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More "Automaton" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... could ask about her. Mrs. Trussit now never spoke to him (and indeed never spoke to any one if she could help it), and went up and down the stairs in her rustling black and flat white face and jingling keys as though she was no human being at all but only a walking automaton that you wound up in the morning and put away in the cupboard at night—Mrs. ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... of a lifetime broke down. Parkins, the immaculate, the silent, the perfect automaton, asked ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... generally, it might be difficult, no doubt, to say. But has any one of the distinguished advocates of the automatic theory ever acted on it, or allowed his thoughts to be really ruled by it for a moment? What can be imagined more strange than an automaton suddenly becoming conscious of its own automatic character, reasoning and debating about it automatically, and coming automatically to the conclusion that the automatic theory of itself is true? Nor is there any occasion here to entangle ourselves in the controversy about Necessarianism. ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... where her pre-war work was already known!... To go back to danger when she had already become accustomed to the safe life of a neutral country!... But her attempts at resistance were ineffectual. She lacked sufficient will-power; the "service" had converted her into an automaton. ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... a-goin' to plow it. I never seed the day's work I didn't git paid for yit, and you'll pay for this. Git up thar, you cussed old critters," and the man struck the horses sharply with a lump of dirt. Away went the crazy rattling old automaton round and round the garden in spite of all ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... a little while there was silence. Then, none commanding him, but as though an instinct pushed him forward, Red Martin began to move up the length of the long room, half dragging, half carrying his captive Ramiro. It was as if some automaton had suddenly been put in motion, some machine of gigantic strength that nothing could stop. The man in his grip set his heels in the floor and hung back, but Martin scarcely seemed to heed his resistance. On he came, and the victim with him, ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... of all power of grasping anything and transformed him into a senseless automaton, wholly absorbed in a ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... will not, deem thee a deceiving, Illusive mockery of human feeling, A body organized, by fond caress Warmed into seeming tenderness; A mere automaton, on which our love Plays, as on puppets, when their wires we move. No! when that feeling quits thy glazing eye, 'Twill live in some blest world beyond ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... caused his breeches to fall down, revealing the sticks on which they had been draped. When Mr. Lavender saw this he called out in a loud voice Sir, you have deceived me. I took you for a human being. I now perceive that you are but a selfish automaton, rooted to your own business, without a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... "I am an automaton? Good! Let me alone, then," said Rose, speaking from a corner where she was sitting on the carpet at the foot of a bookcase, with a volume spread open on her knee.—"Miss Helstone, how do you do?" she ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... company of a circle of men friends and the casual pleasures of the town, selfishness is the last epithet with which their behaviour can be charged. Unselfishness has been their curse. No sane person would, of his own accord, become the automaton that a Government office requires. Pressure on the part of relations, of parents, has been brought to bear on them. The steady employment, the graduated income, the pension—that fatal pension—has been danced by their fathers and their mothers and their Uncle Johns before their ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... brink of the grave. She was reduced almost to a shadow; she would go about the affair—she would entertain no other—with a sort of jerking, spasmodic activity as unlike muscular energy as if she were an automaton. She had no rest in her sleep, and would scream and cry out in weird accents at intervals, and dream such dreams! She would blanch when questioned, and close her lips fast, and never a word escaped them of what these ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... when ordered, and then went like an automaton. Pale, sorrow-stricken, and patient, she moved about, the ghost of herself; and lay down a little, and then tried to work a little, and then to read a little; and could settle to nothing ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... him that the dwarf no longer spoke. He worked his will entirely without words; his evil mind possessed fully the mind of his victim. For Blaine Carson there was no further independent thinking. He was an automaton, a sleep-walker. ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... a moving automaton than a living creature, did Mrs. Howland arise from her place, and follow her husband up to their chamber. There, without uttering a word, she partially disrobed herself, and getting into bed, buried her tearful ...
— The Iron Rule - or, Tyranny in the Household • T. S. Arthur
... sign by a shake of the head. I think the old method was the better, because it is certainly the business of the pitcher not only to do the pitching, but to use his own judgment in deceiving the batsman. He should not act as a mere automaton to throw the ball; moreover, the catcher has enough of his own to attend to without assuming any of the duties of the pitcher. Of course, if the pitcher is young and inexperienced, while the catcher is seasoned and better acquainted with ...
— Base-Ball - How to Become a Player • John M. Ward
... same, March 5.-London unknown to Londoners. "Who is Sir Robert Walpole?" Destruction of the Albion Mills. Automaton snuff-box ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... protecting spirit, letting her want for nothing that thoughtfulness could procure. And he noticed that Daisy seemed as oblivious of this as she had always been. She accepted these extraordinary attentions quite as if Hannibal were some automaton, acting with a set of concealed springs—a mechanism in which there was nothing of ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... changed; this impulse has lost its force, and another which before I should not for a moment have entertained, is all-powerful over me. In short, I know just as little about myself as I do about the Eternal Essence, and I have a haunting suspicion that I may be a mere automaton, my every thought and act due to some power ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... an automaton. Coming out from the priest's house, the Professor took a straight road, which, through an opening in the basaltic wall, led away from the sea. We were soon in the open country, if one may give ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... the divine justice as an innocent martyr to the grand machinery of Providence;—for Dr. Priestley, who turns the whole dictionary of human nature into verbs impersonal with a perpetual 'subauditur' of 'Deus' for their common nominative case;—which said 'Deus', however, is but another 'automaton', self-worked indeed, but yet worked, not properly working, for he admits no more freedom or will to God than to man? The Lutheran leaves the free will whining with a broken back in the ditch; and Dr. Priestley puts ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... murmured Bridget, turning instantly from a friend into an automaton, as was her custom on the rare occasions when I hardened myself to find fault. The words were submissive enough, but her manner announced that she had said her say, and would stick to it, though Herself, poor thing, must be humoured when she took the ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... doll automaton she accepted the booklet from him; like a doll automaton she followed Charley Chubb out into the street, and her limbs were trembling so she could ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... Clerambault, "he can oppose them with a clear conscience if they are contrary to right and happiness. Liberty consists in that very thing, that a free man is in himself a conscious law of the universe, a counter-balance to the crushing machine, the automaton of Spitteler, the bronze Ananke. I see the universal Being, three parts of him still embedded in the clay, the bark, or the stone, undergoing the implacable laws of the matter in which he is encrusted. ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... not," replied Thorndyke. "There is no reason to suppose that he knew how he was dressed. You have heard Jervis's description of his condition; that of a mere automaton. You know that without his spectacles he was practically blind, and that he could not have worn them since we found them at the house in Kennington Lane. Probably his head was wrapped up in the veil, and the skirt and mantle put on afterwards; but, in any ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... Girl continued with her primping and preening, her hands flying back and forth like an automaton from her waist-line to her stockings. Suddenly another knock, this time more vigorous, more insistent, came upon the rough boards of the cabin door, which, finally, was answered ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... arguments. It seemed that possibly even this machine of justice carried a small fragment of sympathy in his soul. Certainly he was not the judicial automaton she had expected ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... untuneable harshness corresponded with the awkwardness of his figure. They were the first words which Mannering had heard him speak; and as he had been watching with some curiosity when this eating, drinking, moving, and smoking automaton would perform the part of speaking, he was a good deal diverted with the harsh timber tones which issued from him. But at this moment the door opened, ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... chairs. They were dumb, and seemed almost in a dream. Matilda could not take her wondering eyes off this astonishing brother of hers, who now must have looked very like the fairy prince to her. She was an automaton in his hands, and he could have done anything with her. But, of course, presently she would awaken, and find it all one of those amazing dreams that so often come to ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... of fate; God's will, will of Heaven; wheel of Fortune, Ides of March, Hobson's choice. last shift, last resort; dernier ressort[Fr]; pis aller &c. (substitute) 147[Fr]; necessaries &c. (requirement) 630. necessarian[obs3], necessitarian[obs3]; fatalist; automaton. V. lie under a necessity; befated[obs3], be doomed, be destined &c. in for, under the necessity of; have no choice, have no alternative; be one's fate &c. n. to be pushed to the wall to be driven into a corner, to be unable to help. destine, doom, foredoom, devote; predestine, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... moved faster now; it needed no urging, and Sheila held her breath for fear that it might fall, straining her eyes to watch its limbs as they moved with the sure regularity of an automaton. After a time they reached the end of the level; Sheila could tell that the pony was negotiating another rise, for it slackened speed appreciably and she felt herself settling back against the cantle of ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... modifying faculties; and with a yet larger display, a yet wider range of knowledge and reflection; and lastly, with the same perfect dominion, often domination, over the whole world of language. What then shall we say? even this; that Shakespeare, no mere child of nature; no automaton of genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration, possessed by the spirit, not possessing it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, till knowledge, become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous power, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... a thin little woman who looked cool and comfortable in her tightly buttoned dress. She had not taken her cap off but stood at the table, moving her irons to and fro with the regularity of an automaton. ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... not function—but his legs moved regularly. In the grasp of this mental, metal monster he was a mere automaton. Phobar noticed idly that he had to step down from a flat disk a dozen yards across. By some power, some tremendous discovery that he could not understand, he had been transported across millions of miles of space—undoubtedly to ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... an account of an automaton speaking-machine which Mr. Franklin Peale and himself had recently inspected. The machine was made to resemble as nearly as possible, in every respect, the human vocal organs; and was susceptible of varied movements by means of keys. Dr. Patterson was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... bold, fearless. aullar howl. aullido m. howl, cry of horror. aumentar increase, enlarge, magnify. an, aun adv. yet, still, even, nevertheless. aunque conj. although. aura f. breeze, zephyr. aurora f. dawn, break of day, aurora. ausencia f. absence. autmata m. automaton, mere machine, puppet. avanzar advance, go forward. avariento, -a avaricious. avaro, -a avaricious, covetous. avaro m. miser. ave f. bird. aventura f. adventure, affair. avergonzarse ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... will with only an illusion of freedom is not a will at all. In that ease it were better to eliminate the will and regard the soul as a thing which acts and reacts under the stimuli of motives like a helpless automaton ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... pressed in a particular spot. If its spinal cord be severed, the lower limbs, disconnected from the brain, will also perform actions of this kind. The question arises, Is the frog entirely a soulless automaton, performing all its actions directly in response to external stimuli, only more perfectly and with more delicate adjustment when its brain remains intact, or is its soul distributed along its spinal marrow, so that it can be divided into two ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... before his eyes. The whole outward world was a void to him, until the moment arrived that beheld him successful in his designs. His preparations for the future absorbed every faculty of his nature, and left him, as to the present, a mere automaton, reflecting no principle, and animated by no event—a machine that moved, but did not perceive—a body that acted, without ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... another acquaintance. A word to the automaton on the front seat and the limousine swept up to the curb where he was passing. Gila leaned out with the sweetest bow. She was the condescending lady now; no mouse-eyes in evidence this time; just a beautiful, commanding presence to ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... that room. I pointed out the fact to Mr. Truscomb when the new machines were set up three years ago. An operative may be ever so expert with his fingers, and yet not learn to measure his ordinary movements quite as accurately as if he were an automaton; and that is what a man must do to ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... while the animal, being hereditarily endowed with the faculties and functions necessary for the maintenance of life, has no occasion for the development of the higher faculties and powers and therefore remains an irresponsible automaton, which cannot be held accountable ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... palms upturned. The Apollo of Canachus also had the hands thus raised, and on the open palm of the right hand was placed a stag, while with the left he grasped the bow. Pliny says that the stag was an automaton, with a mechanical device for setting it in motion, a detail which hints, at least, at the subtlety of workmanship with which those ancient critics, who had opportunity of knowing, credited this early artist. Of this work itself ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... from a mere automaton in this, that it is influenced by old, by registered impressions. In the higher forms of animated life that registration becomes more and more complete, memory becomes more perfect. There is not any necessary resemblance between an external form and its ganglionic impression, any more than ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... countryside was stained with that mystic radiance which is sometimes called the Blood of Apollo. Turning, I saw the disk of the moon coldly rising in the heavens. I thought of the silent birds and the hovering hawk, and I began my preparations for dinner mechanically, dressing as an automaton ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... stick—count of them might be lost. And this extorts yet another confession. One year, Good Friday passed, and Easter-time had progressed to the joyful Monday, ere cognisance of the season came. Speedy is the descent to the automaton. A mechanical mis-entry in the diary threw all the orderly days of the week into a whirling jumble. We knew not Wednesday from Thursday, nor Thursday from Friday, though we calculated and checked notes of the transactions and traits of successive days. To what purpose was the ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... a wooden figure she had once seen on the stage—a figure that walked and moved its arms and uttered sounds which resembled a human voice—and it seemed to her that she, herself, was this figure and that her gestures and the words she spoke were the result of the hidden automaton ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... for Man's benefit, freedom and initiative have ever been regarded (and with good reason) as the gravest of offences. Literal obedience has been exacted by the Law; blind obedience by the Church; passive obedience—the obedience of a puppet, or at best of an automaton—by both. The need for this insistence on the part of Law and Church is obvious. If any lingering desire to think things out for himself, if any intelligent interest in what he was taught, survived in the disciple, the whole system of salvation by machinery would be in danger ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... was talking to a brother-officer of his last week, a man who's awfully fond of him. He told me Aubrey did his work very well. He was complimented by Headquarters on his School only last month. But he's like an automaton. Nobody really knows him, nobody gets any forwarder with him. He hardly speaks to anybody except on business. The mess regard him as a wet blanket, and his men don't care about him, though he's a capital officer. Isn't it strange, ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... whirled along. Once he stopped and mechanically gave the dogs a meal. He became transformed into an automaton, acting by some subliminal power that set his direction correctly and assisted to maintain his body in an ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... four times, like an automaton. Burr, affecting to dismiss the topic, turned again to the book-shelves and fell to reading the gilded titles. A copy of "The Prince" arrested his eye. Taking this down, he opened it at random, and read aloud: ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... earliest of his writings upon the subject, some comments upon the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, and intended to form the basis of a separate work, we find Marx insisting that man is not a mere automaton, driven irresistibly by blind economic forces. He says: "The materialistic doctrine, that men are the products of conditions and education, different men, therefore, the products of other conditions and changed education, forgets that circumstances ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... far from it! But I had no intention of adding invalidism to my other disintegrations. In the evening I played cards with my secretary or practised at the piano, with some revival of my old interest in music. I read little, even in the newspapers. I was become, save perhaps for my music, an automaton. But, although I did not improve in appearance, my health was completely restored, and when the war came I was in perfect condition for the arduous task I immediately undertook. Moreover, my mind, torpid ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Rose herself, it was a mere automaton that moved off in the dance and said the two or three lines that remained to her in the act as if nothing had happened, because all her mind and all her capacity for feeling were occupied and ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... blushing from excitement, and her eye bright with anticipated triumph. She led the poor and humbly clad Ellen by the hand, who dared not look up, but with her gaze riveted on the splendid carpet, was brought like an automaton to the feet of the Duke, where ...
— Ellen Duncan; And The Proctor's Daughter - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... the death of his great grandfather, Louis XIV.; and, even after he came to his majority, he was ruled by his ministers and his mistresses. He was not, like Louis XIV., the life and the centre of all great movements in his country. He was an automaton, a pageant; not because the constitution imposed checks on his power, but because he was weak and vacillating. He, therefore, performing no great part in history, is only to be alluded to, and attention should be mainly directed ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... extravagant account of the clock, and expressed his own anxiety to see it in terms more extravagant still. He paraded his superficial book knowledge of the great clock at Strasbourg, with far-fetched jests on the extraordinary automaton figures which that clock puts in motion—on the procession of the Twelve Apostles, which walks out under the dial at noon, and on the toy cock, which crows at St. Peter's appearance—and this before a man who had studied every wheel ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... neither. No, but I would have a dagger in his throat before the night were passed, but that his short light slumbers are guarded by a slave of singular power, whom the villains fear to attack. I had meant to beg or buy of him this same fierce automaton, but ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... hands the mason's trowel would assuredly have been better adapted than the painter's pencil. It was the very dotage of incapacity. The colouring, the treatment, the coarse obtrusive mechanical touch, seemed those of a clumsily constructed automaton, rather than of a human painter. Thus musing, our artist stood for some time before the vile daubs that excited his disgust, gazing at them long after the train of his reflections had led him far from them; whilst the master of the shop, a little, gray, ill-shaven fellow in a frieze ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... did look up accordingly, with the action of an automaton which suddenly obeys the impulse of a pressed spring. But, strange to tell, not even the haste he had made to attend his patron's mandate, a business, as Master Heriot's message expressed, of weight and importance—nay not ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... have in the language from which they are taken; as, focus, foci; terminus, termini; alumnus, alumni; datum, data; stratum, strata; formula, formuloe; vortex, vortices; appendix, appendices; crisis, crises; oasis, oases; axis, axes; phenomenon, phenomena; automaton, automata; analysis, analyses; hypothesis, hypotheses; medium, media; vertebra, vertebroe; ellipsis, ellipses; genus, genera; fungus, fungi; minimum, ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... dismay, but she was too well-trained an automaton to put her feelings into words. She rustled starchily from the room, to give the dread message to Mary, who promptly flew ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... identical with the saying of the ancients, that true proceeds from cause to effect; though the ancients, so far as I know, never formed the conception put forward here that the soul acts according to fixed laws, and is as it were an immaterial automaton. ...
— On the Improvement of the Understanding • Baruch Spinoza [Benedict de Spinoza]
... chilled by the water into which he plunged the repentant sinners. For the last hour that he stood in the stream, his whole body was numb; he had ceased to feel life in his feet, and his arms worked with a mechanical stiffness like the arms of some automaton over which his mind ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... external circumstances that affect us, and all our mental and bodily acts, are predetermined and brought about by God. Man is thus reduced to, a mere passive instrument. He is nothing more than a complicate and curious machine—a man-machine, an automaton—whose every movement is conceived, determined, directed, controlled by a supervisor. It avails nothing to apply to him terms which signify freedom. We may say that he has the power to will; that he actually wills; but the difficulty is not relieved. The ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson
... other than Silas Huntly, who, after being carried overboard with the mast, had thus, almost by a miracle, escaped a watery grave. Without a word of thanks to his deliverer, the ex-captain, passive, like an automaton, passed on and took his seat in the most secluded corner of the poop. The broken mizzen may, perhaps, be of service to us at some future time, and with that idea it has been rescued from the waves and ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... tempting to ask, what was the secret of his success? The effort, indeed, to investigate the materials from which some rare literary flavour is extracted is seldom satisfactory. We are reminded of the automaton chess-player who excited the wonder of the last generation. The showman, like the critic, laid bare his inside, and displayed all the cunning wheels and cogs and cranks by which his motions were supposed to be regulated. Yet, after all, the true secret was that there ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... till the dark had fallen. By that time I was an automaton, the way a man gets on sentry-go, and I could have easily hung on till morning. My thoughts ranged about the earth, beginning with the business I had set out on, and presently—by way of recollections of Blenkiron and Peter—reaching the German forest where, ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... at this heart-breaking work, so do I," said Dayton-Philipps, and toiled gamely on at the pump. There he was still when day broke, sawing up and down like an automaton. But before the sun rose, utter weariness had done its work. His bleeding fingers loosed themselves from the break, his knees failed beneath him, and he fell in an unconscious stupor of sleep on to the wet planking of the deck. For half an hour more Kettle ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... robbed it of terror? Has life treated them so harshly, that they are tolerably well pleased to be quit of it on any terms? Or is the whole thing mere blind stupor and delirium, in which thought is paralysed, and the man an automaton? Speculation is useless. The fact remains that criminals for the most part die well and bravely. It is said that the championship of England was to be decided at some little distance from London on the morning of the day on which Thurtell was executed, and that, ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... barefooted, coatless lout, drunk and snoring with his hat over his eyes, and his legs stretched out, or vacantly staring with open mouth at Desire, who, with a face like ashes and the air of an automaton, ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... four o'clock on a September day, so that the atmosphere was well-brewed to a visible haze. There was deep stillness, broken only by a light rattle, a light chink, a small sweeping sound, and an occasional monotone in French, such as might be expected to issue from an ingeniously constructed automaton. Round two long tables were gathered two serried crowds of human beings, all save one having their faces and attention bent on the tables. The one exception was a melancholy little boy, with his knees and calves simply in their natural clothing of epidermis, but for the rest of his ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... logic and consequently a summary of reality and idea,—appears again as a universal method of instruction. Fit fabricando faber: of all systems of education the most absurd is that which separates intelligence from activity, and divides man into two impossible entities, theorizer and automaton. That is why we applaud the just complaints of M. Chevalier, M. Dunoyer, and all those who demand reform in university education; on that also rests the hope of the results that we have promised ourselves from such reform. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... nicely padded, so that one can take such exercise as he likes without damaging himself on the very plain and serviceable upholstery. If anybody would only contrive some kind of a lever that one could thrust in among the works of this horrid automaton and check them, or alter their rate of going, what would the world give for ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... way to the boat, on the little vessel itself, I expected Slafe to relax, to indulge in a conversational word, to do something to mark him as more than an automaton. But his actions were confined to using the nasalsyringe, to exchanging one camera for another, to quizzing the sun through that absurd lorgnette, and to muttering over cans of film which he sorted and resorted, always to ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... state positively, since I have it from his own lips, that he was born in Utica, in the State of New York, although both his parents, I believe, are of Presburg descent. The family is connected, in some way, with Maelzel, of Automaton-chess-player memory. In person, he is short and stout, with large, fat, blue eyes, sandy hair and whiskers, a wide but pleasing mouth, fine teeth, and I think a Roman nose. There is some defect in one of his feet. His address is ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... horizontally from under his hat. Noise ceased to be, within the shadow of the roof. The brass band that came into the street once a week, in the morning, never brayed a note in at those windows; but all such company, down to a poor little piping organ of weak intellect, with an imbecile party of automaton dancers, waltzing in and out at folding-doors, fell off from it with one accord, and shunned it ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... the two weirdest imaginations of our time, ever gave me such a thrill of terror as I used to feel when I watched the automaton movements of those bodies sheathed in whalebone. The paint on actors' faces never caused me a shock; I could see below it the rouge in grain, the rouge de naissance, to quote a comrade at least as malicious as ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... commonly tends to be, the most mechanical of physical exercises. The actor is often a mere automaton who repeats night after night the same unimpressive trick of voice, eye, and gesture. His defects of understanding may be comparatively unobtrusive in a spectacular display, where he is liable to escape censure by escaping observation, or at best to be regarded as a showman. Furthermore, ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... accepted the booklet from him; like a doll automaton she followed Charley Chubb out into the street, and her limbs were trembling so ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the executioner the prisoner had trembled; he rose, like an automaton, with dilated eyes and twitching face. He understood what the chaplain said and took a ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... in recalling the debate to the immediate question before the House, took occasion to protest against the doctrine of non-interference laid down by Mr. Crittenden. "Has it come to this," said Mr. Stevens, "that Congress is a mere automaton, to register the decrees of another power, and that we have nothing to do but to find men and money? . . . This is the doctrine of despotism, better becoming that empire which they are attempting to establish ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... brain or mind seems to be put to sleep, while the other faculties are, abnormally awake. Some explain this by supposing that the blood is driven out of one portion of the brain and driven into other portions. In any case, it is as though the human engine were uncoupled, and the patient becomes an automaton. If he is told to do this, that, or the other, he does it, simply because his will is asleep and "suggestion", as it is called, from without makes him act just as he starts up unconsciously in his ordinary sleep ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... Zany either stood like an image carved out of black walnut or moved with the angular promptness of an automaton when a spring is touched. Only the quick roll of her eyes indicated how observant she was. If, however, she met Chunk in the hall, or anywhere away from observation, she never lost the opportunity to torment him. A queer grimace, a surprised stare, an exasperating derisive giggle, were ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... Moderate; and then with his charmed rod he tapped them across the shoulders, and set them a-walking. The creatures straightway jerked up their little heads to the angle of his face, bowed like a brace of automaton dancing-masters, and after pacing round his knees for a few seconds, began Dialogue the first, in just the set terms in which we had been reading it beside our own fire not half an hour before. It seemed, for a few seconds, as if the conjurer and his creations had joined together ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... grin was impudent, the salute she got in acknowledgment was perfection; Jules faced about like a military automaton, strode off briskly, stopped at some distance to light a cigarette, and in effect faded out with ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... had planned for the purpose of obtaining the two hundred thousand francs was forgotten; his volubility was gone; and he silently walked along by his brother's side, like an automaton, totally incapable of ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... tone of their voices spoke of the warm stalls, the double feed of oats, and the great manger of sweet hay that awaited them. Before going into the house Max gave to each mule a stroke of his hand in token of affection. Surely this proud automaton of Hapsburg was growing lowly in his tastes. In other words, nature had captured his heart and was driving out the inherited conventions of twenty generations. Five months of contact with the world had wrought a greater cure than I had hoped five years would work. I was making ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... Abruptly turning on his toe, "I thank you, Master Cupid, no! I am a freeman and a brave, And will not stoop to be a slave. Your rules will never do for me, I'd rather learn the rule of three— "And since I find it is the plan, To make me an automaton, I'll case my heart in triple mail, And fence it so completely round, That all this vaunted skill shall fail, Those blunted arrows back rebound; For know, usurper! from this hour, I scorn thy laws, abjure thy ...
— Vignettes in Verse • Matilda Betham
... apparently in very poor health. He is consequently not exactly a pleasant comrade for the chase: he does not seem to enjoy the sport at all, and his one endeavour is to get through with his task without losing more of his strength and health. Even now he is more of an automaton than a human being, more dead than alive, and yet—greatest of all miseries!—he is not allowed to die. For he has a mother, the witch Uraka, who keeps him artificially alive by anointing him every night with magic salve and giving him such diabolic advice ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... the earth moves with; or else these molecules are, partially at least, arranged by the mind or spirit. If we do not accept the former theory we must accept the latter: there is no third course open to us. If man is not an automaton, his consciousness is no mere function of any physical organ. It is an alien and disturbing element. Its impress on physical facts, its disturbance of physical laws, may be doubtless the only things ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... start up, as if lashed with a whip and, double locking the door which communicated with the ante-chamber, he put the key in his pocket; and, with a step as stiff and mechanical as that of an automaton, he ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... Sanford? He loves you well. He is the one who moves the automaton with the whiskers and long mustache, and gives your wife a ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... her maid fasten her wonderful emeralds on throat and breast and hair. She descended to the drawing-room and walked in to dinner with some strange man—all as one in a dream. She answered as an automaton, and the man thought how beautiful she was, and what a pity for so beautiful a woman to be so stupid ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... scurvy turns and bends that break up thousands of homes. He drew diagrams of the pile-driving and wattling and willow mattrasses in the diary, with the improvements he thought advisable, and some very scientific suggestions by which the river could be made to checkmate itself, like an automaton chess-player. He hung over the guards continually, observing all that was to be observed, and recorded the same under separate headings, such as "currents," "velocity," "flood-rises," with statistics without end showing that the carrying-trade of the great water highway would amount in 1950 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... hammering on the rudiments! The wretched boy, I should say, was quite unspoiled by the inevitable familiarities of the journey. He turned out at each stage the pink of serving-lads, deft, civil, prompt, attentive, touching his hat like an automaton, raising the status of Mr. Ramornie in the eyes of all the inn by his smiling service, and seeming capable of anything in the world but the one thing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... from the rank foliage, and the naked or half-dressed occupants stared stupidly at the craft as it skimmed past. The head of the family lolled on the bank, or in the shade beside his home and smoked; the stolid wife slouched hither and thither like an automaton, plodding at her work or perhaps scratching the ground, that it might laugh a harvest, though oftener her work lay in fighting off the prodigious growth which threatened to strangle everybody and everything. ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... the Cleopatre of Marmontel, he fancied that he could reproduce the hissing of the asp, just as the automaton invented for the purpose by Vaucanson might have done it. The abortive effort made them laugh all the evening. The ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... future, and his face to the past. He is to believe that nothing is possible or desirable but what he finds already established to his hands in time-worn institutions or inveterate abuses. His unde to be made into a political automaton, a go-cart of superstition and prejudice, never stirring hand or foot but as he is pulled by the wires and strings of the state-conjurers, the legitimate managers and proprietors of the show. His powers ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... mustang's spirit was pretty well taken out of him by the last two days' work; for if he had been fresh, the smallest spring on one side would have sufficed to throw me out of the saddle. As it was, I sat upon him like an automaton, hanging forward over his neck, some times grasping the mane, and almost unable to use either rein ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... surely there are two factors, the motive and the volition. Of the second factor in actions which are matters of course we are not conscious; where there is a conflict of motives or hesitation of any kind, we are. Huxley at one time held that man was an automaton. I believe my illustrious friend afterward receded from that position. Yet on the necessarian theory automatons we ...
— No Refuge but in Truth • Goldwin Smith
... bashfulness of that timid overgrown boy; and he, submissive rather than seeking, allowed things to take their course, like a superior being with thoughts absorbed in higher things, and responding to affairs of earth like an automaton. ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Croft; he was much too punctual, too much of an automaton, for me; but I should have felt more regret at leaving him, and losing his friendship, and should have expressed more gratitude for his kindness to Lucy and my boy, if my head had not at the time been full of young Hudson. He professed the warmest regard ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... saw that no such desire seized upon Jean. Steadily—with a precision that was almost uncanny—the half-breed led the way. He did not hurry, he did not hesitate. He was like a strange spirit of the night itself, a voiceless and noiseless shadow ahead, an automaton of flesh and blood that had become more than human to Philip. In this man's guidance he lost ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... much like lovers, Rainey fancied. They lacked the little intimacies that he, though he made himself somewhat of an automaton at the wheel, could not have failed to see. If the girl slipped, Carlsen's hand would catch and steady her by the arm; never go about her waist. And there was no especial look of welcome in her face when the doctor ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... had moved throughout like an automaton swayed by a will outside its own; functioning rather than living; performing appointed business, executing prescribed gestures, uttering foreordained observations, and making dictated responses, all without suggestion of spontaneity, and all without ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... light, presented a most comical, though most lugubrious appearance. He was so completely acting a part that his very looks and gestures, and, in short, the minutest movements of his body, were manifestly 'got up.' One would think an automaton had been employed and set to work to do a certain amount of mourning, and furnish the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... concerning my fellow- lodgers at Les Trois Pigeons; however, it had been comparatively a torpid growth; my meeting with them served to enlarge it so suddenly and to such proportions that I wonder it did not strangle me. In fine, I sat there brush-paddling my failure like an automaton, and saying over and over aloud, "What is wrong with him? What is wrong ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... who left me in the purple pride Of early manhood. Yestermorn he went. The sun shone bright, and scintillant the tide. O'er which the sea-mew swept, with dewy drops besprent. Before he went he kissed me; and I watched His boat that lay so still and stately, till Automaton she seemed, and that she moved To where she willed of her own force and law. But I knew better: his was the will That set the pretty sprite a-going. His arms controlled her to obedience: Those arms that lately clasped me. No alarms Chilled my fond heart, nor dimmed ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... in some measure those of a seer. His immense show of philosophical apparatus, his prodigality of logical balance-wheels and escapements, resemble the superfluous clock-work of the "automaton" which plays its game as the gentleman concealed inside shall judge expedient. It is of course impossible to probe the Two Absolutes, or the wonderful marriage which takes place between them. Mr. Frothingham sees that so it is. Men of aspirations as high, and of intellect as cultivated, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... as a human being. Most persons treat me like an automaton or a bit of dirt. You're different; most of the men are not so bad; it's the women, Mr. Harleston, the women! Good-night, sir. I'll call you ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... It is the revolting idea of a demagogy without an idea, a principle, a sentiment, of a people which would march toward the west with the gait of a blind man, having lost its soul and its will and killing at random, of a terrible automaton like a dead body which can still ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... died, two more fell ill on the same day. Only Abel and Jan were still "about." The mother moved like an automaton, and never spoke. Now and then a deep sigh or a low moan would escape her, and the miller would move tenderly to her side, and say, "Bear up, missus; bear up, my lass," and then go back to his pipe and his cherry-wood chair, where he seemed to ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... himself before his bureau and taking a sheet of paper wrote some lines upon it, whilst D'Artagnan stood imperturbable, without showing either impatience or curiosity. He was like a soldierly automaton, or rather, ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... heard a scratching on the door; the Commander said: "Come in," and a man, one of their automaton soldiers, appeared in the aperture, announcing by his mere presence that luncheon ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... deeds and works, what they are inwardly is here meant, and not the way they outwardly appear; for everyone knows that every deed and work goes forth from the man's will and thought; otherwise it would be nothing but a movement like that of an automaton or image. Consequently, a deed or work viewed in itself is merely an effect that derives its soul and life from will and thought, even to the extent that it is nothing but will and thought in effect, and thus is will and thought ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... had been decided to start the Cast-iron Canvasser there, and then move him on to more populous and active localities if he proved a success. They sent up the Genius, and one of their men who knew the district well. The Genius was to manage the automaton, and the other was to lay out the campaign, choose the victims, and collect the money, geniuses being notoriously unreliable and loose in their cash. They got through a good deal of whisky on the way up, and when they arrived at Ninemile were ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... comfortless cell, kneeling upon the pavement, we may see a delicate woman mechanically repeating her daily-imposed penance of Latin prayers, before the image of a favorite saint and a basin of holy water. This self-regulating, automaton praying machine, as she counts off the number of allotted prayers by the number of beads upon her rosary, beats into her bosom the sharp edge of an iron cross that rests within her shirt of sacking-cloth, until, nature and her task exhausted, ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... world now, has kept me from caring or asserting myself in any way. I feel numb. I seem to be a person listening from some gallery when they all speak around me, and that the Ambrosine who answers placidly is an automaton who moves ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... happy but for Miss Carlyle; that lady still inflicted her presence upon East Lynne, and made it the bane of its household. She deferred outwardly to Lady Isabel as the mistress; but the real mistress was herself. Isabel was little more than an automaton. Her impulses were checked, her wishes frustrated, her actions tacitly condemned by the imperiously-willed Miss Carlyle. Poor Isabel, with her refined manners and her timid and sensitive temperament, had no chance against the strong-minded ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... lapse of time, or the indifference of Laura. Such voluntary mental martyrdom resembles the punishment inflicted by some tyrant of history on his prisoners, whom he commanded to embrace his Apega, a beautiful automaton so constructed as to plunge a concealed ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... words, while there is no soul in them, because his mental powers are spell-bound and imbecile. He stammers, hesitates, and stumbles; or, at best, talks on without object or aim, as mechanically and unconsciously as an automaton. He has learned little effectually, till he has learned ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... we walked down the nave until we came to a side altar where a priest was going through a low mass, with a small congregation of delayed worshipers, and we took our place back of these. The priest raced through the service at the highest possible speed. His motions were like those of an automaton: he kept turning quickly to and fro as if on a pivot; clasping his hands before his breast as if by machinery; bowing his head as if it moved by a spring in his neck; mumbling and rattling like wind in a chimney; the choir-boy who served ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... interpret the words of the abbess? Were they the mere ravings of delirium, or had they signification? If Rita was false, then indeed was there no truth upon earth. Confused, bewildered, tortured by the ideas that crowded upon his heated brain, Herrera sat like an automaton upon his horse, unmindful of where he was, and utterly forgetting the dangers that surrounded him. He was roused by the Mochuelo from his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... the matter is different. No longer is the man you fight an unknown impersonality. He stands before you, an individual whose face you can see, whose eyes you can read. He has taken unto himself the guise of a man; he has dropped the disguise of an automaton. In those eyes you may read the redness of fury or the greyness of terror; in either case it is you or him. And a soldier's job is ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... the individual into a straight-jacket from its earliest infancy; or to shape every human being according to one pattern; not into a well-rounded individuality, but into a patient work slave, professional automaton, tax-paying citizen, or righteous moralist. If one, nevertheless, meets with real spontaneity (which, by the way, is a rare treat,) it is not due to our method of rearing or educating the child: the personality often asserts ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... she saw he could not speak, she hastened to make him a cup of tea; and, stooping down, took off his wet boots, and helped him off with his coat, and brought her own plaid to wrap round him. All this time her heart sunk lower and lower. He allowed her to do what she liked, as if he were an automaton; his head and his arms hung loosely down, and his eyes were fixed, in a glaring way, on the fire. When she brought him some tea, he spoke for the first time; she could not hear what he said till he repeated it, so husky ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... when the different habits of the sexes and the temptations they are exposed to are taken into consideration. Men early flattered and coaxed, and told they are fitted for the higher regions of genius and unfit for anything else,—that they are a superior kind of automaton and ought to move by different impulses than others,—indulge their friends and the public with freaks and caprioles like those of that worthy knight of La Mancha in the Sierra Morena. And then, if our man of genius escapes this temptation, how is ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... revolting process that had turned Bill Jones from a human being into a mindless automaton was repeated with Professor Ralston. It happened as before, too rapidly for intervention, too suddenly for the minds of the onlookers to shake off the paralysis of an unprecedented nightmare. But when the victim was thrown to the surface, when he stepped out, drained of the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... overheard him mutter, "I've more patience with a young fool than an old one." Such training has not had a good effect on Cousin Amelia. She has been so constantly tutored to conceal her emotions and to adopt the carriage and manners of an automaton that the girl is now a complete hypocrite. It is quite impossible to make her out. If you tickled her, I don't believe you could get her to laugh; and if you struck her, I very much doubt whether she would cry. My aunt calls it "self-command;" I call it "imbecility." ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... wound up to say similar things one after the other, like musical-boxes, by reflex action, and you never know when they will give up. The automatic method has this advantage, that when you have had some experience of an automaton, you can always tell—suppose that it is wound up, for instance, to speak on a motion—what it will probably say next, and certainly how it will vote, and that gives you a sense of calm peace. It is a method very common among stump orators, ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... himself in love with some unattainable beauty, he had a passionate craze for music, and played upon the violin and flute with considerable taste and execution. The sound of a favourite melody operated upon the breathing automaton like magic, his frozen faculties experienced a sudden thaw, and the stream of life leaped and gambolled for a while with uncontrollable vivacity. He laughed, danced, sang, and made love in a breath, committing a thousand mad vagaries ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... habit which had grown on him in the years of his prosperity of putting his hand to his mouth and of opening his eyes in an assumption of surprise, which had no basis in fact, now grew upon him. He really degenerated, although he did not know it, into a mere automaton. Life strews its shores with such interesting ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... face, which the glaring footlights caused to assume an even more corpse-like aspect than was natural to it, had in it something so appealing, something so imbecile and meek, that a strange feeling of compassion removed all tendency to laughter. Had he learned these reverences from an automaton or a performing dog? Is this beseeching look the look of one who is sick unto death, or does there lurk behind it the mocking cunning of a miser? Is that a mortal who in the agony of death stands before the public in the art arena, and, like a dying gladiator, bids for their ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... not long since, a man talking to a bright woman on the train, and his manner of comporting himself set me to thinking of the peculiar ways men have of addressing themselves to women. Some talk to a woman very much as they might talk to the wonderful automaton around at the museum when it plays a game of chess. "Why, bless my soul, it really seems to be thinking! What apparent intelligence? What evident faculty of mental independence! It almost appears to possess the power of coherent thought!" Others sit in the presence of a woman as though she was ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... stand up!" He obeyed like an automaton, his brain seemingly paralyzed. There was nothing to fear from this fellow, yet I knew better than to become careless—terror has been known to drive men crazy. I caught him by the collar, whirling him about, my Colt still ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... he had incontestably done something which was very wonderful and very heroic, and which proved in him the most extraordinary presence of mind, he could not honestly glorify himself in his own heart, because it appeared to him that he had acted exactly like an automaton. He blankly marvelled, and thought the situation agreeably thrilling, if somewhat awkward. His father let him go. Then all Edwin's feelings gave place to an immense stupefaction at his father's truly remarkable behaviour. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a crowd. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... longer the slightest interest in it. To gain all that the world could give I would not have raised a listless finger; and it was entirely without intention that I took a cigarette, and felt for matches in my pocket. It was the act of an automaton, of a corpse that twitches a little after ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... sensations and motor images. It would be possible to study these facts experimentally if we had at our disposition a human being who, while retaining his sensations and their motor reactions, was by special circumstances rendered entirely spontaneous like a sensitive automaton, whose movements were neither intentionally produced nor intentionally repressed. In this way, melodic intervals in a hypnotized subject might be ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... friend to determine, so much had the passing of these few months altered him in appearance and in manner. Once light of mien, now he smiled never at all. For hours he would seem to go about his duties as an automaton. He spoke at last to his ancient and faithful friend, kindly as ever, and with his own alertness ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... civilisation, a scene of hard-working activity. On the Canadian shore I see a village of poor cottages, surrounded with apple orchards, like a village in Normandy, in front of which the red sentry marches up and down, as stiff as an automaton. The inhabitants of the said village, French both in feature and appearance, hurried up in delight when they heard us speaking the language of their forefathers. "It's the only tongue we know. We don't want our children to learn any other!" And yet they have been English ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... appendix, appendices or appendixes; automaton, automata or automatons; axis, axes; bandit, banditti or bandits; basis, bases; beau, beaux or beaus; cherub, cherubim or cherubs; crisis, crises; datum, data; ellipsis, ellipses; erratum, errata; focus, foci: fungus, ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... few months after Mercy went away, Stephen seemed to himself to be like an automaton, which had been wound up to go through certain movements for a certain length of time, and could by no possibility stop. He did not suffer as he had expected. Sometimes it seemed to him that he did not suffer at all; and he was terrified at this very absence of suffering. Then again he had hours ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... noble scorn I heard recounted the history of our Proteuses of politics! With what disdainful glances I regarded the Turcarets of finance, lolling on the cushions of some magnificent carriage, and conducted by a laced automaton to the boudoir of some Aspasia. But if I heard told the mighty deeds of the Knights of the Round Table, or the valor of the crusaders celebrated in flowing verse; if chance placed in my hand the great actions of our modern Rolands, ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... repulsion which hitherto had mastered all other feelings. Although she repeated to herself that she wanted never to see him again, Margaret could scarcely resist an overwhelming desire to go to him. Her will had been taken from her, and she was an automaton. She struggled, like a bird in the fowler's net with useless beating of the wings; but at the bottom of her heart she was dimly conscious that she did not want to resist. If he had given her that address, it was ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... was then asked if she had followed the Chinese of her own free will or if violence had been used in taking possession of her and she too repeated like an automaton: ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... spasmodic movements of an ill-constructed automaton, he crossed the room, and stepping very carefully over the prostrate body upon the floor, and with a hesitating reluctance that he could in no degree master, he unlocked, unbolted, and ...
— The Ruby of Kishmoor • Howard Pyle
... affection, papa—never patronage. I could not leave Mrs. Sheldon or Charlotte abruptly or ungraciously, upon any consideration. They gave me a home when I most bitterly needed one. They took me away from the dull round of schoolroom drudgery, that was fast changing me into a hard hopeless joyless automaton. My first ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... automaton she accepted the booklet from him; like a doll automaton she followed Charley Chubb out into the street, and her limbs were trembling so she ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... yet how was he to interpret the words of the abbess? Were they the mere ravings of delirium, or had they signification? If Rita was false, then indeed was there no truth upon earth. Confused, bewildered, tortured by the ideas that crowded upon his heated brain, Herrera sat like an automaton upon his horse, unmindful of where he was, and utterly forgetting the dangers that surrounded him. He was roused by the Mochuelo from his state ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... be useless to appeal to the generosity of the Baron; no human sentiments governed his exorable purposes. Must the affair drift on while he stood tied and helpless? Must this charming and innocent girl be sacrificed to the transient whim of an automaton? Allowing that the Baron's intentions were of the most honorable character, was the situation any less horrible? Marry a Machine! His own loyalty to his friend in New York, his regard for Miss Ward, alike loudly called on him to ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... knocker, which gives a treble knock, and is opened by a steam porter in livery—A chair mounting from the hall, through the ceiling, into the drawing room—Talking to a lady two miles off through a telescope, till one's fingers ache—A callisthenic academy for the children of pauper operatives—An automaton note-writer—A lady professing ignorance of Almack's, "a club where Swift and Johnson used to meet, but I don't profess to be an antiquarian"—"Love and Algebra," one of the common scientific novels thumbed by coal-heavers ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 402, Supplementary Number (1829) • Various
... can oppose them with a clear conscience if they are contrary to right and happiness. Liberty consists in that very thing, that a free man is in himself a conscious law of the universe, a counter-balance to the crushing machine, the automaton of Spitteler, the bronze Ananke. I see the universal Being, three parts of him still embedded in the clay, the bark, or the stone, undergoing the implacable laws of the matter in which he is encrusted. His breath and his eyes alone are free; ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... hot cakes! The old cake woman had resumed her nightly tour, and again we heard her rapid footsteps and her shrill refrain. Always at the same hour, with the regularity of an automaton, she went by our house. And the long winter recommenced in the same manner as had the preceding ones, and as were similarly to begin the ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... still hammering on the rudiments! The wretched boy, I should say, was quite unspoiled by the inevitable familiarities of the journey. He turned out at each stage the pink of serving-lads, deft, civil, prompt, attentive, touching his hat like an automaton, raising the status of Mr. Ramornie in the eyes of all the inn by his smiling service, and seeming capable of anything in the world but the one thing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... world altogether. Luckily for me, my disposition was tractable and law-abiding. I fulfilled by habit the duties of the day; I toiled at my dreary work, ate and slept, wrote to my parents, visited them, having got those tasks as it were by heart, but I went through the rites like an automaton; my mind was elsewhere, intensely dogging the heels of that winged steed, my fancy, panting in its tracks, and perfectly content so only that it did not come up too late to witness the glories which its bold flights discovered. Thanks to it—all thanks to it—I did not become a ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... returning to the huntsman's call, Obedient to the unwelcome note That stays them from the quarry's bursting throat?— Famine and Pestilence and Earthquake dire, Torrent and Tempest, Lightning, Frost and Fire, The soulless Tiger and the mindless Snake, The noxious Insect from the stagnant lake (Automaton malevolences wrought Out of the substance of Creative Thought)— These from their immemorial prey restrained, Their fury baffled and their ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... upon my beast, rode off. Luckily my mustang's spirit was pretty well taken out of him by the last two days' work; for if he had been fresh, the smallest spring on one side would have sufficed to throw me out of the saddle. As it was, I sat upon him like an automaton, hanging forward over his neck, some times grasping the mane, and almost unable to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... soldier who was the rage of the War incarnate, the awakened frenzy of the nation. He was a man lifted above pain and cold and hunger; he was gaunt and wild of aspect, restless and impatient, driving, driving to the end. He went about the duties of the camp like one in a dream; he marched like an automaton—for hours, or for days, as need might be—his thoughts flying on to those moments that alone were real to him, to the charge and the fury of the conflict, the blows that were the only things that counted. He lived amid sights and sounds ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... reversed the order in which we have noticed them, since of the three, the latter appears to be the most important, (at least) in his consideration; for he takes care before the commencement of the performance to place one of his automaton figures on the second row of every box, which commands a good view of the House, who are merely intended to sit with their hats off, and to signify that the two first seats are taken, till the conclusion of the second act; and so in point of fact they are taken by himself, for the accommodation ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... effects, those regular phenomena, from which emanates what he styles the order of the Universe. ANAXAGORAS is said to have been the first who supposed the universe created and governed by an intelligence: ARISTOTLE reproaches him with having made an automaton of this intelligence; or in other words, with ascribing to it the production of things, only when he was at a loss to account for their appearance. From whence it may be deduced, that it is for want of being acquainted with the powers of Nature, or the properties ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... pressing down on me, smothering me. You stalk around me like a grim, sepulchral figure, closing me up in the circle of your narrow ideas. But now I can endure it no longer. I was a proud, high-spirited girl, you've made of me a colourless social automaton, a slave of your stupid worldly traditions. I'm turning into a feeble, complaining, discontented wife! And I refuse to be it. I'm going home—where at least there's some human spontaneity left in people; I'm going back to my father!'—And ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... intervals by bridges, and bearing, on its broad bosom the gathered treasures of many a far-distant nation. The streets, diminished to mere lanes, looked alive with Lilliputians; miniature horses and carriages appeared like so many German automaton toys which had been wound up and set a-going. Far away to the westward patches of green, studded with trees, denoted the parks, in one of which glittered the glass roof and sides of the Crystal Palace; and still more remote were glimpses ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... felt that I was without friendly encouragement and support. During the three days that intervened before the burial of Dr. Schmidt, I was hardly conscious of any thing, but moved about mechanically like an automaton. The next few days were days of confusion; for the death of Dr. Schmidt had left so many places vacant that some fifty persons were struggling to obtain some one of his offices. The eagerness, servility, and meanness which these educated men displayed in striving to conquer ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... Maturin, the two weirdest imaginations of our time, ever gave me such a thrill of terror as I used to feel when I watched the automaton movements of those bodies sheathed in whalebone. The paint on actors' faces never caused me a shock; I could see below it the rouge in grain, the rouge de naissance, to quote a comrade at least as malicious as I can be. Years had leveled those ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... insculp—Demetrius, the son of Antigonus. Arnaud's heart heaved quick with preference, and strait he found within his hand the resemblance of a poniard, its point inverted towards his breast. A mere automaton in the hands of the Demon, he thrust the point through his heart, and underwent a painless death. During his trance, his spirit metempsychosed from the body of his detestation to that of his admiration ... Arnaud ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... for himself learns the authorities for his opinions only later on, when they serve merely to strengthen both them and himself; while the book-philosopher starts from the authorities and other people's opinions, therefrom constructing a whole for himself; so that he resembles an automaton, whose composition we do not understand. The other man, the man who thinks for himself, on the other hand, is like a living man as made by nature. His mind is impregnated from without, which then bears ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... possibility of winning the marquise; but from the moment in which his brother, with no apparent motive of personal interest, aroused the idea that he might be beloved, every spark of passion and of vanity that still existed in this automaton took fire, and he began to be doubly assiduous and attentive to his sister-in-law. She, who had never suspected any evil in this quarter, treated the chevalier at first with a kindliness that was heightened by her scorn for the abbe. But, before long, the chevalier, misunderstanding the ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE GANGES—1657 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... and shirt fronts does not contain Sing Lee. It contains merely an automaton. The laundry is owned by an automaton named Sing Lee, by nobody else. Now that the day's work is done he will sit like this for an hour, two hours, five hours. Time is not a matter of hours to Sing Lee. Or of days. Or ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... would have scared the Angel of Pity. Although the play of passions had ravished her features, she retained certain traces of a fine complexion, which suggested that the figure conserved some fragments of beauty. Poiret was a human automaton, who had earned a pension by mechanical labour as a ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... say; and once I overheard him mutter, "I've more patience with a young fool than an old one." Such training has not had a good effect on Cousin Amelia. She has been so constantly tutored to conceal her emotions and to adopt the carriage and manners of an automaton that the girl is now a complete hypocrite. It is quite impossible to make her out. If you tickled her, I don't believe you could get her to laugh; and if you struck her, I very much doubt whether she would cry. My aunt calls it "self-command;" I call it "imbecility." She shook ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... checked kuppenheimers is a fine achievement of projected psychology. He knows Tarkington so well that if the latter were unhappily deleted by some "wilful convulsion of brute nature" I think it undoubtable that his biographer could reconstruct a very plausible automaton, and would know just what ingredients to blend. A dash of Miss Austen, Joseph Conrad, Henry James and Daudet; flavored perhaps with coal smoke from Indianapolis, spindrift from the Maine coast and a few twanging chords ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... the child hastily, and went quietly out of the green gate which had so lately closed upon Jim. She went as unquestioningly as an automaton moved by some irresistible power; not only was all doubt gone from her mind, but all ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... real object is to determine whether the subject will see more than he is told, or whether he is a mere automaton. The result will tell whether his attention is of the narrow or broad type. If it be narrow, he will see only the forms in the first case and no words, and in the second case he will remember the words but be unable to recall the shape of the ...
— Applied Psychology: Making Your Own World • Warren Hilton
... lodgers at Les Trois Pigeons; however, it had been comparatively a torpid growth; my meeting with them served to enlarge it so suddenly and to such proportions that I wonder it did not strangle me. In fine, I sat there brush-paddling my failure like an automaton, and saying over and over aloud, "What is wrong with him? What ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... saw him hover around her at the table like a protecting spirit, letting her want for nothing that thoughtfulness could procure. And he noticed that Daisy seemed as oblivious of this as she had always been. She accepted these extraordinary attentions quite as if Hannibal were some automaton, acting with a set of concealed springs—a mechanism in which there was nothing of human life ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... sit here and support the paltry pretence of intellectual dignity. A few days ago her startled eye had caught an advertisement in the newspaper, headed 'Literary Machine'; had it then been invented at last, some automaton to supply the place of such poor creatures as herself to turn out books and articles? Alas! the machine was only one for holding volumes conveniently, that the work of literary manufacture might be physically lightened. But surely before long some Edison would ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... the revolting process that had turned Bill Jones from a human being into a mindless automaton was repeated with Professor Ralston. It happened as before, too rapidly for intervention, too suddenly for the minds of the onlookers to shake off the paralysis of an unprecedented nightmare. But when the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... tends to be, the most mechanical of physical exercises. The actor is often a mere automaton who repeats night after night the same unimpressive trick of voice, eye, and gesture. His defects of understanding may be comparatively unobtrusive in a spectacular display, where he is liable to escape censure by escaping observation, or at best to be regarded ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... the grand machinery of Providence;—for Dr. Priestley, who turns the whole dictionary of human nature into verbs impersonal with a perpetual 'subauditur' of 'Deus' for their common nominative case;—which said 'Deus', however, is but another 'automaton', self-worked indeed, but yet worked, not properly working, for he admits no more freedom or will to God than to man? The Lutheran leaves the free will whining with a broken back in the ditch; and Dr. Priestley puts the poor animal out of his misery!—But seriously, ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Parliament. It is as if they were wound up to say similar things one after the other, like musical-boxes, by reflex action, and you never know when they will give up. The automatic method has this advantage, that when you have had some experience of an automaton, you can always tell—suppose that it is wound up, for instance, to speak on a motion—what it will probably say next, and certainly how it will vote, and that gives you a sense of calm peace. It is a method very common among stump orators, because it comes cheaper ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... soul commands not, nor obeys. 175 Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame, A mechanized automaton. When Nero, 180 High over flaming Rome, with savage joy Lowered like a fiend, drank with enraptured ear The shrieks of agonizing death, beheld The frightful desolation spread, and felt A new-created sense within his soul 185 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the dark had fallen. By that time I was an automaton, the way a man gets on sentry-go, and I could have easily hung on till morning. My thoughts ranged about the earth, beginning with the business I had set out on, and presently—by way of recollections of Blenkiron and Peter—reaching the German forest where, in the Christmas of 1915, I had ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... thief!" She jerked the words out like as automaton. They were not, evidently, the Words she had meant to speak, for ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... which it stands is inclined, or scratching where it is made uncomfortable, or croaking when pressed in a particular spot. If its spinal cord be severed, the lower limbs, disconnected from the brain, will also perform actions of this kind. The question arises, Is the frog entirely a soulless automaton, performing all its actions directly in response to external stimuli, only more perfectly and with more delicate adjustment when its brain remains intact, or is its soul distributed along its spinal marrow, so that it can be divided into two parts ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... reasoning, and finds a response to every thing by subtilizing on terms, wholly ignored the Kabalastic dogma and wandered off into the drear vacuity of darkness. It was less a philosophy or a wisdom than a philosophical automaton, replying by means of springs, and uncoiling its theses like a wheeled movement. It was not the human verb but the monotonous cry of a machine, the inanimate speech of an Androïd. It was the fatal precision of mechanism, instead of a free application ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... blank to Theodora. She dressed in her satins and laces, and let her maid fasten her wonderful emeralds on throat and breast and hair. She descended to the drawing-room and walked in to dinner with some strange man—all as one in a dream. She answered as an automaton, and the man thought how beautiful she was, and what a pity for so beautiful a woman to be so stupid ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... consist of the most pessimistic propositions imaginable; its creed shall be godless and immoral, its thirty-nine articles shall exhaust the possibilities of unfaith and its burden shall be vanitas vanitatum. Man shall be an automaton, and life an hereditary disease, and the world a hospital, and truth a dream, and beauty an optical illusion. These sad tidings of great sorrow shall be organized into a state church, with bishops ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... these youths. He always made a point of choosing men who were highly strung and impressionable. He was known to boast that after three interviews with him he could make anyone, either man or woman, into a will-less automaton. ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... stimulated by an idealism inspired by a belief that the spirit was capable of generating an impulse which would overcome the flesh and which could cause men to move toward perfection along any other path than the least resistant. And this because man is an automaton, and can move no otherwise. In this point of view nothing can be more instructive than to compare the Roman with the Mosaic civilization, for the Romans were a sternly practical people and worshipped force as ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... he was remade, when he became the thing the artisans worked upon him to create—when at last his father passed from view and he remained master of Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, it would not be Bonbright Foote VII who was master. It would be an automaton, a continuation of other automatons.... It is said the Dalai Lama is perpetual, always the same, never changing from age to age. A fiction maintained by a mystic priesthood supplying themselves secretly with fresh Dalai Lama material ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... that the dwarf no longer spoke. He worked his will entirely without words; his evil mind possessed fully the mind of his victim. For Blaine Carson there was no further independent thinking. He was an automaton, ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... trowel would assuredly have been better adapted than the painter's pencil. It was the very dotage of incapacity. The colouring, the treatment, the coarse obtrusive mechanical touch, seemed those of a clumsily constructed automaton, rather than of a human painter. Thus musing, our artist stood for some time before the vile daubs that excited his disgust, gazing at them long after the train of his reflections had led him far from them; whilst the master of the shop, a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... knows not, and may never know, anything of this affair which has taken such a hold of you?" said I, rather as a speaking automaton, forced to vocabulate. ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... with her primping and preening, her hands flying back and forth like an automaton from her waist-line to her stockings. Suddenly another knock, this time more vigorous, more insistent, came upon the rough boards of the cabin door, which, finally, was answered ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter, was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was; and there it had abided for now some sixty years or more. And this it ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... so far as the experimental automaton for the belfry was concerned, he allowed fancy some little play; or, perhaps, what seemed his fancifulness was but his utilitarian ambition collaterally extended. In figure, the creature for the belfry should not be likened after the human pattern, nor any animal one, nor after the ideals, ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... forty-seven thousand men. There were about fifteen thousand in the garrison of Mantua. Bonaparte was much weaker, having only forty-two thousand, and of these some eight thousand were occupied in the siege of that place. Wurmser was a master of the old school, working like an automaton under the hand of his government, and commanding according to well-worn precept his well-equipped battalions, every soldier of which was a recruit so costly that destructive battles were made as infrequent as possible, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... and then kultur brought forth hard men; later, it became possible to copy, and then kultur brought forth mechanical perfection rather than creative perfection, systematized its theories of life and work, and brought into being a class of men just a little meaner, more rigid, more automaton-like, than the original class; having reduced life to one system, and that without soul or ideal, kultur brought forth types lacking more and more in originality. Here stands the culminating type; he will copy the good German Gott—he is incapable of originating anything—and ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... with a friend at Wimbledon. About this hour, I calculated, we should be strolling along Beverley Brook or through the glades of Coombe Woods with sunshine filtering through the birches overhead; it would have been more pleasant, and far more instructive, than wasting my time with a hatchet-faced automaton like this. That comes, I thought, of ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... of the cross over him, give him your blessing, kiss him," Nina cried to her. But her head still twitched like an automaton and with a face contorted with bitter grief she began, without a word, beating her breast with her fist. They carried the coffin past her. Nina pressed her lips to her brother's for the last time as they bore the coffin by her. As ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... prosperity of putting his hand to his mouth and of opening his eyes in an assumption of surprise, which had no basis in fact, now grew upon him. He really degenerated, although he did not know it, into a mere automaton. Life strews its shores with such interesting and ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... eighty in number; and they pretended to bear the Deity about, just as they were by the divine impulse directed. The God, says [754]Diodorus Siculus, is carried about in a ship of gold by eighty of his priests. They bear him upon their shoulders, and pursue their way by instinct, just as the divine automaton chances to direct them. These persons, who thus officiated, were probably the same as the Petipharae of the antient Egyptians, but were called Paterae by the Greeks. It was a name, and office, by which the priests of Delphi, and of many other places besides those ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... was proceeding. Loud cries had been raised from our own side, when it was seen that he was being brought up, to clear the bar that the whole House might witness the scene, and every one stood up in intense curiosity. There were now only this figure, less human even than an automaton, and two persons, R. Stuart and E. Ellice, pushing the chair in which he lay. A loud cry of 'Shame, Shame,' burst from our side; those opposite were silent. Those three were counted without passing the ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... clock, and expressed his own anxiety to see it in terms more extravagant still. He paraded his superficial book knowledge of the great clock at Strasbourg, with far-fetched jests on the extraordinary automaton figures which that clock puts in motion—on the procession of the Twelve Apostles, which walks out under the dial at noon, and on the toy cock, which crows at St. Peter's appearance—and this before a man who had studied every wheel in that complex machinery, and who had passed ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... roof. The brass band that came into the street once a week, in the morning, never brayed a note in at those windows; but all such company, down to a poor little piping organ of weak intellect, with an imbecile party of automaton dancers, waltzing in and out at folding-doors, fell off from it with one accord, and shunned ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... the very earliest of his writings upon the subject, some comments upon the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, and intended to form the basis of a separate work, we find Marx insisting that man is not a mere automaton, driven irresistibly by blind economic forces. He says: "The materialistic doctrine, that men are the products of conditions and education, different men, therefore, the products of other conditions and changed education, forgets ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... example, has acquired the habit of leaving the door open. Now occasionally scolding him, when it is specially cold, and now and then shutting him up in a closet for half an hour, will never cure him of the fault. But if there were an automaton figure standing by the side of the door, to say to him every time that he came through without shutting it, Door! which call should be a signal to him to go back and shut the door, and then sit down in a chair near by and count ten; and if this slight penalty was invariably enforced, he ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... there the bamboo or adobe hut of a native peeped from the rank foliage, and the naked or half-dressed occupants stared stupidly at the craft as it skimmed past. The head of the family lolled on the bank, or in the shade beside his home and smoked; the stolid wife slouched hither and thither like an automaton, plodding at her work or perhaps scratching the ground, that it might laugh a harvest, though oftener her work lay in fighting off the prodigious growth which threatened to strangle everybody and everything. She took her turn at smoking, while the youngsters, most ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... replied Thorndyke. "There is no reason to suppose that he knew how he was dressed. You have heard Jervis's description of his condition; that of a mere automaton. You know that without his spectacles he was practically blind, and that he could not have worn them since we found them at the house in Kennington Lane. Probably his head was wrapped up in the veil, and the skirt and mantle put on afterwards; ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... like a thing of lead, and the blood it pumped was cold, for the winter had closed in upon it. The elasticity of my life, that ineffable resiliency of the soul which makes us more than beasts of burden, was gone forever. An automaton, informed only with the material life, remained,—the spirit followed that fleeting figure down the hill. More than twenty years have passed and ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... came the refrain of the old song, but as from a speaking automaton, unconsciously taken up from time to time. The excess of motion and uproar had made them dumb, and despite their youth their smiles were insincere, and their teeth chattered with cold; their eyes, half-closed ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... side was a body that had scarcely ever much life in it—sympathy seemed to have drawn them together—every feature and limb was round and fleshy, and, if a kind of brutal cunning had not marked the face, it might have been mistaken for an automaton, so unmixed was the phlegmatic fluid. The vital spark was buried deep in a soft mass of matter, resembling the pith in young elder, which, when found, is so equivocal, that it only appears a moister ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... estimate these cool, languid, Southwestern knights of the bungstarter, who had the manners of an Earl of Pawtucket, and who, when they disapproved of your presence, moved you with the silence and despatch of a chess automaton advancing a pawn. ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... in the chair proffered him by the lawyer. There was something strange in his air, a quiet automaton-like quality which attracted the latter's notice and led him to watch him very closely. Ransom was busy with the door, which the strong west wind blowing through the hall ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... the plural the form that they have in the language from which they are taken; as, focus, foci; terminus, termini; alumnus, alumni; datum, data; stratum, strata; formula, formuloe; vortex, vortices; appendix, appendices; crisis, crises; oasis, oases; axis, axes; phenomenon, phenomena; automaton, automata; analysis, analyses; hypothesis, hypotheses; medium, media; vertebra, vertebroe; ellipsis, ellipses; genus, genera; fungus, fungi; minimum, minima; ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... scratching on the door; the Commander said: "Come in," and a man, one of their automaton soldiers, appeared in the aperture, announcing by his mere presence that ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... impossible to see where I was going, for the reeds were high above my head, but so long as my reason lasted I steered by the sun. I presume that I doubled many times, and lost much space, but that I do not know, for toward the end I traveled like an automaton. I could not fix my mind on where I was going or why, but I kept repeating to myself that I must push against the current, and so, though I lost the idea at times, and found myself drifting, I think that I went some distance after my ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... think; but there are in the depths of our nature feelings, emotions, qualities of the soul, with which the mere intelligence has nothing to do; and which, when they rise up, like an enraged elephant from the jungle, scatter all the conventionalities of our training, and all the smooth and automaton-like operations of our minds to the winds. As I stood there, listening to the dead-level, unimpassioned, mechanical voice of the phonograph, pouring forth those deadly sentences, I realized for the first time what the sunny-haired little ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... incapacity, which stood, through self-will, in the ranks of art, while its true place was among the lowest trades. The same colours, the same manner, the same practised hand, belonging rather to a manufacturing automaton than ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... subject to it must be really material machines. We look here only to the necessity of the connection of events in a time-series as it is developed according to the physical law, whether the subject in which this development takes place is called automaton materiale when the mechanical being is moved by matter, or with Leibnitz spirituale when it is impelled by ideas; and if the freedom of our will were no other than the latter (say the psychological and comparative, not also transcendental, that is, absolute), ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... say, 'I am socialism.' It is the revolting idea of a demagogy without an idea, a principle, a sentiment, of a people which would march toward the west with the gait of a blind man, having lost its soul and its will and killing at random, of a terrible automaton like a dead body which ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... turning instantly from a friend into an automaton, as was her custom on the rare occasions when I hardened myself to find fault. The words were submissive enough, but her manner announced that she had said her say, and would stick to it, though Herself, poor thing, ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... There dwelt night and chaos. If his passion were blind, the blindness was wilful. For he saw clearly the end of what he meant to do, and chose it. Whatever his love might have been worth, he had been robbed of it, and for him life ended there. He was but an automaton ...
— An Old Meerschaum - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... a mechanical age," say some. To use Shakspeare's words, "he is a mechanical salt-butter rogue who says so." Men use more machines than formerly, but are not one whit more machines themselves. Was James Watt an automaton? Has the press become less an object of wonder or terror since it was worked by steam? How sublime was the stoppage of a mail as the index of rebellion. Luther's Bible was printed by a machine. The organ is ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... eccentricity, preserving traces of his noble character, but querulously impatient of controul, subject to extravagant transports, and incapable of steady exertion or connected thought. Still magnanimous, independent and honourable, but moody, rash, and intractable, he was the automaton of generous instinct, no longer ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... I was not fit to teach children, or to be with them: I had already reduced the boy to little better than an automaton; I had broken his fine spirit with my rigid severity; and I should freeze all the sunshine out of his heart, and make him as gloomy an ascetic as myself, if I had the handling of him much longer. And poor Rachel, too, came in for her share of abuse, as usual; he cannot ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... wildly at the white soldiers who march past to the sound of the fife. He sees his destiny, and accepts it. The arm he had raised for the charge sinks slowly, his fist falls on his hip; his sword falls into the regulation position, and, stiff as an automaton, with a toneless and mechanical voice, the voice of an Austrian ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... rode the mile more as an automaton than as a living, conscious human being. He had no memory of time, place, events—save for the instants of rationality he forced his ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... More automaton than sentient being, he plodded on along the second enceinte of flaring, noisy boulevards, now and again narrowly escaping annihilation beneath the wheels of some coursing motor-cab ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... or trifle," he said, bitterly. "I'm not a machine, or an automaton, and I want something more than my servants, my drawing-room and table well ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... paradoxical, but there is a higher compatibility than that of quality and degree. It is not whether people can live together, but whether they should live together. "It is an awkward thing to play with souls,"—you override the fastidiousness of the soul in marrying your companion. Unless you are an automaton, you cannot rest happy in the fact that you and she do not disagree. For comfort's sake you would have a negative dimension to your cosmos, forgetting that your longings and your needs and, it may be, your dreams, are positive. If sex-comradeship and affection were not as accidental ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... exercise as he likes without damaging himself on the very plain and serviceable upholstery. If anybody would only contrive some kind of a lever that one could thrust in among the works of this horrid automaton and check them, or alter their rate of going, what would the world ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... was eleven o'clock. The old German went like an automaton down the road along which Pons and he had so often walked together. Wherever he went he saw Pons, he almost thought that Pons was by his side; and so he reached the theatre just as his friend Topinard was coming out of it after a morning spent in cleaning the lamps ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... often doctors who ranked as majors or held some commission in the German medical corps. They were less stiff and automaton-like than the officers and sergeants of the line service. Their attitude varied in accordance with the number of stars they had on their epaulette. If their rank were inferior to mine, they were exaggeratedly obsequious, holding their hands along the crease ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... perfume met his senses; the warmth was produced by stoves of a peculiar form standing in the middle of the room; one of these represented Vulcan's forge. Brightly glowing charcoal lay in front of the bellows which were worked by an automaton, at short regular intervals, while the god and his assistants modelled in brass, stood round the genial fire with tongs and hammers. The other stove was a large silver bird's-nest, in which likewise charcoal was ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... pursued the way, automaton-like, unresponsive now to horror or any emotive. And once again, within the hour ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... he had the nurse take the patient's temperature. "Only two degrees of fever," he commented mechanically; "that is very good. Has his wife—has any one been in to see him?" The head nurse, who stood like an automaton at the foot of the bed, replied that she had seen no one; in any case, the doorkeeper would have refused permission unless explicit ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... notched stick—count of them might be lost. And this extorts yet another confession. One year, Good Friday passed, and Easter-time had progressed to the joyful Monday, ere cognisance of the season came. Speedy is the descent to the automaton. A mechanical mis-entry in the diary threw all the orderly days of the week into a whirling jumble. We knew not Wednesday from Thursday, nor Thursday from Friday, though we calculated and checked notes of the transactions and traits of successive days. To ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... that could not confine it, down his sweet deathlike face. His eyes were fast closed, and he had no sign of life about him. I shut the door behind me, and approached the bed. When Catherine caught sight of me, she showed no surprise or emotion of any kind. Her lips, with automaton-like movement, uttered ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... Yestermorn he went. The sun shone bright, and scintillant the tide. O'er which the sea-mew swept, with dewy drops besprent. Before he went he kissed me; and I watched His boat that lay so still and stately, till Automaton she seemed, and that she moved To where she willed of her own force and law. But I knew better: his was the will That set the pretty sprite a-going. His arms controlled her to obedience: Those arms that lately ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... arms and popped him down just as if he was a block; he had no sooner deposited his burden than he began a long harangue upon the talents of the individual whom he had just deposited before us, in acting a machine or automaton, he then to prove his assertion gave him a knock on the back of the head, when it fell forward just as if it had belonged to a figure made with joints; he then gave it a chuck of the chin so violent that it sent the head back so as to lean on the coat collar; at last he put it in its proper ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... saw him deceiving Madam Bartlett, sneering at Mr. Ranny's efforts at reform, terrorizing little Miss Leaks. Then he had a swift and relentless vision of himself in his new position, a well trained automaton, expected to execute Mr. Bangs's orders not only in the factory but in ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... performing sentry duty at the gate, though he challenged him like an automaton, was astonished at the sight of a uniform, the like of which, in style, brilliancy, and ornaments, he ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... staring toward the garden. Noon had crept upon it, devouring all shadow. Her eyes saw little but the golden blur. A fusuma opened softly, and two women, Mata and the attendant seamstress, came mincing and smirking toward her, each with an armful of white silk. Ume rose like an automaton. They began her toilet, talking the while in low voices. They robed her in white with a thin lining-edge of crimson, and threw over her shining hair a veil of tissue. Some one outside called that the bride's kuruma was at the gate. Old Kano entered the room, smiling. ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... trick which he obviously dislikes, and insistence on your part may do great harm. The Poodle is exceptionally sensitive, and is far more efficiently taught when treated as a sensible being rather than as a mere quadrupedal automaton. He will learn twice as quickly if his master can make him understand the reason for performing a task. The whip is of little use when a lesson is to be taught, as the dog will probably associate his tasks with a thrashing ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... as to Darcy's guilt; and he was man enough to have paid the extreme penalty willingly. For thirty years he lived the monotonous round of prison life, becoming more and more like a dumb animal, and paroled at last in his old age little better than an automaton—the qualities of daring, thrift, and religious enthusiasm long since ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... (all these men who are somebody's "labourers" are poor samples of humanity, evidently lacking in grit, and destitute of ability to do any work which would mean decent wages). Judging from appearances, they will do nothing well. They are a kind of automaton, with the machinery rusty; slow, dull, and incapable. The man of ordinary intelligence leaves them in the rear. They could doubtless earn more even at odd jobs, but lack the energy. Of course, this means little food, exposure ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... with some difficulty, like a clumsy automaton animated by unwilling springs, the fat scoundrel lurched awkwardly to his feet ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... INSTRUMENT for his fire-tipt fingers to traverse, while every several nerve of emotion, passion, thought, that thrids the flesh-and-blood of our common humanity, responded to the touch,—that this SWEET PSALMIST OF ISRAEL was himself as mere an instrument as his harp, an AUTOMATON poet, mourner, and supplicant;—all is gone,—all sympathy, at least, and all example. I listen in awe and fear, but likewise in perplexity ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... tone relapsed; it was now conspicuous for its want of "success waves"; it seemed to imply a definite cognizance of personal uselessness. He who had brightened a moment before now spoke like an automaton. Mr. Mackintosh looked at him and his shabby garments. He had a ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... brilliant sister, while others—the sensible portion—wondered, pitied, and blamed, attributing the whole to the ambitious mother, whose agency in her son's marriage was now generally known. At Maple Grove closets, chairs, tables, and sofas were loaded down with finery, and like an automaton, Anna stood up while they fitted to her the rich white satin, scarcely whiter than her own face, and Mrs. Livingstone, when she saw her daughter's indifference, would pinch her bloodless cheeks, wondering how she could care so ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... her in contact with tragic and touching things. A day or two after that early morning when he had told the outlines of the Batesons' story to the two ladies who had entertained him at breakfast he had found her in Bateson's cottage with his wife. Bateson was dead, and his wife in that dumb, automaton state of grief when the human spirit grows poisonous to itself. The young girl who came and went with so few words and such friendly timid ways had stirred, as it were, the dark air of the house with a breath of tenderness. She would sit beside the widow, sewing ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... overcoming the bashfulness of that timid overgrown boy; and he, submissive rather than seeking, allowed things to take their course, like a superior being with thoughts absorbed in higher things, and responding to affairs of earth like an automaton. ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... in such moods most safely entrust ourselves; and it is tempting to ask, what was the secret of his success? The effort, indeed, to investigate the materials from which some rare literary flavour is extracted is seldom satisfactory. We are reminded of the automaton chess-player who excited the wonder of the last generation. The showman, like the critic, laid bare his inside, and displayed all the cunning wheels and cogs and cranks by which his motions were supposed to be regulated. Yet, after all, the true secret was that there was a ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... spectator has only the instinct, not the certainty, of being cheated. The idea he incarnates, that of a man whose soul is aflame with patriotism, is finely suggested, but an idea, even a great one, does not make an individuality. And in fact Insarov is not a man, he is an automaton. To compare Shubin's utterances with his is to perceive that there is no spontaneity, no inevitability in Insarov. He is a patriotic clock wound up to go for the occasion, and in truth he is very useful. Only on his deathbed, when the unexpected happens, and the machinery runs ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... stood, like a pallid automaton, when the instant came for him to change his position, and he saw me. The cry that rose to his lips but did not escape them, the reel which his figure gave before it stiffened into marble, testified to the shock he had received, and also to the sense of unreality with which my appearance ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... Mareschal continued to mark the time with the listless apathy of an automaton; the smoke curled from his meerschaum, the drum continued to tap-tap-tap, until it seemed to sound like thunder to my strained ears, for every sense was painfully excited. All count had long been lost, but when several hundred lashes had been given, Van Wandenberg ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... the faculties, also, gives versatility of talent, so that, if the customary business of the laborer is superseded by improvements, he can readily betake himself to another kind of employment. But an uncultivated mind is like an automaton, which can do only the thing for which its wheels or springs were made. Brute force expends itself unproductively. It is ignorant of the manner in which Nature works, and hence it can not avail itself of her mighty agencies. Often, indeed, it attempts to oppose Nature. It ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... The woman's voice was on the edge of hysteria. She came through the crowd like an automaton, not seeing the people she ...
— The Cuckoo Clock • Wesley Barefoot
... worked well together, she and Fenger, their minds often marching along without the necessity of a single spoken word. There was no doubt that Fenger's mind was a marvelous piece of mechanism. Under it the Haynes-Cooper plant functioned with the clockwork regularity of a gigantic automaton. System and Results—these were his twin gods. With his mind intent on them he failed to see that new gods, born of spiritual unrest, were being set up in the temples of Big Business. Their coming had been rumored for many years. Words such as Brotherhood, Labor, Rights, Humanity, ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... but she was too well-trained an automaton to put her feelings into words. She rustled starchily from the room, to give the dread message to Mary, who promptly flew upstairs, voluble ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... of a class of men common in all times. We have seen Nicodemus very often. He is a good man whose goodness has no life in it. His goodness is a sort of an automaton—all machinery and no soul. He is so thoroughly right in all he does; everything about him is so proper; he is so perfectly en regle in his own eyes,—that we sometimes wish that he might be betrayed into some impropriety, commit some not too great folly, have some ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... stay on at this heart-breaking work, so do I," said Dayton-Philipps, and toiled gamely on at the pump. There he was still when day broke, sawing up and down like an automaton. But before the sun rose, utter weariness had done its work. His bleeding fingers loosed themselves from the break, his knees failed beneath him, and he fell in an unconscious stupor of sleep on to the wet planking of the deck. For half an hour more Kettle struggled on at the pump, ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... what is more strange, I am thanking and praising and blessing them for it, in spite of my teeth! I swallow the dose as eagerly as if it had been prepared and sweetened by my own hand; and it appears I have had nothing to do in the matter! I am a mere automaton; and as such they ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... asked to execute during that winter a very large order for hurdles and other copse-ware, for which purpose he had been obliged to buy several acres of brushwood standing. He was now engaged in the cutting and manufacture of the same, proceeding with the work daily like an automaton. ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... of its object. (2) This conclusion is identical with the saying of the ancients, that true proceeds from cause to effect; though the ancients, so far as I know, never formed the conception put forward here that the soul acts according to fixed laws, and is as it were an immaterial automaton. ...
— On the Improvement of the Understanding • Baruch Spinoza [Benedict de Spinoza]
... room to order things for their growth and change and discipline and enlightenment. The present living idea informing the cosmos, is nobler than all forsaken perfection—nobler, as a living man is nobler than an automaton. ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... chord in the listener which all the nicely-calculated trills and cadences of the ingenious mechanical toy failed to set in motion. In like manner we repeat that the power to determine his own course raises man to a plane incomparably higher than he could have occupied as an automaton. The same faculty of free choice which in its abuse makes the sinner, in its right {99} exercise furnishes forth the saint. All that we mean by moral progress, by "the steady gain of man," his rise to more exalted ideals, his conquest ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... likewise a peculiar and appropriated dialect—they address every one by the title of Citizen, thee and thou indistinctly, and talk of nothing but the agents of Pitt and Cobourg, the coalesced tyrants, royal ogres, satellites of the despots, automaton slaves, and anthropophagi; and if they revert to their own prosperous state, and this very happy country, it is, un peuple libre, en peuple heureux, and par excellence la terre de la liberte. ["A free people—a happy people—and, above all others, the land of liberty."]—It is to ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... descended from her carriage as Keith passed by. Just as she was about to enter the shop, a well-knit figure with square shoulders and springy step, swinging down the street, caught her eye. She glanced that way and gave an exclamation. The door was being held open for her by a blank-faced automaton in a many-buttoned uniform; so she passed in, but pausing just inside, she glanced back through the window. The next instant she left the shop and gazed down the street again. But Keith had turned a corner, and so Alice Lancaster did not see him, though she stood on ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... but with this difference: he did his speechmaking at his own home, the ax-grinders in his interest rounding up audiences for him and herding them before his door. One of the two corpses, too, was galvanized into a kind of ghastly activity and became a talking automaton; but the other had been too long dead. In a few years more the decent tradition that a man should not blow his own horn will be obsolete in its application to the high office, as it is to all the others, but the popular saying will lose none of its ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... visitor's heart by her kind manner to the poor son, who was very well trained, and behaved like an automaton, but grew restless with the hopes of wild beasts and London shops. His mother was about to take leave, when Percy proposed to take charge of him, and leave her to rest for the afternoon with Mrs. Martindale, a plan ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... supplementary, so that human reflection has fallen into a habit of interlarding them. The world, instead of being a living body, a natural system with moral functions, has seemed to be a bisectible hybrid, half material and half mental, the clumsy conjunction of an automaton with a ghost. These phases, taken in their abstraction, as they first forced themselves on human attention, have been taken for independent and separable facts. Experience, remaining in both provinces quite sensuous and ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... daughter—Cecilia, who would have been very much astonished had anyone hinted at such a thing to her. The sharp eyes of the little Cockney were not to be deceived in any matter concerning the only person in the house who treated her as if she were a human being and not a grate-cleaning automaton. ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... often little in a transfer of a person who has tended a machine of one kind to a machine of a different kind. Instances there still are of manual skill brought to naught by the invention of a mechanical automaton that does the work more rapidly and accurately than the hand of man can do it; and the worker who possesses this skill must usually, in such cases, content himself with an employment where his more general aptitudes may stand him in good stead ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... cannot, will not, deem thee a deceiving, Illusive mockery of human feeling, A body organized, by fond caress Warmed into seeming tenderness; A mere automaton, on which our love Plays, as on puppets, when their wires we move. No! when that feeling quits thy glazing eye, 'Twill live in some blest world ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... the quarter that I handed to the stage-driver. I have spent thousands on your education, but you don't sing for me, you don't read to me, you never think of soothing my overtaxed nerves by cheerful, hopeful talk. Were I a steel automaton, supplying your wants, I should answer just as well, and in that case you might remember the laws of matter and apply a little oil occasionally. What are the motives of your life but dress, admiration, excitement, a rapid succession of men to pass under your baleful fascination, and then ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... should live and die without being a happy wife. I don't want you to become a mere benevolent automaton set aside for church work, and charities; getting solemn and thin, with patient curves deepening around your mouth, and loneliness ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
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