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Awe

Awe is the body's response to scale it cannot match. The breath stops for a fraction of a second; the eye widens; the sense of self briefly thins so that something larger can occupy the same room. Vela reads awe through the writers and traditions that have refused to make it small — that have kept awe as the encounter with the genuinely outsized rather than as a synonym for liking something a lot.

Working definition · The widening that opens before something vast or beyond the usual scale—wonder mixed with humility.

4329 passages · 9 Vela essays · in 1 cluster

Vela’s read on this emotion

Awe is one of the emotions most actively diluted in contemporary usage. *Awesome* is now an adjective for a sandwich. The reading attends to a more specific register: awe as the response to scale — natural, mortal, divine, historical — that the self cannot domesticate.

The contemplative tradition is the deepest reservoir for awe. The Hebrew word *yir'ah* — translated variably as *fear*, *awe*, *reverence* — names the response to the divine that older translations have struggled to carry into English. The Book of Job, the Psalms of creation, the prophets at the moment of vocation each preserve awe as a primary religious experience. The Sufi tradition — Rumi, Hafiz, the Persian mystical poets — reads awe as the soul's recognition of the Beloved. The Buddhist contemplative literature names a parallel register inside silence rather than presence. Augustine of Hippo writes *trembling awe* — *amor et timor* — as the structure of devotion in the *Confessions*.

The modern reading runs through the writers who have refused to flatten the natural sublime. The Romantic tradition — Wordsworth at Tintern Abbey, the Hudson River school painters, John Muir in the Sierra Nevada — treats awe before mountains, rivers, and storms as a serious cognitive event. The literature of exploration — Robert Kurson's *Rocket Men* on the Apollo 8 crew seeing Earth from the moon, the Antarctic memoirs, the deep-ocean accounts — preserves awe at the scale of what humans can encounter when they leave the human-scaled world. Joy Harjo's *Crazy Brave* reads awe inside the Indigenous spiritual register that the colonial inheritance has tried to refuse.

Awe is not the same as wonder, admiration, fear, or gratitude. Wonder is awe's curious cousin — interested rather than overcome. Admiration is steadied seeing; awe is the witness flooded. Fear shares awe's somatic shape — the breath catch, the still body — but the object is threatening rather than vast. Gratitude can shade into awe when the gift exceeds what can be acknowledged. The four are kin; the reading keeps them distinct because the writers who have been most honest about each have kept them separate.

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An essay on how this word lives in language, in the tagged corpus, and in figurative art when curators pair passage with image — not a list of stages, not permission to feel.

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Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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4329 tagged passages

  • From Anna Karenina (1877)

    Stop a minute, stoop down,' said Kitty's sister, Madame Lvov, and with her plump, handsome arms she smilingly set straight the flowers on her head. Dolly came up, tried to say something, but could not speak, cried, and then laughed unnaturally. Kitty looked at all of them with the same absent eyes as Levin. Meanwhile the officiating clergy had got into their vestments, and the priest and deacon came out to the lectern, which stood in the forepart of the church. The priest turned to Levin saying something. Levin did not hear what the priest said. 'Take the bride's hand and lead her up,' the best man said to Levin. It was a long while before Levin could make out what was expected of him. For a long time they tried to set him right and made him begin again—because he kept taking Kitty by the wrong arm or with the wrong arm—till he understood at last that what he had to do was, without changing his position, to take her right hand in his right hand. When at last he had taken the bride's hand in the correct way, the priest walked a few paces in front of them and stopped at the lectern. The crowd of friends and relations moved after them, with a buzz of talk and a rustle of skirts. Some one stooped down and pulled out the bride's train. The church became so still that the drops of wax could be heard falling from the candles. The little old priest in his ecclesiastical cap, with his long silvery-grey locks of hair parted behind his ears, was fumbling with something at the lectern, putting out his little old hands from under the heavy silver vestment with the gold cross on the back of it. Stepan Arkadyevitch approached him cautiously, whispered something, and making a sign to Levin, walked back again. The priest lighted two candles, wreathed with flowers, and holding them sideways so that the wax dropped slowly from them he turned, facing the bridal pair. The priest was the same old man that had confessed Levin. He looked with weary and melancholy eyes at the bride and bridegroom, sighed, and putting his right hand out from his vestment, blessed the bridegroom with it, and also with a shade of solicitous tenderness laid the crossed fingers on the bowed head of Kitty. Then he gave them the candles, and taking the censer, moved slowly away from them. 'Can it be true?' thought Levin, and he looked round at his bride.

  • From Anna Karenina (1877)

    Then he had been sent to the bedroom to help the old princess to move the holy picture in its silver and gold setting, and with the princess's old waiting-maid he had clambered on a shelf to reach it and had broken the little lamp, and the old servant had tried to reassure him about the lamp and about his wife, and he carried the holy picture and set it at Kitty's head, carefully tucking it in behind the pillow. But where, when, and why all this had happened, he could not tell. He did not understand why the old princess took his hand, and looking compassionately at him, begged him not to worry himself, and Dolly persuaded him to eat something and led him out of the room, and even the doctor looked seriously and with commiseration at him and offered him a drop of something. All he knew and felt was that what was happening was what had happened nearly a year before in the hotel of the country town at the deathbed of his brother Nikolay. But that had been grief—this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loop-holes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it. 'Lord, have mercy on us, and succour us!' he repeated to himself incessantly, feeling, in spite of his long and, as it seemed, complete alienation from religion, that he turned to God just as trustfully and simply as he had in his childhood and first youth. All this time he had two distinct spiritual conditions. One was away from her, with the doctor, who kept smoking one fat cigarette after another and extinguishing them on the edge of a full ash-tray, with Dolly, and with the old prince, where there was talk about dinner, about politics, about Marya Petrovna's illness, and where Levin suddenly forgot for a minute what was happening, and felt as though he had waked up from sleep; the other was in her presence, at her pillow, where his heart seemed breaking and still did not break from sympathetic suffering, and he prayed to God without ceasing. And every time he was brought back from a moment of oblivion by a scream reaching him from the bedroom, he fell into the strange error that had come upon him the first minute. Every time he heard a shriek, he jumped up, ran to justify himself, remembered on the way that he was not to blame, and he longed to defend her, to help her.

  • From Anna Karenina (1877)

    'And I looked out for miracles, complained that I did not see a miracle which would convince me. A material miracle would have persuaded me. And here is a miracle, the sole miracle possible, continually existing, surrounding me on all sides, and I never noticed it! 'Fyodor says that Kirillov lives for his belly. That's comprehensible and rational. All of us as rational beings can't do anything else but live for our belly. And all of a sudden the same Fyodor says that one mustn't live for one's belly, but must live for truth, for God, and at a hint I understand him! And I and millions of men, men who lived ages ago and men living now—peasants, the poor in spirit and the learned, who have thought and written about it, in their obscure words saying the same thing—we are all agreed about this one thing: what we must live for and what is good. I and all men have only one firm, incontestable, clear knowledge, and that knowledge cannot be explained by the reason—it is outside it, and has no causes and can have no effects. 'If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect. 'And yet I know it, and we all know it. 'What could be a greater miracle than that? 'Can I have found the solution of it all? can my sufferings be over?' thought Levin, striding along the dusty road, not noticing the heat nor his weariness, and experiencing a sense of relief from prolonged suffering. This feeling was so delicious that it seemed to him incredible. He was breathless with emotion and incapable of going farther; he turned off the road into the forest and lay down in the shade of an aspen on the uncut grass. He took his hat off his hot head and lay propped on his elbow in the lush, feathery, woodland grass. 'Yes, I must make it clear to myself and understand,' he thought, looking intently at the untrampled grass before him, and following the movements of a green beetle, advancing along a blade of couch-grass and lifting up in its progress a leaf of goat-weed. 'What have I discovered?' he asked himself, bending aside the leaf of goat-weed out of the beetle's way and twisting another blade of grass above for the beetle to cross over on to it. 'What is it makes me glad? What have I discovered? 'I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew. I understand the force that in the past gave me life, and now too gives me life.

  • From Anna Karenina (1877)

    But something drew her towards it, and she could yield to it or resist it at will. She got up to rouse herself, and slipped off her plaid and the cape of her warm dress. For a moment she regained her self-possession, and realised that the thin peasant who had come in wearing a long overcoat, with buttons missing from it, was the stoveheater, that he was looking at the thermometer, that it was the wind and snow bursting in after him at the door; but then everything grew blurred again . . . That peasant with the long waist seemed to be gnawing something on the wall, the old lady began stretching her legs the whole length of the carriage, and filling it with a black cloud; then there was a fearful shrieking and banging, as though someone were being torn to pieces; then there was a blinding dazzle of red fire before her eyes and a wall seemed to rise up and hide everything. Anna felt as though she were sinking down. But it was not terrible, but delightful. The voice of a man muffled up and covered with snow shouted something in her ear. She got up and pulled herself together; she realised that they had reached a station and that this was the guard. She asked Annushka to hand her the cape she had taken off and her shawl, put them on and moved towards the door. 'Do you wish to get out?' asked Annushka. 'Yes, I want a little air. It's very hot in here.' And she opened the door. The driving snow and the wind rushed to meet her and struggled with her over the door. But she enjoyed the struggle. She opened the door and went out. The wind seemed as though lying in wait for her; with gleeful whistle it tried to snatch her up and bear her off, but she clung to the cold doorpost, and holding her skirt got down on to the platform and under the shelter of the carriages. The wind had been powerful on the steps, but on the platform, under the lee of the carriages, there was a lull. With enjoyment she drew deep breaths of the frozen, snowy air, and standing near the carriage looked about the platform and the lighted station. XXX T HE raging tempest rushed whistling between the wheels of the carriages, about the scaffolding, and round the corner of the station.

  • From Anna Karenina (1877)

    The sun was setting behind a thick forest, and in the glow of sunset the birch-trees, dotted about in the aspen copse, stood out clearly with their hanging twigs, and their buds swollen almost to bursting. From the thickest parts of the copse, where the snow still remained, came the faint sound of narrow winding threads of water running away. Tiny birds twittered, and now and then fluttered from tree to tree. In the pauses of complete stillness there came the rustle of last year's leaves, stirred by the thawing of the earth and the growth of the grass. 'Imagine! One can hear and see the grass growing!' Levin said to himself, noticing a wet, slate-coloured aspen leaf moving beside a blade of young grass. He stood, listened, and gazed sometimes down at the wet mossy ground, sometimes at Laska listening all alert, sometimes at the sea of bare tree-tops that stretched on the slope below him, sometimes at the darkening sky, covered with white streaks of cloud. A hawk flew high over a forest far away with a slow sweep of its wings; another flew with exactly the same motion in the same direction and vanished. The birds twittered more and more loudly and busily in the thicket. An owl hooted not far off, and Laska, starting, stepped cautiously a few steps forward, and putting her head on one side, began to listen intently. Beyond the stream was heard the cuckoo. Twice she uttered her usual cuckoo-call, and then gave a hoarse, hurried call and broke down. 'Imagine! the cuckoo already!' said Stepan Arkadyevitch, coming out from behind a bush. 'Yes, I hear it,' answered Levin, reluctantly breaking the stillness with his voice, which sounded disagreeable to himself. 'Now it's coming!' Stepan Arkadyevitch's figure again went behind the bush and Levin saw nothing but the bright flash of a match, followed by the red glow and blue smoke of a cigarette. 'Tchk! tchk!' came the snapping sound of Stepan Arkadyevitch cocking his gun. 'What's that cry?' asked Oblonsky, drawing Levin's attention to a prolonged cry, as though a colt were whinnying in a high voice, in play. 'Oh, don't you know it? That's the hare. But enough talking! Listen, it's flying!' almost shrieked Levin, cocking his gun. They heard a shrill whistle in the distance, and in the exact time, so well-known to the sportsman, two seconds later—another, a third, and after the third whistle the hoarse, guttural cry could be heard.

  • From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

    Memory had fled. To all intents and purposes she was as a being for the first time ushered into the world. 'All of the past that remained to her was the faculty of pronouncing a few words, and this seems to have been as purely instinctive as the wailings of an infant; for at first the words which she uttered were connected with no ideas in her mind.' Until she was taught their significance they were unmeaning sounds. "'Her eyes were virtually for the first time opened upon the world. Old things had passed away; all things had become new.' Her parents, brothers, sisters, friends, were not recognized or acknowledged as such by her. She had never seen them before,—never known them,—was not aware that such persons had been. Now for the first time she was introduced to their company and acquaintance. To the scenes by which she was surrounded she was a perfect stranger. The house, the fields, the forest, the hills, the vales, the streams,—all were novelties. The beauties of the landscape were all unexplored. "She had not the slightest consciousness that she had ever existed previous to the moment in which she awoke from that mysterious slumber. 'In a word, she was an infant, just born, yet born in a state of maturity, with a capacity for relishing the rich, sublime, luxuriant wonders of created nature.' "The first lesson in her education was to teach her by what ties she was bound to those by whom she was surrounded, and the duties devolving upon her accordingly. This she was very slow to learn, and, 'indeed, never did learn, or, at least, never would acknowledge the ties of consanguinity, or scarcely those of friendship. She considered those she had once known as for the most part strangers and enemies, among whom she was, by some remarkable and unaccountable means, transplanted, though from what region or state of existence was a problem unsolved.' "The next lesson was to re-teach her the arts of reading and writing. She was apt enough, and made such rapid progress in both that in a few weeks she had readily re-learned to read and write. In copying her name which her brother had written for her as a first lesson, she took her pen in a very awkward manner and began to copy from right to left in the Hebrew mode, as though she had been transplanted from an Eastern soil. . . . "The next thing that is noteworthy is the change which took place in her disposition. Instead of being melancholy she was now cheerful to extremity. Instead of being reserved she was buoyant and social. Formerly taciturn and retiring, she was now merry and jocose.

  • From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

    125. I have noticed a curious enlargement of certain 'distances' of difference under the influence of chloroform. The jingling of the bells on the horses of a horse-car passing the door, for example, and the rumbling of the vehicle itself, which to our ordinary hearing merge together very readily into a quasi -continuous body of sound, have seemed so far apart as to require a sort of mental facing in opposite directions to get from one to the other, as if they belonged in different worlds. I am inclined to suspect, from certain data, that the ultimate philosophy of difference and likeness will have to be built upon experiences of intoxication, especially by nitrous oxide gas, which lets us into intuitions the subtlety whereof is denied to the waking state. Cf. B. P. Blood: The Anæsthetic Revelation, and the Gist of Philosophy (Amsterdam, N.Y., 1874). Cf. also Mind, VII. 206. [442] Op. cit . p. 126 ff. [443] Stumpf, pp. 111-121. [444] Stumpf, pp. 116-7. I have omitted, so as not to make my text too intricate, an extremely acute and conclusive paragraph, which I reproduce here: "We may generalize: Wherever a number of sensible impressions are apprehended as a series , there in the last instance must perceptions of simple likeness be found. Proof : Assume that all the terms of a series, e.g. the qualities of tone, c d e f g , have something in common,—no matter what it is , call it X; then I say that the differing parts of each of these terms must not only be differently constituted in each, but must themselves form a series , whose existence is the ground for our apprehending the original terms in serial form. We thus get instead of the original series a b c d e f . . . the equivalent series X±, X², X³ , . . . etc. What is gained? The question immediately arises: How is ± ² ³ known as a series? According to the theory, these elements must themselves be made up of a part common to all, and of parts differing in each, which latter parts form a new series, and so on ad infinitum , which is absurd." [445] The most important ameliorations of Fechner's formula are Delbœuf's in his Recherches sur la Mesure des Sensations (1873), p. 35, and Elsas's in his pamphlet Über die Psychophysik (1886), p. 16. [446] Reversing the order is for the sake of letting the opposite accidental errors due to 'contrast' neutralize each other. [447] Theoretically, it would seem that it ought to be equal to the sum of all the additions which we judge to be increases divided by the total number of judgments made. [448] J. Delbœuf Eléments de Psychophysique (1883), p. 9. [449] Philos. Studien, IV. 588. [450] Berlin Acad. Sitzungsberichte, 1888, p. 917. Other observers (Dobro. wolsky, Lamansky) found great differences in different colors. [451] See Merkel's tables, loc. cit . p.

  • From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

    We discover among its parts regulations that were never given to sense at all,—mathematical relations, tangents, squares, and roots and logarithmic functions,—and out of an infinite number of these we call certain ones essential and lawgiving, and ignore the rest. Essential these relations are, but only for our purpose, the other relations being just as real and present as they; and our purpose is to conceive simply and to foresee. Are not simple conception and prevision subjective ends, pure and simple? They are the ends of what we call science; and the miracle of miracles, a miracle not yet exhaustively cleared up by any philosophy, is that the given order lends itself to the remodelling. It shows itself plastic to many of our scientific, to many of our æsthetic, to many of our practical purposes and ends." Cf. also Hodgson: Philos. of Refl., ch. V; Lotze: Logik, §§342-351; Sigwart: Logik, §§60-63, 105.[549] In an article entitled 'Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment,' published in the Atlantic Monthly for October 1880, the reader will find some ampler illustrations of these remarks. I have there tried to show that both mental and social evolution are to be conceived after the Darwinian fashion, and that the function of the environment properly so called is much more that of selecting forms, produced by invisible forces, than producing of such forms,—producing being the only function thought of by the pre-Darwinian evolutionists, and the only one on which stress is laid by such contemporary ones as Mr. Spencer and Mr. Allen.[550] "It is perfectly true that our world of experience begins with such associations as lead us to expect that what has happened to us will happen again. These associations lead the babe to look for milk from its nurse and not from its father, the child to believe that the apple he sees will taste good; and whilst they make him wish for it, they make him fear the bottle which contains his bitter medicine. But whereas a part of these associations grows confirmed by frequent repetition, another part is destroyed by contradictory experiences; and the world becomes divided for us into two provinces, one in which we are at home and anticipate with confidence always the same sequences; another filled with alternating, variable, accidental occurrences.". . . Accident is, in a wide sphere, such an every-day matter that we need not be surprised if it sometimes invades the territory where order is the rule. And one personification or another of the capricious power of chance easily helps us over the difficulties which further reflection might find in the exceptions. Yes, indeed, Exception has a peculiar fascination; it is a subject of astonishment, a ˜±Í¼±, and the credulity with which in this first stage of pure association we adopt our supposed rules is matched by the equal credulity with which we adopt the miracles that interfere with them.

  • From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

    Thus not only our morality but our religion, so far as the latter is deliberate, depend on the effort which we can make. "Will you or won't you have it so?" is the most probing question we are ever asked; we are asked it every hour of the day, and about the largest as well as the smallest, the most theoretical as well as the most practical, things. We answer by consents or non-consents and not by words. What wonder that these dumb responses should seem our deepest organs of communication with the nature of things! What wonder if the effort demanded by them be the amount which we accord of it be the one strictly underived and original contribution which we make to the world! THE EDUCATION OF THE WILL. The education of the will may be taken in a broader or a narrower sense. In the broader sense, it means the whole of one's training to moral and prudential conduct, and of one's learning to adapt means to ends, involving the 'association of ideas,' in all its varieties and complications, together with the power of inhibiting impulses irrelevant to the ends desired, and of initiating movements contributory thereto. It is the acquisition of these latter powers which I mean by the education of the will in the narrower sense. And it is in this sense alone that it is worth while to treat the matter here.[519] Since a willed movement is a movement preceded by an idea of itself, the problem of the will's education is the problem of how the idea of a movement can arouse the movement itself. This, as we have seen, is a secondary kind of process; for framed as we are, we can have no a priori idea of a movement, no idea of a movement which we have not already performed. Before the idea can be generated, the movement must have occurred in a blind, unexpected way, and left its idea behind. Reflex, instinctive, or random execution of a movement must, in other words, precede its voluntary execution. Reflex and instinctive movements have already been considered sufficiently for the purposes of this book. 'Random' movements are mentioned so as to include quasi -accidental reflexes from inner causes, or movements possibly arising from such overflow of nutrition in special centres as Prof. Bain postulates in his explanation of those 'spontaneous discharges' by which he sets such great store in his derivation of the voluntary life.[520]

  • From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

    The tympanic membrane is furthermore able to render sensible differences in the pressure of the external atmosphere, too slight to be, felt either as noise or in this more violent way. If the reader will sit with closed eyes and let a friend approximate some solid object, like a large book, noiselessly to his face, he min immediately become aware of the object's presence and position—likewise of its departure. A friend of the writer, making the experiment for the first time, discriminated unhesitatingly between the three degrees of solidity of a board, a lattice-frame, and a sieve, held close to his ear. Now as this sensation is never used by ordinary persons as a means of perception, we may fairly assume that its felt quality, in those whose attention is called to it for the first time, belongs to it quâ sensation, and owes nothing to educational suggestions. But this felt quality is most distinctly and unmistakably one of vague spatial vastness in three dimensions—quite as much so as is the felt quality of the retinal sensation when we lie on our back and fin the entire held of vision with the empty blue sky. When an object is brought near the ear we immediately feel shut in, contracted; when the object is removed, we suddenly feel as if a transparency, clearness, openness, had been made outside of us. And the feeling will, by any one who will take the pains to observe it, be acknowledged to involve the third dimension in a vague, unmeasured state.[156]

  • From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

    But the symbol will often give us the emotional effect of the perception. Such expressions as the abysmal vault of heaven, the endless expanse of ocean, etc., summarize many computations to the imagination, and give the sense of an enormous horizon. So it seems with the blind. They multiply mentally the amount of a distinctly felt freedom to move, anti gain the immediate sense of a vaster freedom still. Thus it is that blind men are never without the consciousness of their horizon. They all enjoy travelling, especially with a companion. On the prairies the feel the great openness; in valleys they feel closed in; and one has told me that he thought few seeing people could enjoy the view from a mountain-top more than he. A blind person on entering a house or room immediately receives, from the reverberations of his voice and steps, an impression of its dimensions, and to a certain extent of its arrangement. The tympanic sense noticed on p. 140, supra, comes in to help here, and possibly other forms of tactile sensibility not yet understood. Mr. Hank Levy, the blind author of 'Blindness and the Blind' (London), gives the following account of his powers of perception:

  • From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

    At first this view astounds us by the enormous number of special adjustments it supposes animals to possess ready-made in anticipation of the outer things among which they are to dwell. Can mutual dependence be so intricate and go so far? Is each thing born fitted to particular other things, and to them exclusively, as locks are fitted to their keys? Undoubtedly this must be believed to be so. Each nook and cranny of creation, down to our very skin and entrails, has its living inhabitants, with organs suited to the place, to devour and digest the food it harbors and to meet the dangers it conceals; and the minuteness of adaptation thus shown in the way of structure knows no bounds. Even so are there no bounds to the minuteness of adaptation in the way of conduct which the several inhabitants display. The older writings on instinct are ineffectual wastes of words, because their authors never came down to this definite and simple point of view, but smothered everything in vague wonder at the clairvoyant and prophetic power of the animals—so superior to anything in man—and at the beneficence of God in endowing them with such a gift. But God's beneficence endows them, first of all, with a nervous system; and, turning our attention to this, makes instinct immediately appear neither more nor less wonderful than all the other facts of life. Every instinct is an impulse. Whether we shall call such impulses as blushing, sneezing, coughing, smiling, or dodging, or keeping time to music, instincts or not, is a mere matter of terminology. The process is the same through-out. In his delightfully fresh and interesting work, Der Thierische Wille, Herr G. H. Schneider subdivides impulses (Triebe) into sensation-impulses, perception-impulses, and idea-impulses. To crouch from cold is a sensation-impulse; to turn and follow, if we see people running one way, is a perception-impulse; to cast about for cover, if it begins to blow and rain, is an imagination-impulse. A single complex instinctive action may involve successively the awakening of impulses of all three classes. Thus a hungry lion starts to seek prey by the awakening in him of imagination coupled with desire; he begins to stalk it when, on eye, ear, or nostril, he gets an impression of its presence at a certain distance; he springs upon it, either when the booty takes alarm and sees, or when the distance is sufficiently reduced; he proceeds to tear and devour it the moment he gets a sensation of its contact with his claws and fangs. Seeking, stalking, springing, and devouring are just so many different kinds of muscular contraction, and neither kind is called forth by the stimulus appropriate to the other. Schneider says of the hamster, which stores corn in its hole:

  • From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

    "While sitting at my desk this A. M. reading a circular of the Loyal Legion a very curious thing happened to me, such as I have never experienced. It was perfectly real, so real that it took some minutes to recover from. It seems to me like a direct intromission into some other world. I never had anything approaching it before sale when dreaming at night. I was wide awake, of course. But this was the feeling. I had only just sat down and become interested in the circular, when I seemed to love myself for a minute and then found myself in the top story of a high building very white and shining and clean, with a noble window immediately at the right of where I sat. Through this window I looked out upon a marvelous reach of landscape entirely new. I never had before such a sense of infinity in nature, such superb stretches of light and color and cleanness. I know that for the space of three minutes I was entirely lost, for when I began to come to, so to speak,—sitting in that other world, I debated for three or four minutes more as to which was dream and which was reality. Sitting there I forgot a faint sense of C.... [the town in which the writer was][131], away off and dim at first. Then I remember thinking 'Why, I used to live in C....; perhaps I am going back.' Slowly C.... did come back, and I found myself at my desk again. For a few minutes the process of determining where I was very funny. But the whole experience was perfectly delightful, there was such a sense of brilliancy and clearness and lightness about it. I suppose it lasted in all about seven minutes or ten minutes." The hallucinations of fever-delirium are a mixture of pseudo-hallucination, true hallucination, and illusion. Those of opium, hasheesh, and belladonna resemble them in this respect. The following vivid account of a fit of hasheesh-delirium has been given me by a friend:

  • From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

    But when we excite 2 by the eye, although the path 1—2 doubtless is then shot through also, the phenomenon which we are discussing shows that the direct discharge from 1 into 2, unaided by the eyes, ploughs the deeper and more permanent groove. There is, moreover, a greater amount of tension accumulated in the brain before the discharge from 1 to 2, when the latter takes place unaided by the eye. This is proved by the general feeling of strain in the effort to remember 2; and this also ought to make the discharge more violent and the path more deep. A similar reason doubtless accounts for the familiar fact that we remember our own theories, our own discoveries, combinations, inventions, in short whatever 'ideas' originate in our own brain, a thousand times better than exactly similar things which are communicated to us from without. A word, in closing, about the metaphysics involved in remembering. According to the assumptions of this book, thoughts accompany the brain's workings, and those thoughts are cognitive of realities. The whole relation is one which we can only write down empirically, confessing that no glimmer of explanation of it is yet in sight. That brains should give rise to a knowing consciousness at all, this is the one mystery which returns, no matter of what sort the consciousness and of what sort the knowledge may be. Sensations, aware of mere qualities, involve the mystery as much as thoughts, aware of complex systems, involve it. To the platonizing tradition in philosophy, however, this is not so. Sensational consciousness is something quasi-material, hardly cognitive, which one need not much wonder at. Relating consciousness is quite the reverse, and the mystery of it is unspeakable. Professor Ladd, for example, in his usually excellent book,[609] after well showing the matter-of-fact dependence of retention and reproduction on brain-paths, says: "In the study of perception psycho-physics can do much towards a scientific explanation. It can tell what qualities of stimuli produce certain qualities of sensations; it can suggest a principle relating the quantity of the stimuli to the intensity of the sensation; it can investigate the laws under which, by combined action of various excitations, the sensations are combined [? ] into presentations of sense; it can show how the time-relations of the sensations and percepts in consciousness correspond to the objective relations in time of the stimulations. But for that spiritual activity which actually puts together in consciousness the sensations, it cannot even suggest the beginning of a physical explanation. Moreover, no cerebral process can be conceived of, which—in case it were known to exist—could possibly be regarded as a fitting basis for this unifying actus of mind.

  • From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

    Colors are similarly perceived by the sub-conscious self, which the hysterically color-blind eyes cannot bring to the normal consciousness. Pricks, burns, and pinches on the anæsthetic skin, all unnoticed by the upper self, are recollected to have been suffered, and complained of, as soon as the under self gets a chance to express itself by the passage of the subject into hypnotic trance. It must be admitted, therefore, that in certain persons , at least, the total possible consciousness may be split into parts which coexist but mutually ignore each other , and share the objects of knowledge between them. More remarkable still, they are complementary . Give an object to one of the consciousnesses, and by that fact you remove it from the other or others. Barring a certain common fund of information, like the command of language, etc., what the upper self knows the under self is ignorant of, and vice versa . M. Janet has proved this beautifully in his subject Lucie. The following experiment will serve as the type of the rest: In her trance he covered her lap with cards, each bearing a number. He then told her that on waking she should not see any card whose number was a multiple of three. This is the ordinary so-called 'post-hypnotic suggestion,' now well known, and for which Lucie was a well-adapted subject. Accordingly, when she was awakened and asked about the papers on her lap, she counted and said she saw those only whose number was not a multiple of 3. To the 12, 18, 9, etc., she was blind. But the hand , when the sub-conscious self was interrogated by the usual method of engrossing the upper self in another conversation, wrote that the only cards in Lucie's lap were those numbered 12, 18, 9, etc., and on being asked to pick up all the cards which were there, picked up these and let the others lie. Similarly when the sight of certain things was suggested to the sub-conscious Lucie, the normal Lucie suddenly became partially or totally blind. "What is the matter? I can't see!" the normal personage suddenly cried out in the midst of her conversation, when M. Janet whispered to the secondary personage to make use of her eyes. The anæsthesias, paralyses, contractions and other irregularities from which hysterics suffer seem then to be due to the fact that their secondary personage has enriched itself by robbing the primary one of a function which the latter ought to have retained. The curative indication is evident: get at the secondary personage, by hypnotization or in whatever other way, and make her give up the eye, the skin, the arm, or whatever the affected part may be.

  • From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

    Mr. Spencer, looking back on his review of mental evolution, tells us how "in tracing up the increase we found ourselves passing without break from the phenomena of bodily life to the phenomena of mental life."[163] And Mr. Tyndall, in the same Belfast Address from which we just quoted, delivers his other famous passage: "Abandoning all disguise, the confession that I feel bound to make before you is that I prolong the vision backward across the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that matter which we, in our ignorance and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium the promise and potency of every form and quality of life."[164] —mental life included, as a matter of course. So strong a postulate is continuity! Now this book will tend to show that mental postulates are on the whole to be respected. The demand for continuity has, over large tracts of science, proved itself to possess true prophetic power. We ought therefore ourselves sincerely to try every possible mode of conceiving the dawn of consciousness so that it may not appear equivalent to the irruption into the universe of a new nature, non-existent until then. Merely to call the consciousness 'nascent' will not serve our turn.[165] It is true that the word signifies not yet quite born, and so seems to form a sort of bridge between existence and nonentity. But that is a verbal quibble. The fact is that discontinuity comes in if a new nature comes in at all. The quantity of the latter is quite immaterial. The girl in 'Midshipman Easy' could not excuse the illegitimacy of her child by saying, 'it was a very small one.' And Consciousness, however small, is an illegitimate birth in any philosophy that starts without it, and yet professes to explain all facts by continuous evolution. If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at the very origin of things. Accordingly we find that the more clear-sighted evolutionary philosophers are beginning to posit it there. Each atom of the nebula, they suppose, must have had an aboriginal atom of consciousness linked with it; and, just as the material atoms have formed bodies and brains by massing themselves together, so the mental atoms, by an analogous process of aggregation, have fused into those larger consciousnesses which we know in ourselves and suppose to exist in our fellow-animals. Some such doctrine of atomistic hylozoism as this is an indispensable part of a thorough-going philosophy of evolution. According to it there must be an infinite number of degrees of consciousness, following the degrees of complication and aggregation of the primordial mind-dust. To prove the separate existence of these degrees of consciousness by indirect evidence, since direct intuition of them is not to be had, becomes therefore the first duty of psychological evolutionism. SOME ALLEGED PROOFS THAT MIND-DUST EXISTS.

  • From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

    The superficial introspective view is the overlooking, even when the things are contrasted with each other most violently, of the large amount of affinity that may still remain between the thoughts by whose means they are cognized. Into the awareness of the thunder itself the awareness of the previous silence creeps and continues; for what we hear when the thunder crashes is not thunder pure , but thunder-breaking-upon-silence-and-contrasting-with-it.[225] Our feeling of the same objective thunder, coming in this way, is quite different from what it would be were the thunder a continuation of previous thunder. The thunder itself we believe to abolish and exclude the silence; but the feeling of the thunder is also a feeling of the silence as just gone; and it would be difficult to find in the actual concrete consciousness of man a feeling so limited to the present as not to have an inkling of anything that went before. Here, again, language works against our perception of the truth. We name our thoughts simply, each after its thing, as if each knew its own thing and nothing else. What each really knows is clearly the thing it is named for, with dimly perhaps a thousand other things. It ought to be named after all of them, but it never is. Some of them are always things known a moment ago more clearly; others are things to be known more clearly a moment hence.[226] Our own bodily position, attitude, condition, is one of the things of which some awareness, however inattentive, invariably accompanies the knowledge of whatever else we know, We think; and as we think we feel our bodily selves as the seat of the thinking. If the thinking be our thinking, it must be suffused through all its parts with that peculiar warmth and intimacy that make it come as ours. Whether the warmth and intimacy be anything more than the feeling of the same old body always there, is a matter for the next chapter to decide. Whatever the content of the ego may be, it is habitually felt with everything else by us humans, and must form a liaison between all the things of which we become successively aware.[227] On this gradualness in the changes of our mental content the principles of nerve-action can throw some more light. When studying, in Chapter III, the summation of nervous activities, we saw that no state of the brain can be supposed instantly to die away. If a new state comes, the inertia of the old state will still be there and modify the result accordingly. Of course we cannot tell, in our ignorance, what in each instance the modifications ought to be. The commonest modifications in sense-perception are known as the phenomena of contrast. In æsthetics they are the feelings of delight or displeasure which certain particular orders in a series of impressions give.

  • From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

    These secondary emotions themselves are assuredly for the most part constituted of other incoming sensations aroused by the diffusive wave of reflex effects which the beautiful object sets up. A glow, a pang in the breast, a shudder, a fulness of the breathing, a flutter of the heart, a shiver down the back, a moistening of the eyes, a stirring in the hypogastrium, and a thousand unnamable symptoms besides, may be felt the moment the beauty excites us. And these symptoms also result when we are excited by moral perceptions, as of pathos, magnanimity, or courage. The voice breaks and the sob rises in the struggling chest, or the nostril dilates and the fingers tighten, whilst the heart beats, etc., etc.

  • From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

    Mapéy, Att. Μάρεια, ἡ, Marea, a town in Lower Egypt, Hdt. 2. 18, 30, Thue. 1. 104. II. a lake near it, Strab. 793 ; more commonly called ἡ Μαρεῶτις (λίμνη), Id. :—also ὁ Μαρεώτης (οἶνος) Id. 799, cf. Virg. G. 2. 91. μάρη [a], ἡ, = χείρ, hand, Pind. Fr. 276; whence must be derived evpapns, εὐμάρεια. Μαριανδῦνοί, οἱ, a people of Bithynia, Hdt. 1. 28, etc.:—hence Ναρι- ανδυνὸς θρηνητήρ, of one who utters a wild, barbarian lament, Aesch. Pers. 937; cf. Κίσσιος. μαριεύς, ews, ὃ, Arist. Mirab. 41 (v.1. μαριθάς) a stone that takes fire when water is poured on it; in Hesych. the order requires μαριεύς for —Oevs. μαρικᾶς, ὁ, a foreign word for κίναιδος, acc. to Hesych.; under this name Eupolis attacked | Hyperbolus, Ar. Nub. 553, cf. Meineke Com. Fr. 1. p. 137. paptAcuris, ov, 6, a charcoal-man, Lat. carbonarius, Soph. Fr. 908: from μαρτλεύω, to burn to charcoal, Poll. 7. 110. μᾶρίλη [ἡ, 7, (perhaps from μαίρω, μαρμαίρωλ) :—the embers of char- coal (ὃ χνοῦς τῶν ἀνθράκων Schol. Ar. Ach. 350), Cratin. “Op. 9; μ. ἀνθράκων Hippon. 62, Ar.l.c.; distinguished from ἄνθρακες (charcoal) and σποδίη (ashes) by Hipp. 648. 55 ; λεπτῆς μ. Arist. Probl. 38. 8 :— hence, ὦ Μᾶρτλάδη O son of Coal-dust! comic name of an Acharnian collier, Ar. Ach. 609. μᾶρϊλο- καύτη, ov, 6, charcoal-burner, Soph. Fr. οοϑ. μᾶρτλο- πότης, ov, ὃ, coal-dust-gulper, of a blacksmith, Anth.Plan.15. μᾶρῖνος, ὃ, ἃ kind of sea- -fish, Arist. H. A. 6.17, 2; cf. 8. 19, 5 (Ὁ. 1.) μάρις, ews, 6, a liquid measure, containing six κοτύλαι, Arist. H. A. 8. 9.1, Poll. 10.184; or ten, Polyaen. 4. 3, 32. μαρίω, Dor. μαιριάω, to be feverish, Hesych. Pappaipw, used only in pres. and impf.; Ion. impf. μαρμαίρεσκον Q. Sm. I. 150. (Strengthd. by redupl. from 4/MAP (cf. μαιμάω, μορμύρω, πορφύρω, παιφάσσω), whence also Hap-Hapos, μαρμαρ- voow, μαρμαρ-υγή, ἀ-μαρ-ὕσσω, ἀ-μαρ-υγή, and prob. ἀ-μαυρ- os, μαυρ- os.) To flash, spar kle, glisten, gleam, of any darting, quivering light, in Hom. (only in Il.); of the gleaming of metal, ἔντεα μαρμαίροντα Il. 12, 195., 16. 664. etc.; τεύχεα μ. 18. 617; Τρῶες... χαλκῷ μαρμαίροντες 12. 801; σὺν évreat μαρμαίροντες 16.279; δ Κα ΤΣ χρύσεα μαρμαίροντα 13.223 ὄμματα μαρμαίροντα the sparkling eyes | of Aphrodité, 3.397: —so in later Poets, αὐγὴ μαρμαίρουσα κεραυνοῦ Hes. Th. 699; μαρ- see δὲ δόμος χαλκῷ Alcae.1; χρυσῷ ἐλέφαντί τε μ. οἶκοι Bacchyl. 7.8; νύκτα .. ἄστροισι μαρμαίρουσαν Aesch.Theb. 401: χρυσῷ χαίταν Rael oe of Apollo, Eur. Ion 888, cf. 1427; ἀστὴρ ἘΠ ΤΣ: Dion. P. 329, cf. Anth. P. 5. 282:—used also in late Prose, Luc. D. Meretr. T3434 Alciphro 3: 67. μαρμᾶράριος, 6, a marble-mason, Ο. 1. 1107, 5922 μαρμάρειος, a, ov,=sq., Hesych. μαρμάρεος [μὰ]. a, ov, (μαρμαίρω) flashing, sparkling, glistening, gleaming, esp. of metals, aiyis, ἄντυξ Il, 17. 594., 18. 480 ; πύλαι Hes, 922

  • From The City of God

    12 Books That Matter: The City of God Augustine himself, near the end, admits that it was a work great and arduous. If you have read it all, you know he indulged there in a rare understatement. But it’s not only an impressive relic, it is also a living wellspring of wisdom, insight, and argument, and a powerful set of lenses through which to view our world today, letting us see its contours with a different light and a slightly different focus. Prompted by the sack of Rome in 410, the text’s early books possess an urgency of argument that, as the work cooled into the reflective wisdom of maturity, and then accelerates again in its final books as Augustine begins to look forward to his own death, and perhaps foresees something of the changes that were overtaking his world in his final years. In it, you see a full-considered judgment of ancient Rome, and a full exposition of what would become the foundation for a comprehensive Christian worldview, pertinent in Augustine’s day and even into our own. When I teach this book to students, I actually compare it to a Hollywood blockbuster, the kind that Cecil B. DeMille used to make in the 1950s. It has far more characters, subplots, moving pieces, and epic drama than almost anything else we have from the ancient world. For scope, its only rivals are the great epic poems such as The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, perhaps the histories of Thucydides and Herodotus. Indeed, at times it seems almost aware of those as its peers. As a book, this work is clearly swinging for the fences. Its uniqueness is unquestioned and its scale is unprecedented. But Augustine had been thinking about many of the central themes for this book for a quarter-century before he began to dictate it. And he probably did dictate it, by the way, to a scribe—you can imagine the writer’s cramp you would receive from this book. Themes, motifs, arguments, and concepts have appeared in many other works of his. He’d even delivered a sermon 10 years before using the exact same phrase, City of God, and expositing its theological meaning. So while the work was unprecedented, it was quite clearly also premeditated.

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