5 uses
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Definition
will (done consciously and voluntarily without being forced or threatened)
- It seemed as though, by some nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life.Chapters 34-36 -- The Cabin-Table; The Mast-Head; The Qarter-Deck--Ahab and all (95% in)
- It is worse; for you cannot sit motionless in the heart of these perils, because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and you are pitched one way and the other, without the slightest warning; and only by a certain self-adjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness of volition and action, can you escape being made a Mazeppa of, and run away with where the all-seeing sun himself could never pierce you out.Chapters 58-60 -- Brit; Squid; The Line (94% in)
- It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, so common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them.Chapters 73-75 -- Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; The Sperm Whale's Head, The Right Whale's Head (62% in)
- Unerringly impelling this dead, impregnable, uninjurable wall, and this most buoyant thing within; there swims behind it all a mass of tremendous life, only to be adequately estimated as piled wood is—by the cord; and all obedient to one volition, as the smallest insect.Chapters 76-78 -- The Battering-Ram; The Great Heidelburgh Tun; Cistern and Buckets (24% in)
- Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated, instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the weltering sea.Chapters 133-135 -- The Chase--First Day; The Chase--Second Day; The Chase--Third Day (87% in)
There are no more uses of "volition" in Moby Dick.
Typical Usage
(best examples)