latter being a mere identical proposition followed by an assertion of God's prescience. ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... learning, lore, erudition, culture, enlightenment, attainments, information; cognizance, apprehension, cognition, understanding, ken; omniscience (universal knowledge); prescience (foreknowledge); polymathy. Antonyms: sciolism, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... the cause of death; and sin's alone The cause of God's predestination: And from God's prescience of man's sin doth flow Our destination ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... induced by intemperance of knowledge the old age of the world drew on. This the mass of mankind saw not, or, living lustily although unhappily, affected not to see. But, for myself, the Earth's records had taught me to look for widest ruin as the price of highest civilization. I had imbibed a prescience of our Fate from comparison of China the simple and enduring, with Assyria the architect, with Egypt the astrologer, with Nubia, more crafty than either, the turbulent mother of all Arts. In history {*2} of these regions I met with a ray from the Future. The individual artificialities of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... organization was John D. Perry of St Louis; and associated with him were a body of capitalists in Missouri and Pennsylvania whose financial ability was unquestioned, and who have since evinced a vigor and commercial prescience which elevate them to the level of their Eastern rivals. Perceiving that the miserable Fremont-Hallet quarrel had effectually frustrated all rivalry in the construction of a track to the one hundredth meridian, they made application to Congress for an extension ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... know?" cried Anne, too aghast at this instance of Miss Cornelia's uncanny prescience ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and saw Magepa's wives, old women all of them. Also, at his bidding, his daughter, whose name was Gita, brought me some maas, or curdled milk, to drink. She was a well-formed woman, very like her father, but sad-faced, perhaps with a prescience of evil to come. Clinging to her finger was a beautiful boy of something under two years of age, who, when he saw Magepa, ran to him and threw his little arms about his legs. The old man lifted the child and kissed ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... unnecessary vows are folly, because they suppose a prescience of the future which has not been given us. They are, I think, a crime, because they resign that life to chance which God has given us to be regulated by reason; and superinduce a kind of fatality, from which it is the great privilege of our nature to be free.' Piozzi ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... gayety was that of excitement rather than of youth, if George's depression was that of jaded effort rather than of satiated pleasure, it was no more than she had seen in them at other times. She acknowledged that she had few facts to go upon—that she had indeed little more than the terrified prescience which warns the animal ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... forth, By accident most strange, bountifull Fortune (Now my deere Lady) hath mine enemies Brought to this shore: And by my prescience I finde my Zenith doth depend vpon A most auspitious starre, whose influence If now I court not, but omit; my fortunes Will euer after droope: Heare cease more questions, Thou art inclinde to sleepe: 'tis a good dulnesse, And giue it way: I know thou canst not chuse: Come away, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... with a wise prescience of the jealousies and bickerings always arising between Regulars and Volunteers, provides that Regulars shall be tried by Regular, and Volunteers by Volunteer Officers. In practice, the spirit of the law is evaded by the subterfuge, that a Regular Officer, temporarily in command of Volunteers, ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... grandeur and monumental immobility, such as we see in Marius, with the dazzling intellectual versatility found in the Gracchi, in Sylla, in Catiline, in Antony. The comprehension and the absolute perfection of his prescience did not escape the eye of Lucan, who describes him as—"Nil actum reputans, si quid superesset agendum." A fine lambent gleam of his character escapes also in that magnificent fraction of a line, where he is described as one incapable of learning ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... Allen's masterpiece; a work of beauty and finished art. There can be no question of its supreme place in our literature; there can be no doubt of its wide acceptance and acceptability. More than any of his books it is destined to an enviable popularity. It does not take extraordinary prescience to predict an extraordinary circulation for it." —JAMES MACARTHUR in a review in ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... counting all my chains as if that so They never could fall off at any blow Struck by thy possible hand—why, thus I drink Of life's great cup of wonder! Wonderful, Never to feel thee thrill the day or night With personal act or speech, nor ever cull Some prescience of thee with the blossoms white Thou sawest growing! Atheists are as dull, Who cannot guess God's ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... they are mentioned AFTER the heavenly bodies and the "heaven of heavens," but BEFORE the terrestrial elements. As to their purpose, he hesitates between those who held that they were stored up there by the prescience of God for the destruction of the world at the Flood, as the words of Scripture that "the windows of heaven were opened" seemed to indicate, and those who held that they were kept there to moderate the heat of the heavenly bodies. As to the firmament, he is in doubt whether it ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... we can reconcile these words to our belief of Christ's prescience and divinity, or not, matters little to the debate about his divinity itself; since we can so fully prove it by innumerable passages of Scripture, too direct, express, and positive, to be balanced by one obscure passage, from 'whence ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... greed. The ample lands to be had for the taking guaranteed independence to all at the price of labor. With this resource no man needed to call another master. This may be considered the idyllic period of the republic, the time when De Tocqueville saw and admired it, though not without prescience of the doom that awaited it. The seed of death was in the state in the principle of private capitalism, and was sure in time to grow and ripen, but as yet the conditions were not favorable to its development. All seemed to go well, and it is not strange that the American people indulged ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... Chinaman was upon me. That strange, subconscious voice, with which I had become familiar in the past, awoke within me to-night. Not by logic, but by prescience, I knew that the Yellow doctor ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... thirty-fifth Congresses. The day was fast coming when contests for the Speakership and battles over appropriation bills, ay, even the fierce struggle over Kansas, would sink into insignificance, and Mr. DAVIS, with that political prescience for which he was always remarkable, seemed to discern the first sign of the coming storm. The winds had been long sown, and now the whirlwind was to be reaped. The thirty-sixth Congress, which had opened so inauspiciously, and which his vote had ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell
... their judgment and sanction. Their authority in a word was so high, that the first fathers of the Christian church could no otherwise account for a reputation thus universally received, than by supposing that the devils were permitted by God Almighty to inform the oracles with a more than human prescience, that all the world might be concluded in idolatry and unbelief, [3] and the necessity of a Saviour be made more apparent. The gullibility of man is one of the most prominent features of our nature. Various periods and times, when whole nations have as it were with one consent run into the most ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... alarm. She hastened after him, dragging me with her. Lord Cheisford was past middle age, but he was running along the cliff path like a boy. We followed. Lady Angela would have passed him, but I held her back. She did not speak a word. Some vague prescience of the truth even then, I think, had ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... self-respect, while a strong attachment elsewhere rendered him insensible to her personal attractions. As a matter of ambition, the alliance was beyond his hopes, and brought him one step nearer to that throne which, by some extraordinary prescience, both he and his friends anticipated that he was destined one day to ascend;[5] but he could not forget that there were dark suspicions attached to the strange and sudden death of a mother to whom he had been devoted; and he felt doubly repugnant ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... wounded, and for days, like Joseph and Mary, the anxious parents had sought him, only to find him on the threshold of death, with a bullet in his liver. Again and again she beguiled her anguish by chronicles of his miraculous childhood—his precocious intelligence at five, his prescience at six, his unfathomable wisdom at seven. The silent company of wayfarers listened in patience to the twice-told tale. No one could say her nay as she repeated her litany of pain. She was, indeed, the only passenger in that compartment whose ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... in which the nation needs statesmanship and a broad outlook upon the world. In the existing situation we need not the duplicity of a Machiavelli, but the commanding prescience of a Gladstone or an Alfred the Great, or a Julius Caesar. Luckily we have exactly this type of man ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... dossiers, he was sure, there was a clue, the basic clue that would tell him everything he needed to know. His prescience had never been so strong; he knew perfectly well that he was staring at the biggest, most startling and most complete disclosure of all. And he ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... powerful in mind, gifted with reason, and having within him a spirit that is immortal, proud, glorious, aspiring as he is, falls very far short of perfection in every attribute of his nature. To say, therefore, that the prescience, the creative power of the Almighty, reached the limit of its achievements in the creation of man, is to impeach the omnipotence of God himself. Will any man insist that the ingenuity of the Almighty ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... on the earth's surface, who greater prescience has than thou, Gripir! Thou mayest not conceal it, unhappy though it be, or if ill ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... and pressure of the times demanded the latter. It is from such demands that our chief institutions arise. By precept we may be taught their propriety; by example we may see their advantages. But until the necessity is personally felt they are sure to be neglected; and men wonder at their want of prescience and upbraid their shortsightedness when, with a sudden and sometimes startling success, the proposal they have slighted arises through the energy ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... people ruled, like AElfred or AEthelstan or Eadgar, from Winchester, the spiritual head of the English people was content to rule from Canterbury. It was when the piety of the Confessor and the political prescience of his successors brought the Kings finally to Westminster that the Archbishops were permanently drawn to their suffragan's manor house at Lambeth. The Norman rule gave a fresh meaning to their position. In the new course of national ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... here and the sad mornings, The air is filled with portents and with warnings, Clouds that vastly loom and winds that cry, A mournful prescience Of bright things going hence; Red leaves are blown about the widowed sky, And late disconsolate blooms Dankly bestrew The garden walks, as in deserted rooms The parted guest, in haste to bid adieu, Trinklets and shreds forgotten left behind, Torn letters and a ribbon once so brave— ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... reinstated in her old authority—a more perfect one now—as housekeeper of that ample mansion. The reasons which determined her liege upon her restoration to the household have been already reported to the reader. His prescience as to his own approaching fate was perhaps not the least urgent among them. He fortunately left her in possession, and we know how the law estimates this advantage. Of her trials and sorrows, when she was made aware of her widowhood, we will say nothing. Sensitive natures will easily ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... considered them to be only articles of peace, that is to say, you are not to preach against them[305].' BOSWELL. 'It appears to me, Sir, that predestination, or what is equivalent to it, cannot be avoided, if we hold an universal prescience in the Deity.' JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, does not GOD every day see things going on without preventing them?' BOSWELL. 'True, Sir; but if a thing be certainly foreseen, it must be fixed, and cannot happen otherwise; and if we ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... after them, and as she looked a great, nameless dread took possession of her, and she experienced exactly the same peculiar sensation she had felt in the train coming down, a feeling of prescience and foreboding, of brooding evil. It gripped her heart with cold hands and she changed her intention of going to Nyoda's room and asking what was the matter with Veronica. Suddenly she felt that Nyoda would not know. All her heart cried ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... note of prescience in her voice. It was so pronounced that the sense of foreboding ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... date of my letter, that it was his own fault that he had it not before. But, governed by the same pragmatical motives which induced me to correspond with him at first, I was again afraid, truly, with my foolish and busy prescience; and the disappointment would have thrown him into the way of receiving fresh insults from the same persons; which might have made him guilty of some violence to them. And so to save him an apprehended rashness, I rushed into a real one myself. And what vexes me ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... were used, and the papers of Mr. Ferrars examined, it turned out worse than even Myra, in her darkest prescience, had anticipated. Her father had died absolutely penniless. As executor of his father, the funds settled on his wife had remained under his sole control, and they had entirely disappeared. There was a letter addressed to Myra on this subject. ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... heed it. She stood hushed, attentive to the prescience that woke in her; surrendered to the secret, with desire that veiled itself to meet its ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... seemed, whenever he cared to exert himself, to flow from his lips without effort, had deserted him. He sat where the rather brilliant light from the high windows fell upon his face, and Francis wondered more than once whether there were not some change there, perhaps some prescience of trouble to come, which had subdued him and made him unusually thoughtful. Another slighter but more amusing feature of the luncheon was the number of people who stopped to shake hands with Sir Timothy ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... up her monograph on Mickiewicz with an admirable companion study of Zygmunt Krasinski, the 'Unknown' or 'Anonymous' Poet of Poland, second only to Mickiewicz in genius, and, in virtue of his personality, his strange gift of prescience, and the romantic and tragic conditions of his life, appealing to a wider audience than his great contemporary. He came on his father's side of an ancient, noble, and wealthy Polish family, related to the House ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... loneliness; this parching, astringent wind of sorrow that seemed to dry up the oil of his joints, evaporate the simple liquor of his thought, put out the vital sparkle in his eye; and now, latest act of dispossession, to milk his old veins of their warmth—if it had not been for this influence and prescience, Old Dalton might have run hardily quite a good little ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... does not wish to lay claim to any special prescience or wisdom, for, in spite of lucid intervals of foresight, we were all deceived by Germany. Nearly fifty years of peace had blinded us to fifty years of relentless preparation for war. But if we were deceived by the treachery of Germany's false professions, we had no monopoly of illusion. Germany ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... He constantly pondered upon the possibilities through which his friend might be freed from the shackles that bound him to the effeminate serfdom of idleness; but the magic that could unrivet those fetters had not yet been revealed. Still he was sometimes stirred by a mysterious prescience that they would be loosened, ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... the Bravi did not at once talk over the unexpected news, for Grattacacio was with them, coming and going, bringing hot water, shaving them as well as any barber, unpacking their linen and clothes, and waiting on them with such a constant prescience of their needs as only a highly trained body-servant can possess. For the truth was that he had begun life as a bishop's footman, and had risen to be valet to a cardinal, before he had taken to the road after robbing his master of some valuable ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... is not always prescience; they are impressed with images, of which the event only shews them the meaning. They tell what they have seen to others, who are at that time not more knowing than themselves, but may become at last very adequate witnesses, by comparing the narrative ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... Gladstone. If we look simply at the magnitude of the results obtained, compared with the exiguity of the resources at command,—if we remember that out of the small Kingdom of Sardinia grew united Italy, we must come to the conclusion that Count Cavour was undoubtedly a statesman of marvellous skill and prescience. Abraham Lincoln, unknown to fame when he was elected to the presidency, exhibited a power for the government of men which has scarcely been surpassed in any age. He saved the American Union, he enfranchised the black race, and for the task he had to perform ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... breathing herself, listening absorbed, here became conscious, by some sort of prescience, of the basilisk gaze her guardian's wife had fixed ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... primitive Church. And now it is conventionally used to denote a somewhat less honourable class. "The prophets of our day" are many. From the positive style they have adopted, you would suppose that the gift of prescience had come upon them in a far more absolute form than upon the prophets of old. With more dogmatism and less authority do they pronounce upon "the times and seasons." Though failure on failure happens, this seems rather to nerve ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... and went down the grand corridor. The bulldog tugged at his chain. Animals are gifted with prescience. He knew that his master had passed forever out of his life. Presently he heard the voice of the princess calling; and the glamour of royalty encompassed him,—something a human finds hard to resist, and he was ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... were mere scenes of "passing excitement" had any idea of the profound teaching he gave his people! The then editor of "The Christian," who took the trouble to visit them, as well as to converse with The General at length, with remarkable prescience wrote, as early as 1871, in his preface to The General's first important publication, "How to Reach the Masses with ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... his smiling ones. The unabashed impudence, the unfluttered aplomb, but above all the uncanny prescience of this youth disturbed him because he could not understand them. Moreover, it happened that his suspicious mind had lingered on the chance of a betrayal at the hands of his chief. For which very reason ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... war, at least in words (and—should My chance so happen—deeds), with all who war With Thought;—and of Thought's foes by far most rude, Tyrants and sycophants have been and are. I know not who may conquer: if I could Have such a prescience, it should be no bar To this my plain, sworn, downright detestation Of ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... to supplying the public with the evidence on which Mr. Bright's friends assert his right to a place in the front rank of English statesmen. I suppose that there is no better evidence of statesmanship than prescience; that no fuller confirmation of this evidence can be found than in the popular acceptance of those principles which were once unpopular and discredited. A short time since, Lord Derby said that Mr. Bright was the real leader of the Opposition. It is true that he has given ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... exploits. He accomplishes the destruction of the demon Kesi, one of those infernal beings who in vain attempted to kill the divine child, instigated by their prescience of their fate when he should ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... have been prescience, it may have been merely the deplorable state of his nerves, but, as he continued to look out upon that unfamiliar landscape, the beauty of it, in growing on him, became almost intolerable. It affected him with an indescribable ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... or Macedon, the French innovators had destroyed the bonds of union, under colour of providing for the independence of each of their cities. "If the present project of a Republic should fail," Burke said, with a prescience really profound, "all securities to a moderate freedom fail with it. All the indirect restraints which mitigate despotism are removed; insomuch that, if monarchy should ever again obtain an entire ...
— Burke • John Morley
... correspondence and an invitation to join the true believers, i.e., the Mahdists. I have no doubt he meant well, but the land and the dervishes were alike abhorrent to me. Osman had quietly come to the wise conclusion that Mahdism was near its end. With his usual prescience he made his own arrangements without consulting the Khalifa. Early in the year he had all his women and children and such wealth as he could smuggle out of the country sent over to Jeddah. There his family ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... the lad, and the prescience of its waiting denouement, her mind went back into his and his father's history. Mr. Belcher could have alleviated that history; nay, prevented it altogether. What had been her own responsibility in the case? She could not have foreseen all the horrors ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... went down she found everybody had got up early, and Mary Nellen, with some prescience of it, had breakfast ready. Jeff, now in his coat, stood by the dining-room door with his father, talking in a commonplace way about the house as it used to be, and the colonel was professing himself glad no newer fashions had made him change it ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... investigate the forma informans of Vegetables: for as I think that he shall find it a very difficult task, who undertakes to discover the form of Saline crystallizations, without the consideration and prescience of the nature and reason of a Globular form, and as difficult to explicate this configuration of Mushroms, without the previous consideration of the form of Salts; so will the enquiry into the forms of Vegetables be no less, if not much more difficult, ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... hastened forth, intent upon immediate prevention, if possible, of any further ordeals undertaken in behalf of herself. She was thoroughly frightened. A prescience of something ominous impending seemed to grip her very heart. She glanced about, helplessly, unfamiliar with the place. Van was nowhere in sight. She started to run around the cabin when Gettysburg appeared in ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... himself, on the very brink of this world, may have obtained that singular glance into futurity proper to that situation, and perhaps speaks less from his own reflection than from a strange spirit of prescience, which dictates his words. Have I then in earnest sinned so far in my imperial duty, as to make it just to apply to me the warning used by the injured Cleonice to her ravisher and murderer? Methinks I have not. Methinks that at less expense than that of a ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... country, especially the South and West, for the profit of a lucky financial group in the Eastern States. He knew also that such financial groups are never national: he knew that the Bank had foreign backers, and he showed an almost startling prescience as to the evils that were to follow in the train of cosmopolitan finance, "more formidable and more dangerous than the naval and military power of an enemy." But above all he knew that the Bank was odious to the people, ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... whose far-seeing eyes Saw in the germ the nation that should be, Saw how a mighty empire should arise And span the continent from sea to sea, And building for the future, led the way With prescience and high courage, daring fate, An emperor's domain in a single day Bought for a purse of gold! a vast estate, From Europe's despot gained—to ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... hazarding the conjecture, that Blake's prophetic vision recognised, in the lineaments of the 'priests in black gowns,' most of his future editors. Perhaps, though, if Blake's prescience had extended so far as this, he would have taken a more drastic measure; and we shudder to think of the sort of epigram with which the editorial efforts of his worshippers might have been rewarded. The present edition, however, amply compensates for the past. Mr. Sampson gives us, in the ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... came here I have not been visited until to-night by even a shadow of those forebodings which, in the form of divine prescience, illuminated my plans and your fortunes in Olympus. [A pause, while the gods lean towards him in deepest attention.] But a dream came close to my pillow last night and whispered to me strange, disquieting words.... ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... associated capital. To-day the new feudalism has more than half entangled society in its meshes, and its complete establishment stares us in the face. What perspicuity to have foreseen so clearly what is now being realized! If prescience is a test of science—if the foretelling of future events is a test of the laws that govern them and from which they are deducible, then Fourier must have discovered at least some of the laws ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... she sang. But there the burden broke, and rising, her eyes shaded by her hand, Vivia gazed down the lonely road where a stage-coach rolled along in a cloud of dust. What prescience, what instinct, it was that made her throw the shawl over her head, the shawl that Beltran liked to have her wear, and hasten down the field and away to lose herself in the wood, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... and prescience of the human intellect have been largely glorified by some Infidel lecturers, upon the strength of the accuracy with which it is possible to calculate and predict eclipses, and to the disparagement of Bible predictions. And this glorification has been amazingly swollen by Le ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... suit of substantial blue broadcloth, boldly presented himself at George Brenton's front door, and inquired if Miss Breck was at home. It proved to be a fortunate, as well as a bold step. Pedy recognised him at once, and had a kind of a vague prescience as to the object of his visit, or such might have been the inference drawn from the deep crimson which suddenly suffused ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... discover. It is the common story of extraordinary qualities balanced by striking defects. He was not a great statesman, but he was a supremely great administrator, a supremely great master of parliamentary management and of parliamentary legislation. He had little prescience; he often grossly misread the signs of the times, or only recognised them when it was too late; but when he was once convinced, he acted on his conviction with frankness and courage, and when a thing had to be done, no one could do it like him. As ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... not wait for some grand "mission," some mighty crusade to call him to action. The world is full of wrong which needs no preternatural prescience to discover—fraud which bears its name boldly upon its very face. The true reformer will denounce fraud and falsehood wherever found—will assail the wrong no matter how strongly intrenched it be in prescriptive right. But he will make ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... self-assertion, his instinctive appreciation of the meaning and bearing of facts, his capacity to recognize the precise time until which action should be postponed and then to know that action must be taken, suggesting the idea of prescience, his long-suffering and tolerance towards impolitic, obstructive, or over-rash individuals, his marvelous gift of keeping in touch with the people, form a group of qualities which, united in the President of the United States at that mortal juncture, are as strong evidence as anything ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... an unexpected quarter. That ubiquitous power which hurled anathemas alike at the heresies of Luther and the length of clerical wigs, discountenanced its use, and at length fairly lost its temper in the contest with snuff. Whether from a prescience of the beneficial influence it was destined to exert upon mankind, or from a suspicion of its power of sharpening intellects, it is difficult to say; but Popes Urban VIII., and Innocent waged quite a miniature crusade against snuff, anathematizing those who should use ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... companions curtly, with a philosophic commentary on the folly of "throwing up their hand before the game was played out." But they were furnished with liquor, which in this emergency stood them in place of food, fuel, rest, and prescience. In spite of his remonstrances, it was not long before they were more or less under its influence. Uncle Billy passed rapidly from a bellicose state into one of stupor, the Duchess became maudlin, and Mother Shipton snored. Mr. Oakhurst alone remained erect, leaning against a rock, ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... pull on that brought us to the stone steps of the landing-stage. While I made the seats ready for the voyagers and handed them in, Yeo took two reefs in the lug-sail (an act which seemed, I must say, with what wind we felt there, to be carrying his prescience to bold lengths) and hauled the sail to its place. I went forward to lower the centre keel as he came aft with the sheet in his hand. The Mona sidled away, stood out, and then reached for the distant sandhills. The village diminished and ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... his first marriage. It was into his ear that the dying man had poured the wretched tale of his repentance for the life he had lived and the state in which he was leaving his affairs with such scant provision for his sons. For Oliver he had no fear. It was as if with the prescience that comes to men in his pass he had perceived that Oliver was of those who must prevail, a man born to make the world his oyster. His anxieties were all for Lionel, whom he also judged with that same penetrating insight vouchsafed a man in his last hours. Hence his piteous recommendation ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... unfit to handle; and whatever system she embraces, she must find herself involved in inextricable difficulties, and even contradictions, at every step which she takes with regard to such subjects. To reconcile the indifference and contingency of human actions with prescience; or to defend absolute decrees, and yet free the Deity from being the author of sin, has been found hitherto to exceed all the power of philosophy. Happy, if she be thence sensible of her temerity, when she pries into these sublime mysteries; ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... within us. Therefore we do not belong to the system of stars, sun, and earth, but to God only; for in respect to them which seek only to amplify themselves, we are born and live by chance; but in respect to God, whose instruments we are, we are formed by prescience and design, and for a high end. Therefore we are bound to no Father but God, and receive all things from Him. They hold as beyond question the immortality of souls, and that these associate with good angels after ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... of the little grey house came the deadly sweet smell of anaesthetics, heavy with prescience and pain. It dominated, instantly, all the blended Summer fragrances and brought terror ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... the men of The Hague, when they wrote those articles, had a sort of prescience of the future cruelties of war and that they wanted to avoid them. Let us see how ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... did not rail against Hubert, or even Julia. Their personalities had somehow dropped out of her mind, and merely represented forces against which she found herself unable any longer to contend. Nor was she surprised at what had happened. There had always been in her some prescience of her fate. She and unhappiness had always seemed so inseparable, that she had never found it difficult to believe that this last misfortune would befall her. She had thought it over, and had decided that it would be unendurable ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... mysterious brother Rivers might have been one of the robbers,—perhaps the one who accompanied Mrs. Barker to San Jose. But it was plain that the young girl had no complicity with the actions of the gang, whatever might have been her companion's confederation. In the prescience of a true lover, he knew that she must have been deceived and kept in utter ignorance of it. There was no look of it in her lovely, guileless eyes; her very impulsiveness and ingenuousness would have long since betrayed the secret. Was it left for ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... with his feelings, while at the same time I continued to sit before the glass, a helpless onlooker. I was two men at once; the man who knelt all unaware of what was coming and the man who waited in the arm-chair, incapable of word or movement, yet gifted with a torturing prescience. And as I sat this was ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... beleeve they are so; bot I shall never be of the opinion they can forsee future contingencies, which I suppose the divell himselfe can neither forknow nor fortell; these being things which the Almightie hath keepd hidden in the bosome of his divine prescience. And whither the great God hath preordained or predestinated these things, which to us are contingent, to fall out by ane uncontrollable and unavoidable necessitie, is a question not yet decided." [SIR JAMES TURNER'S ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... Berlin, in a sort of semi-diplomatic position, when the Assembly of Notables was convened. His keen prescience and profound sagacity induced him to return to his distracted country, where he knew his services would soon be required. Though debauched, extravagant, and unscrupulous, he was not unpatriotic. He had an intense hatred of feudalism, and saw in its varied inequalities ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... in charge of the bridge, he came down the stairs and aft on the run. Not a word was spoken by either; but, with the prescience that men feel at the coming of a fight, the two cooks left their dishes and the engineers their engines to crowd their heads into the hatches. Riley showed his disfigured face over the heads of the other two; and on the bridge Forsythe watched with ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... terrors, though the now unfriendly elements combined to check his career, still, with unswerving purpose, undaunted courage, she saw him march constantly forward. Spirits of evil could not drive from his heart the prescience of greatness; and his soul dwelt calmly under the foreshadow of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... marking their shocked sense of it by soft shufflings at the door of the parlor, his sanctuary. He felt obscurely that he had become important to them, the chief figure of a little infamous tragedy. He had a moment's intense and painful prescience of the way they would take it; they would treat him with an excruciating respect, an awful deference, as a person visited by God ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... the spirit-world within us; certainly does it seem to have prescience of the future. Is it an electric chain connecting what is, with what is to be? Or is it the second-sight of instinct? Certainly there are times when something within whispers a warning—as, in the physical world, God's wild creatures are warned ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... beyond them just as present; and as for Barbara, she is quite determined that no one but she shall let Freddy into the all-important secret. She is now fully convinced in her own mind that she had always had special prescience of this affair, and the devouring desire we all have to say "I told you how 'twould be" to our unfortunate fellow-travellers through this vale of tears, whether the cause for the hateful reminder be for weal or woe, is strong ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... in fact, the results which have accrued. Without doubt, it was difficult to foresee them, but it is worthy of note that, in spite of all adverse and possibly ephemeral appearances, symptoms are not wanting which encourage the belief that the prescience of the early Free Traders may, in the end, be tardily vindicated. It is the irony of current politics that at a time when England is meditating a return to Protection—but is as yet, I am glad to say, ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... excuse for the General Staff in its not of its own accord pressing upon the technical people that something of the sort must be produced somehow. Knowledge that a thoroughly practical man possessed of engineering knowledge and distinguished for his prescience like Swinton was convinced that the thing was feasible, was just what was required to set the General Staff ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... far forth. By accident most strange, bountiful Fortune, Now my dear lady, hath mine enemies Brought to this shore; and by my prescience 180 I find my zenith doth depend upon A most auspicious star, whose influence If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes Will ever after droop. Here cease more questions: Thou art inclined to sleep; 'tis a good dulness, 185 And give it way: I know thou canst not ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... with the divinities of the Jews and the Christians thrown in, that in a day to come he would avenge Domitian's rods with daggers. Had the prince been able to do so, there might have risen in his mind some prescience of a certain scene, in which he must play a part on a far-off but destined night. He might have beheld a vision of himself, bald, corpulent and thin-legged, but wearing the imperial robes of Caesar, rolling ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... Mr. Landale's weighted brow she propped up her own long sallow face, upon its aching side, with a trembling hand, and, full of agonised prescience, ventured to ask ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... anger stirring in him. Perhaps it was excited by that ancient instinct which causes the male animal to resent the spying upon him when he is courting his female as the deadliest of all possible insults, or perhaps by some prescience of affronts which were about to be offered to him and Isobel by these two whom he knew to be bitterly hostile. At least his temper was rising, and like most rather gentle-natured men when really provoked and cornered, he ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... moment he had a sharp prescience of the unwisdom of his rejection. A cold calculator of chance and probabilities would have reckoned that a half hour of assuagement here would have been a wiser investment of his mortal moments than any virtuous ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... Moempelgard (Montbeliard), 1586, in disputing with Andreae, he defended the proposition "that Adam had indeed of his own accord fallen into these calamities, yet, nevertheless, not only according to the prescience, but also according to the ordination and decree of God—sponte quidem, sed tamen non modo praesciente, sed etiam iuste ordinante et decernente Deo." (186.) "There never has been, nor is, nor will be ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... Quincy, Jr., and John Hancock, she did her full share toward making such a commemoration possible. [Applause.] As in 1776, so in 1876, we have sent John Adams to represent us at Philadelphia, and, perhaps with some prescience of what the next century is to effect, we have sent with him Madame Boylston as his colleague [applause]; and it may be that Alma Mater in this has possibly shown a little feminine malice, for it is to a silent congress that she is made her deputy. [Laughter ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... replaced. They will, indeed, obtain a large profit on their sales, and will be accused by ignorant persons of speculating on scarcity and popular apprehension; but it will be due wholly to their prescience that the scarcity did not become famine, and the apprehension suffering; and they will have merited for this service more than the largest profits that can ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... A prescience of the soul that has no name; Expectancy that is both wild and tame, As if the Earth, from out its azure ring Of heavens, looked to see, as white as flame,— As Perseus once to chained Andromeda came,— The swift, divine revealment ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... lady saw that lank and sinister man of God quite distinctly, but she did not choose to do so, and Larkin, with a grand sort of prescience, foresaw a county feud between the Houses of Five Oaks and Brandon, and now the lady had vanished. The money, carefully counted, was rolled in Lake's pocket book, and the bright new deed which made Jos. Larkin, ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... a comet myself, and knew little about the methods of exploring the heavens for one, except what had been told me by H. P. Tuttle. But I gave him the best directions I could, and we parted. It is now rather humiliating that I did not inquire more thoroughly into the case. It would have taken more prescience than I was gifted with to expect that I should live to see the bashful youth awarded the gold medal of the Royal ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... Asquith's Governments nor that of his successor need fear comparison with those of our Allies or our enemies on that account; and it is merely a modest foible of the people, which has hardly lost a war for nearly four hundred years, to ascribe its escape to fortune, and to envy the prescience and the science which have lightened the path ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... stood looking out the window after he left, uneasy with a prescience of trouble. She watched with a feverish interest the stir that presently arose about the bunkhouses. That summer a wide space had been cleared between bungalow and camp. She could see moving lanterns, and even now and then hear the voices of men calling to each other. Once the Panther's ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... l'aube du jour was not the key-word but the key-word was constructed from it by some arbitrary rule; and that rule was susceptible of solution. After he was free of this fellow Marston, he would solve the problem quickly enough. It was as sure as tomorrow. The prescience was come. ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... symphony. But in his sonatas he is always rather hampered, and never attains the flow of his slow melodies for the violin. Mozart, also, while a beautiful player upon the pianoforte of his day, did not possess the prescience of Beethoven, who was able to see over the pianoforte of his time and write as if he felt the assurance of the nobler and yet nobler instruments of these later times. Here he stands with Bach, who in his great Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue requires and confidently expects the breadth ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... head-quarters of the army and the quartermasters ought to have inquired at the head-quarters of the defenses of Washington, if the roads are safe. But of course it was not done, as the big men here possess all the prescience, and need no valuable information. All of them appear to me as ostriches, who hide their heads and eyes, not to ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... of this exultation when he returned to his office on the morning following Druce's release. An indefinable oppression weighed him down. He had won, he knew—and yet the air about him seemed charged with prescience of evil. He tried to shake it off and could not. He was anxious, too, about Harry. Why, he asked himself, should he worry about an ungrateful son. John Boland did not know the answer, yet the answer was very plain. His son Harry was his own flesh and blood and no man can cut himself off from ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... Is the Lord of Hosts so slight a God, that we must place a barrier to His sovereignty, and fix the boundaries of Omnipotence between the Jordan and the Lebanon? It is not thus written; and were it so, I'll pit my inspiration against the prescience of my ancestors. I also am a prophet, and Bagdad shall be my Zion. The daughter of the Voice! Well, I am clearly summoned. I am the Lord's servant, not Jabaster's. Let me make His worship universal as ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... alone in such matters as refraining from violent exercise, and the taking of food whether inclined for it or not, that a sort of prescience guided beautiful Tara at this time in her new home beside the Sussex Downs. There came a morning when, as she strolled about the strip of shrubbery and orchard which lay between the stabling and the house, it occurred to her that it would be a good thing to dig a hole somewhere ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... last (1879) a woman, known as the Queen of Hearts, who had attained the age of one hundred years, and who had been known for three quarters of a century as a fortune-teller, died in Vienna. Apparently gifted with the faculty of prescience, intimately acquainted with the shuffling of cards, deeply learned in the lore of the prophetic lines traced by the graver of Fate upon human hands and feet, this lady devoted her days to the unravelling of the tangled secrets of the future, charging those whose curiosity prompted them to ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... another episode of this visit. One evening the composer outlined to his friends his plans for "Parsifal," adding that it probably would be his last work. The little circle was deeply affected, and Cosima wept. Strange prescience! "Parsifal" was not produced until twenty years later, yet it proved to be the finale of Wagner's ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... head to foot, and seemed to fathom what was coming, with a prescience vague, but unmistakable. One appeal was left to ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... musing and unhappy. To a man of his delicate and hyper-sensitive nature, an event of this kind was a vast disturbance. He felt that this anonymous letter was but the forerunner of a long series of troubles. That prescience which nervous people have of misfortunes portrayed to him a future black with disappointments ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... rubber, and the feathers of the ostrich. Statesmen will modestly say that a study of the map showed them how the course of empire must take its way into this or that undiscovered wilderness, and that in consequence, at their direction, armies marched to open these tracts which but for their prescience would have remained a desert. But that was not the real reason. A woman wanted three feathers to wear at Buckingham Palace, and to oblige her a few unimaginative traders, backed by a man who owned a tramp steamer, opened up ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... among three courses. The impulses of my heart, joined to some prescience of trouble, bade me to follow Elisabeth. My duty ordered me to hasten to Mr. Calhoun. My interest demanded that I should tarry, for I was sure that the Baroness von Ritz would make no merely idle request in these circumstances. Hesitating ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... child is ignorant of so many things. It leaves room for the existence and growth of a mind, of an imagination which, in time, shall lead rather than follow the processes of reason; which shall leap before it looks, conscious of prescience before proof, arriving on wings while the shoestrings are being tied. Blessed are the ignorance, the beliefs and the innocency of the country boy. For if he can maintain a remnant of these into maturity the world will be more beautiful; he will idealize his friends and lovers, ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... writing all this perfectly coolly and in full possession of my reason; I have perfect prescience of what my resolve entails, and of this blind rush towards death. I feel that my very minutes are numbered, and that I no longer have anything in my skull, in which some fire, though I do not quite know what ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... as was Hojo Tokimasa, his son Yoshitoki excelled him in both of those attributes as well as in prescience. It was to the mansion of Yoshitoki that Sanetomo was carried for safety when his life was menaced by the wiles of Tokimasa. Yet in thus espousing the cause of his sister, Masa, and his nephew, Sanetomo, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... ginger might not do. Failing that, I should feel inclined to say, buncombe." Mr. J. says, this was a different mare. What of that? In turf matters the name is everything, and I am therefore justified in citing this as one of the most extraordinary instances of prescience known ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 24, 1890 • Various
... sincere that it is never offensive nor ridiculous. Compare the modes in which modern literature is advertised with the prospectus of this book, and think what a reading public it addresses, what criticism it expects. It seems to have been uttered from some eastern summit, with a sober morning prescience in the dawn of time, and you cannot read a sentence without being elevated as upon the table-land of the Ghauts. It has such a rhythm as the winds of the desert, such a tide as the Ganges, and is as superior to criticism as the Himmaleh Mountains. Its tone is of such unrelaxed fibre, that ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... Olivet, and the long line of the white city walls, with the gilding of the Temple glittering in the sunshine, burst upon their view, the multitude lifted up their voices in gladness. But Christ sat there, and as He looked across the valley, and beheld, with His divine prescience, the city, now so joyous and full of stir, sitting solitary and desolate, He lifted up His voice in loud wailing. The Christ wept because He must punish, but He punished though ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... personage of the Olympian divinities, was more respectable morally than his father. He was the sun-god of the Greeks, and was the embodiment of divine prescience, of healing skill, of musical and poetical productiveness, and hence the favorite of the poets. He had a form of ideal beauty, grace, and vigor, inspired by unerring wisdom and insight into futurity. He was obedient to the will of Zeus, to ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... from the little Venetian printing press came forth all the great authors of antiquity, each bearing on the title-page the words [Greek text]; words which may serve to remind us with what wondrous prescience Polybius saw the world's fate when he foretold the material sovereignty of Roman institutions and exemplified in himself the ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... be denied that the enemy can select the point of attack out of the whole extent of coast, where is the prescience that can indicate the spot? And if it cannot be foretold, how is that ubiquity to be imparted that shall always place our fleet in the path of the advancing foe? Suppose we attempt to cover the coast by cruising in front of ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck |
