second sight

English

Noun

second sight (uncountable)

1. An additional sense beyond the five normal ones; the ability to see things that are not detectable by normal sight; clairvoyance; extrasensory perception.

   I think she must have the second sight, because she always knows where I've been.

   • 1716 April 3 (Gregorian calendar), Joseph Addison, “The Free-holder: No. 27. Friday, March 23. ”, in The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, Esq; , volume IV, London: Jacob Tonson, , published 1721, →OCLC:

     He was seized on the sudden with a fit of second-sight.

   • 1782, John Trumbull, McFingal:

     Nor less avail'd his optic sleight, / And Scottish gift of second-sight

   • 1886, Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, translated by H.L. Brækstad, Folk and Fairy Tales, page 46:

     These fairy-lands are only seen by very pious people or by those who are gifted with second sight, when in danger of their lives at sea, and they appear where at other times no land is to be found.

   • 1890, Arthur Conan Doyle, “That Little Square Box”, in The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales‎:

     I have noticed that such presentiments occur often in men of my peculiar temperament, and that they are not uncommonly fulfilled. There is a theory that it arises from a species of second-sight, a subtle spiritual communication with the future.

   • 1909, Bram Stoker, The Lady of the Shroud‎:

     I had long had a secret belief that she was gifted, to some degree at any rate, with Second Sight, which quality, or whatever it is, skilled in the powers if not the lore of superstition, manages to keep at stretch not only the mind of its immediate pathic, but of others relevant to it.

   • 1915, W[illiam] Somerset Maugham, chapter CIV, in Of Human Bondage, New York, N.Y.: George H[enry] Doran Company, →OCLC:

     "Now, don't you begin chaffing me. The fact is I know quite a lot about palmistry and second sight."

   • 1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 221:

     In traditional cultures, where "second sight" was more normal and accepted, the people could see the surviving etheric body of the newly dead; funeral customs, like the traditional Irish wake, in which the dead person is praised and encouraged to move on, were not intended only for the mourners; they were intended for the specter, which in its recently dead state was lost and disoriented.

2. Synonym of senopia

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