"Vital force" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... science, and claimed its autonomy. The result was a fatal breach in the defences of materialism, for biology is being driven to accept final causes, and would be glad to adopt some theory of vitalism, if it could do so without falling back into the old error of a mysterious 'vital force.' Biological truth, it is plain, cannot be reduced to the purely quantitative categories of mathematics and physics. Then psychology aspired to be a philosophy of real existence, and attacked both absolutism and materialism. The pretensions of psychology rehabilitated subjectivism and ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... saw, carried on the old classical tradition, bringing forth monuments like the Annals of Tigearnac; and there was the same vigor and vital force in every part of the nation's life. The coming of the Normans changed this in no essential regard. There was something added in architecture, the Norman modifying the old native style; the castle and keep gradually taking the place ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... destroying agencies of sun or frost. To any place that begins to weaken under toil comes an accession from the abundant internal heat collected and stored up against the day of need; it fills the vacancy, restores the vital force, and lengthens endurance to the utmost. Past exertion means not dissipation but increase of force, which can be fanned into ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... beaten man; but Hereward was spent. He had lived his life, and had no more life which he could live; for every man, it would seem, brings into the world with him a certain capacity, a certain amount of vital force, in body and in soul; and when that is used up, the man must sink down into some sort of second childhood, and end, like Hereward, very much where he began; unless the grace of God shall lift him up above the capacity of the mere flesh, into a life ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... idea of him, must come to the truth of that idea; and under every form of Christ is the Christ. The truth of every man, I say, is the perfected Christ in him. As Christ is the blossom of humanity, so the blossom of every man is the Christ perfected in him. The vital force of humanity working in him is Christ; he is his root—the generator and perfecter of his individuality. The stronger the pure will of the man to be true; the freer and more active his choice; the more definite his individuality, ever the more is the ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... discover this and to repudiate the prevailing terminology were the physiologists, who early announced their disbelief in a vital force, and their belief that all physiological activities were of purely physical and chemical origin, and that there was no need to assume any such thing as a vital force. Then came the discovery that chemical force, or affinity, had only an adventitious existence, ...
— The Machinery of the Universe - Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena • Amos Emerson Dolbear
... a prisoned poet, often in his finest moments inarticulate. Working in the theater with his companies and stars, with the women and the men who knew and loved him, he accomplished less by word than by a radiating vital force that brought them into his intensity of feeling. In his social intercourse and comradeship, telling a dramatic or a comic story, at a certain pressure of its progress where other men depend on paragraphs and phrases ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... the hare, give progeny which are themselves sterile (mules, etc.). The feebleness and sterility of hybrids derived from widely separated races or nearly allied different species proves the deficiency in vital force of the offspring of fundamentally dissimilar procreators. But, on the other hand, the dangers of continuous consanguineous reproduction are no less evident. Perpetual unions between brothers and sisters for several generations, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... chaff upon the dung heap, and after various mutations, have come in contact with a clod of earth, through which they have sent their roots, and have finally grown into thrifty plants. A thought thrown out on the world, if it possesses vital force, never dies. How much is remembered of the work of our greatest men? Only a sentence here and there; and many a man whose name will go down through all the ages, owes it to the truth or the vital force of the thought embedded ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... meanwhile, suffered a corresponding agitation, more penetrative in proportion to the finer substance of her nature. She did not know until the scene was over how much vital force it had cost her; when she took off the veil a fire danced before her eyes, and her limbs ached and trembled as she lay down in the darkness. All night long she was acting her part over and over; when she woke up, it was always at the point where Sidney replied to her, ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... not atrophy is the law of life. Action is the expression of that vital force called energy, and energy moves the world. The keynote of the natural world is action: the earth revolves, the river moves in its course, the tempest rages, the mountain acts from volcanic phenomena, vegetation grows, etc. In every tiny seed ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... over-much gaiety. The demands of her profession proved too great for her impaired nervous energy, and she sought some stimulant which would enable her to appear bright on the stage when actually she should have been recuperating, in sleep, that loss of vital force which can be recuperated in ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... Perhaps only those who have had close dealings with the British officer in time of action or emergency realise, to the full, the effective qualities hidden under a careless or conventional exterior:—the vital force, the pluck, endurance, and irrepressible spirit of enterprise, which—it has been aptly said—make him, at his best, the most romantic figure of our ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... enquired, 'How is it that fire (vital force) in combination with the earthly element (matter), becomes the corporeal tenement (of living creatures), and how doth the vital air (the breath of life) according to the nature of its seat (the muscles and nerves) excite to action (the corporeal frame)?' ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... sooty servitors tending their furnaces. I saw them, also on Saturday night, after their work was done, going to receive its poor wages, looking pallid and dull, as if they had spent on tempering the steel that vital force that should have ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... natural habits of life in accord with Nature's Laws. Economize vital force. Build up the blood on a natural basis, that is, supply the blood with its natural constituents in right proportions. Promote the elimination of waste matter and poisons without in any way injuring the human body. Arouse the individual in the highest possible degree to the consciousness ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... order come the sexual desires; for these, in addition to the great diversion of energy (vital force) into other channels, in many different ways, beyond the primary one (as, for instance, the waste of energy in expectation, jealousy, &c.), are direct attractions to a certain gross quality of the original matter of the Universe, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... himself to God. The seneschal was not so white that he could not become whiter, and now he blanched like linen newly dried, remaining dumb with passion. And this old man who had not in his veins the vital force to procreate a child, found in this moment of fury more vigour than was necessary to undo a man. He seized with his hairy right hand his heavy club, lifted it, brandished it and adjusted it so easily you could have thought it a bowl at a game of skittles, to bring ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... other and simpler means, for instance dichogamy. It may be that the production of the male and female reproductive elements and the maturation of the ovules was too great a strain and expenditure of vital force for a single individual to withstand, if endowed with a highly complex organisation; and that at the same time there was no need for all the individuals to produce young, and consequently that no injury, on the contrary, good resulted from half of them, ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... here, have you never noticed how brilliant and lively Mrs. Krauss is at times, with shining eyes and a colour in her cheeks? Then on other days, if she does appear, she is limp as a wet rag, depressed and old; there is a complete lack of all vital force. Now tell me how you ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... observance of every seventh day, attracted attention, and even secured a certain amount of acceptance. The Jews, therefore, even when, as a nation, they were ruined and crushed, proved themselves possessed of such vital force, of such tenacity, as to impress their conquerors with interest in, and respect for, their sabbatic customs. Of their tenacity and force in general, of their power to influence the nations amongst whom they have been scattered, the history of the last two thousand five hundred years is eloquent. ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... spacious philosopher might allay a certain fever in my blood. But he did nothing of the kind. He wrote for cool and spacious people like himself; not for corpses like me revivified suddenly with an overcharge of vital force. I pitched him—how much more truly companionable is a book than its author!—I pitched him across the room, and thrusting my hands in my pockets and stretching out my legs, stared in a certain ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... fierce and implacable in action; at once loved and most terribly feared; shy as a wild animal, but straightforward and undeviating in his human relations; most remarkably quiet and unassuming, but with tremendous vital force in his deep eyes and forward-thrust jaw; informed with the widest and most understanding humanity, but unforgiving of evildoers; and with the most direct and absolute courage, Bwana C. was to me the most interesting ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... is generally known under the broad name of "Vibration." The work is divided into twelve chapters, of which the following is an epitome. Chapter I, treats upon the Occult Forces of Nature; II, the Language of the Starry Heavens; III, Vital Force; IV, the Temperament, Physical and Magnetic; V, the Mental and Intellectual Powers; VI, the Financial Prospects; VII, Love and Marriage; VIII, Friends and Enemies; IX, Celestial Dynamics in Operation; X, the Diagnosis of Disease; XI, the Treatment of Disease; ...
— Within the Temple of Isis • Belle M. Wagner
... all manifestations of powers other than those of electricity, gravitation, magnetism, and so forth are anomalous, and we have the very word "anomaly" applied to them. "The only anomaly," he writes, "is our ignorance of the nature of vital force. [158:1] But do we know much more of ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... Nature's non-admission of a break, Nature's vis medicatrix, were offered as explanations of phenomena; when the qualities of things were mistaken for real entities dwelling in the things; when the phenomena of living bodies were thought to be accounted for by being referred to a "vital force;" when, in short, the abstract names of phenomena were mistaken for the causes of their existence. In this sense of the word it can not be reasonably denied that the metaphysical explanation of phenomena, equally with ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... wrote of the Seeress of Prevorst, and Clemens Brentano watched for years at the bedside of a stigmatized nun. On the other hand, from nature comes a love for home and country, and this love serves as a bridge to the patriotism which was the vital force in the Wars of Liberation and which, by well-marked gradations, destroyed the cosmopolitanism engendered by the French Revolution. Art went hand in hand with nature; the wild, weird landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, fascinating and specifically ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... told; probably not a dozen could tell exactly where he is buried. Such is fame. And yet this man, in the belief of most of his countrymen, was chosen president, though never seated; he was governor of New York and a vital force in the politics and public life ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... omnipresent and omnipotent, retreating before them deeper and deeper, the deeper they delve: namely, the life which shapes and makes; that which the old schoolmen called "forma formativa," which they call vital force and what not—metaphors all, or rather counters to mark an unknown quantity, as if they should call it x or y. One says—It is all vibrations: but his reason, unsatisfied, asks—And what makes the vibrations vibrate? Another—It ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... sense of the people and the vital force of the Constitution triumphed over sectional prejudice and the political errors of the day, and the State of Texas returned to the Union as she was, with social institutions which her people had chosen for themselves and with ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... darkness and unbelief, saw in it the common yearning of the human soul to find rest on a loving Father's almighty arm; yet when our oriental missionaries and scholars found such fundamental truths of their own religion as the common brotherhood of man, and that love is the vital force of all religion, which consists not in blood-oblations or in forms and creeds, but in shunning evil and doing good, and that we must overcome evil by good and hatred by love, and that there is a spiritual ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... hope that religion in the family is not to be a wistful memory of the past but a most vital force in the making of the better day that is coming, this volume is offered as a contribution and ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... which we talk about for an hour a week, on Sunday, is not only the vital force which protects our community, but it is the vital force which makes our communities. The power of our spiritual forces has not ...
— Fundamentals of Prosperity - What They Are and Whence They Come • Roger W. Babson
... a continent and strike the Pacific ocean. This is a simile borrowed from astronomy. To adopt the language of the naturalist, those three little colonies were the puny germs which bore within themselves a vital force vastly more potent and wonderful than that which dwells in the heart of the gourd seed, and the acorn whose nascent swelling energies will lift huge boulders and split the living rock asunder: vastly more potent because it was ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... respiration, wind; breath of life, breath of one's nostrils; oxygen, air. [devices to sustain respiration] respirator, artificial respirator, heart and lung machine, iron lung; medical devices &c. 662. lifeblood; Archeus[obs3]; existence &c. 1. vivification; vital force; vitalization; revivification &c. 163; Prometheus; life to come &c. (destiny) 152. [Science of life] physiology, biology; animal ecology. nourishment, staff of life &c. (food) 298. genetics, heredity, inheritance, evolution, natural selection, reproduction (production) 161. microbe, aerobe, anaerobe, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... unlike China, Korea, and Japan are in some respects, through the careers of all three we can trace the same life-spirit. It is the career of the river Jordan rising like any other stream from the springs among the mountains only to fall after a brief existence into the Dead Sea. For their vital force had spent itself more than a millennium ago. Already, then, their civilization had in its deeper developments attained its stature, and has simply been perfecting itself since. We may liken it to some stunted tree, that, finding itself prevented from growth, bastes the more luxuriantly ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... burlesque on Scientific categories. Professor Bastian, in his great work on the "Beginnings of Life," has unhesitatingly said: "The 'vitalists' must give up their last stronghold—we cannot even grant them a right to assume the existence of a special 'vital force' whose peculiar office it is to effect the transformation of physical forces. The notion that such a force does exist, is based on no evidence; it is a mere postulate. The assumption of its existence carries with it nothing but confusion ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... saner moments she was aware of her own misdemeanor. She knew that her morbid questioning, her ceaseless grievings were wearing away her vital force, and that no doctor could ever again medicine her to sweet sleep, that no wind or cloud would bring coolness to her burning brain. "I am no longer worthy of any man's love," she ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... prolonged his days would have sufficed to bring him through two courses of Boyhood. It is not unusual to hear grown people talk of "living their youthful days over again;" but the examples of those who have gone through this ordeal are very rare. The amount of wear and tear, the expenditure of vital force, involved in the transit from infancy to manhood cannot be estimated. The abrasions of later life do not compare with the rubs of Boyhood, because none of the aids of experience and philosophy are attainable by the tyro, ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... (Athena in the Earth.) Study, supplementary to the preceding lecture, of the supposed and actual relations of Athena to the vital force in material organism. ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... expressions of life in the individual body as well as in the social body and the racial body, is not an enemy with whom we must maintain unceasing warfare, but a wise and trustworthy friend with whom we may safely co-operate, neither repressing this vital force until we have conquered it and dragged it like a bleeding captive behind our chariot-wheels, nor should we like the drug-slave become lost in the clutches ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... clearly what we mean by a subtle body. It is nothing but a minute germ of a living substance. It contains the invisible particles of matter which are held together by vital force, and it also possesses mind or thought-force in a potential state, just as the seed of a plant contains in it the life force and the power of growth. According to Vedanta, the subtle body consists of Antahkaranam, that is, the internal organ or the ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... of this interplay and balance between the state and the people. The original and vital force of the people, through the organization of the state, realizes itself fully in the unified communal ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... sides, have been advocated for years by statesmen, judges, and bar associations. First steps toward that end should not longer be delayed. Rigid and expeditious justice is the first safeguard of freedom, the basis of all ordered liberty, the vital force of progress. It must not come to be in our Republic that it can be defeated by the indifference of the citizen, by exploitation of the delays and entanglements of the law, or by combinations of criminals. Justice must not fail because the agencies ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... to such as will see. Matter, Mr. Cinch, does not act. Matter has no will. It doesn't feel, or get tired, or wear out or do any of the things attributed to it by thoughtless people. Matter is inanimate and takes form only as the mind, the soul, the Vital Force, wills that it shall. It responds to the soul. Therefore, if your legs are bowed, ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... to the trinity of the soul, as we have shown a little further back. Some Hebrew scholars hold that "Nichema" is the Ego, or Intelligent Spirit; "Rouach," the lower vehicle of the Ego; and "Nephesh," the Vital Force, Vitality, ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... of pride in her ability to write this mysterious shorthand, she opened her notebook, and waited with poised pencil. The mien of the two men had communicated to her an excitement far surpassing their own, in degree and in felicity. The whole of her vital force was concentrated at the point of her pencil, and she seemed to be saying to herself: "I'm very sorry, mother, but see how important this is! I shall consider what I can do for you the very ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... spiritualized materialism of men like Huxley and Tyndall need not trouble us. It springs from the new conception of matter. It stands on the threshold of idealism or mysticism with the door ajar. After Tyndall had cast out the term "vital force," and reduced all visible phenomena of life to mechanical attraction and repulsion, after he had exhausted physics, and reached its very rim, a mighty mystery still hovered beyond him. He recognized that he had made no step toward its solution, and was forced ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... Her health, always frail, suffered from their separation. She became a thin and frail vision—a "gossamer girl" indeed. The ordinary life of travel and society lost all hold upon her; she passed through it in a mood of weariness and distaste that was in itself a danger to vital force. The mother became desperately alarmed, and made a number of flurried concessions. Letters, at any rate, should be allowed, in spite of the guardians, and without their knowledge. Yet each letter caused emotions which ran like a storm-wind through the child's fragile being, and ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... talking to unperceptive and unappreciative persons. It is not that he desires to appear brilliant; it is that he is so intolerant of tedium that he sacrifices himself to fatiguing efforts in trying to strike a spark out of a dull stone. The spark is perhaps struck, but he parts with his vital force in striking it. He will be apt to be reproached with being eremitical, self-absorbed, unsociable, fastidious; but he must not care for that, because the essence of his work is to cultivate relations of sympathy with people whose faces he may never see, and he must save his talk, so to speak, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the living organism than those which act in the inorganic realm, or at least there are none but forces at one with these in their blindness and necessity. True, the purposiveness of living processes cannot be denied; but its ground lies, according to this view, not in a vital force which guides and rules the individual life, but in the original creation and collocation of matter according to a rational plan. The purposiveness of life is part of the purposiveness of the universe; just as the stars circle for ever in harmoniously adjusted paths, so do the processes of ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... hair she possessed the shrewdness to preserve all the alert and youthful grace of those Parisian women who never grow old; who carry within themselves a surprising vital force, an indomitable power of resistance, and who remain for twenty years triumphant and indestructible, careful above all things of their bodies and ever ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... the other apparently separated minds, and with the Universal Mind of which it forms a part. Just as is the Matter of which our physical bodies are composed really in touch with all Matter; and just as is the Vital Force used by us really in touch with all Energy; so is our Mind-substance really in touch with all Mind-substance. It is as if the Ego in its progress were moving through great oceans of Matter, Energy, or Mind-substance, making use of that of each which it needed and which immediately ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... for us. It seems to me, our apprehension of this matter is, for most part, radically falsified thereby. We ought to know withal, and to keep for ever in mind, that these divisions are at bottom but names; that man's spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in him, is essentially one and indivisible; that what we call imagination, fancy, understanding, and so forth, are but different figures of the same Power of Insight, all indissolubly connected with each other, physiognomically ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... maleficent deity a purely sentimental fancy, contradicted by human reason and the aspect of the world. Evil is often the active form of good; as F. W. Newman says, so likewise is Evil the revelation of Good. With him all existences are equal: so long as they possess the Hindu Agasa, Life-fluid or vital force, ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... them aloft so far: and the nimble wicked Voltaire so seizes his moment, trips poor Sisyphus; and sends him down, heels-over-head, in a torrent of roaring debris! 'From gradual transpiration of our vital force comes Death; which perhaps, by precautions, might be indefinitely retarded,' says Maupertuis. 'Yes, truly,' answers the other: 'if we got ourselves japanned, coated with resinous varnish (INDUITS DE POIX RESINEUX); who knows!' Not a sublime owlery can you drop, but it is manipulated, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... seized it with both hands, and, oblivious to the hopeful derision Gathering on the faces of those about me, I breathed into it all the despair and anguish of my expiring breath. It gave forth a hollow, soulless, and lugubrious squeak, utterly out of proportion to the vital force expended, yet I felt that I had triumphed, and detected a new expression of awe and admiration on ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... suffering to her affectionate care and caress, and planned the bold step that they go out together across the seas and live in each other's lives like lovers in truth and reality,—was this only the resurrection of a moment or the firm vital force of a seven years' silent passion? Had either of them ever repented, though one was a coward and the other a condemned and public criminal before the law, and both had suffered? Was not the true sin, as is suggested, ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... in the athletic annals of Williams, and his influence, apparently cut off by his early death, is still a vital force among those who cheered his memorable gains on the gridiron and who admired him ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... needed, and also where sympathy merely softened and ruined. Her face, too, followed this inner change. Soft lines merged into something more vivid. She was usually pale, and her sweet, small mouth had a weary droop, but her eyes were keen and living, and lit with vital force. ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... moon were not retained in their orbits by vital force (aut alia aligua aequipollenti), the earth and moon would ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... all the sounds and shallows of the ether, and in realizing within himself all the harmonies and dissonances of the soul, of feeling, and of thought. Idleness and contemplation! Slumber of the will, lapses of the vital force, indolence of the whole being—how well I know you! To love, to dream, to feel, to learn, to understand—all these are possible to me if only I may be relieved from willing. It is my tendency, my instinct, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... begin where men leave off. I suppose that that's what's meant by the myth of Eve springing from Adam's side. It was to be noticed even then, in the prehistoric, in the age that formed the great legends. Adam was asleep, when Eve as a vital force leaped away from him. If it wasn't for Eve's vitality the human race would still ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... drainage from above, and cut off by rocks and impervious strata from springs from below. Dr. Livingstone, struck with this phenomenon in Southern Africa, asks: "Can the white ants possess the power of combining the oxygen and hydrogen of their vegetable food by vital force so as to form water?"—Travels, p. 22. And he describes at Angola an insect (A. goudotti? Bennett.) resembling the Aphrophora spumaria; seven or eight individuals of which distil several pints of water every night.—P. ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... Negro race and, in fact, was slowly but surely exterminating the race. It demonstrated that the fourth generation of the children born of intermarrying mulattoes were invariably sterile or woefully lacking in vital force. It asserted that only in the most rare instances were children born of this fourth generation and in no case did such children reach maturity. This is a startling revelation. While this intermingling was impairing the vital force of our race and exterminating it, it was ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... vital force, which gives us a glimpse into the innermost sanctuary of a woman's soul—a revelation of the truth that to a woman there may be a greater thing than the love of a man—the story pictured against a wonderful Southern ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... the field who was even more dreaded. But as soon as this enemy had been beaten out of sight it could not act at all. This had been because it did not represent the American people, but only the American states. The vital force which moved it was not the resistless force of a whole people, but only a shadowy semblance of force, derived from a theoretical consent of thirteen corporate bodies, which in their corporate capacity ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... affections of others. Mazzini, that greatest of all democrats, who broke his heart over the condition of the South European peasantry, said: "Education is not merely a necessity of true life by which the individual renews his vital force in the vital force of humanity; it is a Holy Communion with generations dead and living, by which he fecundates all his faculties. When he is withheld from this Communion for generations, as the Italian peasant has been, we say, 'He is like a beast ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... period of childhood, from three to seven years, bodily growth is very rapid. Much of the vital force is thus consumed, and less energy is available for physical activity. The child has also less power of resistance and is thus susceptible to the diseases of childhood. His movements are for the same reason lacking in co-ordination. In the later period, from seven to twelve ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... the breadth, lack of confines, the largeness and movement, vibration and life,—these are the things which the modern painter has discovered in landscape and has emphasized; and this is what has made modern landscape a vital force in modern art. Whatever you do or do not see, feel, and express in your painting, these you must see, feel, and express; for once these qualities are recognized and accepted they are as universal as the law of gravity, and ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... it to comprehend the work of creation that we see the creed of the Church take this as its starting point. Were this article taken away there would be no original sin, the promise of Christ would become void, and all the vital force of our religion would be destroyed." The Westminster divines in drawing up their Confession of Faith specially laid it down as necessary to believe that all things visible and invisible were created not only out of nothing but in exactly ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... in Stephen's face that he should have misjudged him. He had come to patronize. He had remained to worship. And in after years, when he thought of this new vital force which became part of him that day, it was in the terms of Emerson: "Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... ignorance." But the current of his thought did not swerve. It held to the one course: What would his master, the dauntless, the infinitely resourceful Schulze, do if he were confronted by this intolerable obstacle of a perfect machine refusing to do its duty and pump vital force through an eagerly waiting body? "He'd make it go, I'd bet my life," the young man muttered. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... from the nourishing yelk around the germ, each being at first roundish in shape, and having a spot near the centre, called the nucleus. The reason why cells increase must remain a mystery, until we can penetrate the secrets of vital force—probably forever. But the mode in which they multiply is as follows: The first change noticed in a cell, when warmed into vital activity, is the appearance of a second nucleus within it, while the cell ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... himself and hold his own in a hand-to-hand struggle. He had no rights that the herd of children among whom he was thrown felt bound to respect; and if he were not able to maintain his rights, he must go down helplessly, and he did go down daily, often hourly. But he had will and vital force, and these brought him always to his feet again, and with strength increased rather than lost. On the days that Mrs. Burke went out he lived for most of the time in the little street, playing with the children that swarmed its pavements, ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... be to your advantage, Isabelle! Barbadoes happens to be the creme de la creme of the British Indies. I would not advise you to display your ignorance before Evadne, or your future lecturettes on the conventionalities may prove lacking in vital force." ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... actor, as I called him, nor a cheat, nor a scoundrel; he lives at other people's expense, not like a swindler, but like a child.... Yes; no doubt he will die somewhere in poverty and want; but are we to throw stones at him for that? He never does anything himself precisely, he has no vital force, no blood; but who has the right to say that he has not been of use? that his words have not scattered good seeds in young hearts, to whom nature has not denied, as she has to him, powers for action, ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... spread a bushel or more of coarse litter about each shrub in fall. Not because it needs protection in the sense that a tender plant needs it, but because a mulch keeps the frost from working harm at its roots, and saves to the plant that amount of vital force which it would be obliged to expend upon itself if it were left to take care of itself. For it is true that even our hardiest plants suffer a good deal in the fight with cold, though they may not seem to be much injured by it. Mulch some of them, and leave some ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... prompted Bismarck to hold up the royal hand, but after all is said, the vital force of Bismarck's endorsement was found in the man's genius for leadership. It was not so much the cause as it was the man. For had Bismarck gone over to the other side the history of Germany would have been ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... Scriptures, would have been a wonder indeed, and thus the coming of the Friars and the revival of pulpit oratory was all the more welcome because the people had not become wearied by the too frequent iteration of truths which may be repeated so frequently as to lose their vital force. A sermon was an event in those days, and a preacher with any real gifts of oratory was looked upon as a prophet sent by God. Never was there a time when the people needed more to be taught the very rudiments ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... relationship; and just as a pendulum is functional, by reason of the counteraction of two opposing forces,—viz., the force of motion and the force of gravity,—so is a thoracic cavity (considering it as a mechanical apparatus) functional by two opposing forces—the vital force and the surrounding physical force. The inspiration of thoracic space is the expiration of general space, ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... cause,—sometimes even a successive development, starting from a central heat; but can the term "life" be applied to this kind of movement? Limestone does not generate sandstone. I do not know that there exists what physiologists call a vital force, different from, or opposed to, the physical forces which we recognize in all matter; I think the vital process is only a particular mode of action, of limitation of those physical forces; action, the nature of which we have not yet fully sounded. I believe ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... any vital force is impressed on any organic substance, so as to die gradually away as the substance extends, an infinite curve is commonly produced by its outline. Thus, in the budding of the leaf, already examined, the gradual ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... superior to the inert atmosphere in which it flies? What subtle power paints the rose, and tunes the merry songster's voice? To explain this mystery, philosophers of olden time supposed the existence of a certain peculiar force which is called life, or vital force, or vitality. This supposition does nothing more than furnish a name for a thing unknown, and the very existence of which may fairly be doubted. In fact, any attempt to find a place for such a force, to understand its origin, or harmonize ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... forbears, and contemptuously ignored the right of other nations to a place on the high seas. It was their dominion, and their prerogative therefore to monopolize them. Uneasy, ill-informed, political propagandists and commercial theorists would do well to ponder over what it has cost in courage, in vital force, in genius and in wealth to build up an edifice that represents half the world's tonnage. This structure of national strength has been erected without the aid of subsidies or bounties, and it may be not only maintained without them, but grow still greater if it is left alone to pursue ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... the Turkish envoy; on the 28th he was in the agonies of death. His stomach swelled, and convulsive vomitings put him to intense torture. The doctors, alarmed at these symptoms, ordered copious bleeding, which appeared to allay his sufferings; but they enervated the vital force of the prince, who had weakened himself by debauchery. He fell asleep for a short time, and the doctors and ministers withdrew; but he soon awoke in fresh convulsions, and died in the presence of a valet de chambre, named Brunetti, in the arms of ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... men who found industries and carve out new careers, as well as the common body of working-people, from whom the national strength and spirit are from time to time recruited, must necessarily furnish the vital force and constitute the real backbone of ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... of ours which is composed of ether is called the "vital body" in Western Mystery Schools, for, as we have already seen, ether is the avenue of ingress for vital force from the sun and the field of agencies in nature which promote such vital activities as assimilation, ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... further heights of living than can be attained by ratiocination. But these, the blameless and loved saints of the earth, rise too rarely on our dull horizons to make a rule for the world. The law of things is that they who tamper with veracity, from whatever motive, are tampering with the vital force of human progress. Our comfort and the delight of the religious imagination are no better than forms of self-indulgence, when they are secured at the cost of that love of truth on which, more than on anything else, the increase of light and happiness among men must depend. We have to ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... the electro-magnetic telegraph, that the same people, when overrun by a terrible crisis, moved slowly, waited patiently, and suffered from the mismanagement of its leaders. This is to be exclusively explained by the youthful self-consciousness of an internal, inexhaustible vital force, and by ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... oxydation of carbon, for instance, in the fireplace, is the formation of the stable compound called carbon dioxide, and light and heat are evolved. The explosion of dynamite, again is the decomposition of an unstable compound. Hence, we begin to perceive that force— the vital force— which keeps the rabbit moving, is supplied by the decomposition and partial oxydation of compounds continued in its food, to carbon dioxide, water, urea, and ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... another. He was seated in his little bed—he used a small and very narrow one—and, at its side, was his wife, Veronica, almost his equal in years. In a clear and sonorous voice he told me why he would be able to leave this life with a valiant soul.... Feeling a little later the failure of vital force, he exclaimed, 'Glad and full of hope will I go with you, my good God!' He then composed himself; and having closed his eyes, as though about to sleep, with a slight sigh, he left ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... fifty years have elapsed since his martyr death and we see his images everywhere, yet Lincoln is no mere legendary figure of an heroic age done in colors, cast in bronze, or sculptured in marble; he is a living, vital force in American politics and statecraft. The people repeat his wise sayings; politicians invoke his principles; men of many political stripes profess to be following in his footsteps. We of this generation can almost see him in the flesh ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... years; and many explanations were attempted by the vitalists (as, for instance, that urea was halfway between the inorganic and organic kingdoms, or that the carbon, from which it was obtained, retained the essentials of this hypothetical vital force), but only to succumb at a later date to the indubitable fact that the same laws of chemical combination prevail in both the animate and inanimate kingdoms, and that the artificial or laboratory synthesis of any substance, either inorganic ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... Shakspeare, for the wonderful variety and vital force of his artistic power. I know no other mind he so nearly resembles. Like Shakspeare, he forces you to accept and to forgive a thousand excesses, and uses his own faults as musicians use discords, only to enhance ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... in this discussion only a limited part of this great subject. Phenomena modified by the action of the vital force, either in plants or in animals, will be excluded; I shall not, therefore, consider such subjects as botany or zooelogy. Geology and related branches will also be omitted by restricting our study to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... SUSTAINING HEALTH. The act of transforming latent, non-vital force which exists pent-up in food, as heat is in coal, into vital energy, requires the simultaneous elimination from the system of a like amount of worn-out matter. Assimilation of nutritive materials is impossible, unless a like amount of matter be eliminated from the system. Muscular and nervous ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... vision is also able to discern what is called the "prana aura" of a person. By this term is indicated that peculiar emanation of vital force which surrounds the physical body of each and every person. In fact, many persons of but slight clairvoyant power, who cannot sense the auric colors, are able to perceive this prana-aura without trouble. It is sometimes called the "health aura," or "physical ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... existed before, but were scarcely more than local designations, or convenient divisions of the people and territories. This called them into being as depositories and agents of political power in its mightiest efficacy and most vital force. It remitted to the people their original sovereignty. Before, that sovereignty had rested in the hands of a remote central deputation; this returned it to them in their primary capacity, and brought it back, in its most important elements, to their immediate control. ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... deeply set, the lids heavy, the lashes short and thick, the eyebrows strongly marked, arched and almost joining over the nose. But these are mere outward presentments, and tell nothing of the spirit living in those marvellous eyes. This was a thing of vital force, for ever changeful. Even the colour of her eyes was varying, and yet there was a curious persistency of gaze, a power of fixing. The Guestrow citizens called Wilhelmine von Graevenitz witch and ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... Chutsz was dualistic. All nature owed its existence to the Ri and Ki, the determining principle and the vital force of primordial aura that produces and modifies motion. Wang held that these two were inseparable. ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... there was one thing that Denver held against him—he had been a drinking man when Arizona was wet. And a man who has drunk, no matter when, is never quite the same in a contest. He has lost that narrow margin of vital force, those last few ounces of strength and stamina which win or lose at the finish. Yet even at that he was a better man than Meacham, who had laid down like a yellow dog. Denver remembered that too and when he found his man he told ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... the little ones keep up their strength? We do not like to suggest reserves supplied by the egg as rectifying the animal's expenditure of vital force, especially when we consider that those reserves, themselves so close to nothing, must be economized in view of the silk, a material of the highest importance, of which a plentiful use will be made presently. There must be other powers ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... succeeded. The patient is convalescent, but—you see how he is. He has very little vital force, and also, occasionally, delusions. Merely ephemeral, you know, but delusions. He wants quiet chiefly, and very little else—just that atmosphere of repose and—er—peace which you can create for ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... done. To divert the currents of life and energy from blood and brain, from memory and muscle, in order to secrete it for the shambles of prostitution, is death to true manhood; but remember, it can be done! The generous liquid life may inspire the brain and blood with noble impulse and vital force, or it may be sinned away and drained out of the system until the jaded brain, the faded cheek, the enervated young manhood, the gray hair, narrow chest, weak voice, and the enfeebled mind show another victim in the long catalogue ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... eyes did not flinch and his tongue did not falter. He was, I have it on the best authority, admirable in his earnestness, in his sincerity and also in his restraint. He was perfect. Nevertheless the vital force of his unknown individuality addressing him so familiarly was enough to fluster Mr Smith. Flora saw her father trembling in all his exiguous length, though he held himself stiffer than ever if that was possible. He muttered a little and at last managed to utter, ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... yonder spark of flame, Yon trembling pearl, the star That beareth Venus' name, And glistens from afar, By Nature's glorious scheme, The infinite grace of God, The planet's tranquil beam That cheers the traveler's road, The grass, the water-course, Woods, fields with dew impearled, The quenchless vital force, The sap of all the world,— I banish from my heart This reckless passion's ghost, Mysterious shade, depart! In the dark past be lost! And thou whom once I met As friend, while thou didst live, The hour when I forget, I likewise should forgive. Let me forgive! I break The long-uniting ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... of sexual generation and of fecundation, the character of his vapeur subtile (aura vitalis) which he supposes to take an active part in the act of fertilization, because the notion is quite as objectionable as that of the vital force which he rejects. He goes on to say, however, that we cannot penetrate farther into the wonderful mystery of fecundation, but the opinions he expresses lead to the view that "nature herself imitates her procedures in fecundation in another state ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... bliss that he found strength to live? Did he not regain strength only because he now wished to live? Who can tell how far the influence of the will extends over the body? Who knows what internal subtle aroma it has the power of disengaging to preserve the sinking frame from decay; what vital force it can breathe into the debilitated organs? Who can say where the dominion of mind over matter ceases? Who knows how far our senses are under the dominion of the imagination, to what extent their powers may be increased, or their extinction accelerated, by its influence? ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... the raw cold of that leaden crisis in the four-and-twenty hours when the vital force of all the noblest and prettiest things that live is at its lowest, the three watchers looked each at the blank faces of the other two, and all at the blank face of Riderhood ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... variance with life; and I do not speak of philosophers only. How do you think a man can be amused while he has his doubts whether after all life is worth living? Besides this, one observes a disquieting depression of vital force, which must be attributed to the abuse man makes of his sensations. Excess of all kinds has blurred our senses and poisoned our faculty for happiness. Human nature succumbs under the irregularities imposed upon it. Deeply attainted at its ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... faculties, the germs of which lie within our borders? Perhaps because we have each only a certain amount of what I'll call vital current. If the Nile could overflow the whole desert it would all be fertilized, and perhaps if we had sufficient vital force we could develop all the faculties whose germs we inherit. Suppose by some accident, owing to a shock or strain, as you say, the flow of this vital current of ours is stopped in the direction in which it usually flows most strongly; its course is ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... in favourable soil, where it can have light and air, and be sheltered from the wind; you remove the superfluous branches, you train the strength into the leading shoots. The acorn will then become as fine a tree as it has vital force to become. The difference between men and other things is only in the largeness and variety of man's capacities; and in this special capacity, that he alone has the power of observing the circumstances favourable to his own growth, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... being a writer was one of his strongest points. Writing is a career by itself. The composition of one editorial of the first class is a very hard day's work, and one that leaves to the writer but a small residue of vital force. Writing for the public is the most arduous and exhausting of all industries, and cannot properly be combined with any other. Nor can a man average more than two or three editorial articles a week such as "The Times" prints ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... tell you that the only reason for my continuing to live is the irresistible impulse of creating a number of works of art which have their vital force in me. I recognise beyond all doubt that this act of creating and completing alone satisfies me and fills me with a desire of life, which otherwise I should not understand. I can, on the other hand, do quite well without any chance of a performance. I see clearly that before the completion ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... shall produce a speck of protoplasm to-day will have the credit of unlocking a power in inorganic nature; he will prove by a short cut how immanent the creative energy or the vital force of the universe is in matter. He will not have eliminated the creative energy; he will only have disclosed it and availed himself ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... the serene heights far above doubt and uncertainty, where love so fills two beings that happiness flows quietly and evenly into their life, their looks, and words. Such love is to a life what religion is to the soul; a vital force, a power that enlightens and upholds. I understood the love of husband and wife in nowise as most people do; for me its full beauty and magnificence began precisely at the point where love perishes ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... name Of Love, not knowing what love meant. But swift As light floods darkened chamber, when one flings The window wide, so her unconscious soul Was flooded with the strange incoming thought— In that eternal moment—of true love, Love as a vital force within the soul, A strength, a power, an illuming light. And Sanpeur loved her! O immortal crown. She was not conscious of her love for him, Her love for his love was ...
— Under King Constantine • Katrina Trask
... before his brain cleared, Kent never could have told. It might have been a minute or an hour. Every vital force that was in him had concentrated into a single consciousness—that the dead had come to life, that it was Marette Radisson, the flesh and blood and living warmth of her, he held in his arms. Like the flash of a picture on a screen he had seen McTrigger's face close ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... was not the girl who had run the Carillon Rapids, for that adventuress was full of a vital force like a man's, and this girl had the evanishing ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... I might have lingered on a little longer, but I chose to concentrate the vital force which would have lasted me a few more senile years into the minutes necessary for this message from me to you—a message I could not have given you if he were not dead. And I am dying so that you may hear it. Dying! My God! I ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... focus. Baur sought the solution of the agitated question in the apostolic history rather than in the life of Christ. The Christianity about which so much discussion is elicited, is, according to him, not a perfect and divine production, but only a vital force in process of development. This is the principle which underlies the multifarious theories of the Tuebingen school. In order to have a place where to stand and eliminate the theory, the epistles of Paul are chosen. But these are not all authentic. Hence a selection ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... hands, which no remedy and no other person seemed to possess. How long would he be chained to her; and she to him, and what would be the consequence of the mysterious relation which must necessarily spring up between a man like him, in the plenitude of vital force, of strongly attractive personality, and a young girl organized for victory over the calmest ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... she had never felt before, how entirely right her father had been in insisting on her resistance to an attachment which was unworthy of her. So far, but no farther, her conscience yielded to its own conviction of what was just. But the one unassailable vital force in this world is the force of love. It may submit to the hard necessities of life; it may acknowledge the imperative claims of duty; it may be silent under reproach, and submissive to privation—but, ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... and powerlessness of his personal opinions. And yet the power of the nation is only the result of the combined influences of its individual citizens. All power is with the individual. However much the absolute monarchy may have suppressed the individual, in a democracy he can become a vital force in government. We are too fond of taking censuses on the one hand, and of deferring to governmental mechanisms on the other. The individual is master of his fate, and he is the ultimate determinant of government. If government is sound, the misbehavior of the individual can ruin it; ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... nothing with that sort of conviction, so to say, which proceeds from conscious inward vigour. When she was not actually riding or fencing, or doing something of the sort, there was a languor in her movements and her manner which told that she had no great vital force upon which to draw. Those who already know something of her story, will remember that her life was short as ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... your ramparts as ye lean, The general debility; Of genius the sterility; Mighty projects countermanded; Rash ambition, brokenhanded; Puny man and scentless rose Tormenting Pan to double the dose. Rebuild or ruin: either fill Of vital force the wasted rill, Or tumble all again in heap To weltering Chaos and ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... had been too ill to share in the active work of the campaign, but her influence was everywhere—a vital force, a continual inspiration. ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... to see him I could not say. Every impulse and vital force of nature centered in my eyes, and they fastened themselves upon that one irregular shadow in the opposing corner which slowly—oh! with such agonizing slowness—assumed the outlines of a man. My fascinated gaze wandered not ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... Revelation does not reveal God on this theory. We have no knowledge of God in the gospel, any more than we had in nature. Instead of knowledge, we have only law. But this seems to despoil Christianity of its vital force. Christ says, "This is life eternal, to know thee, the only true God." But Mr. Mansel tells us that such knowledge of God is impossible. Therefore, instead of the gospel, he gives us the law; for it is certain that his regulative truths are simply moral precepts, addressed ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... in this world that is of any practical good whose vital force is not to be found in example rather than in precept? Who has more need to go into the room of the sick with the purest breath, the cleanest tongue, the brightest eyes, the purest complexion, the most radiant countenance, and with a soul free from the bonds of ailings or habits that ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... expenditure of force (nervous energy), even though it be only the winking of an eyelid; and the labor entailed upon the system, of raising the temperature of the stomach to normal figures, after deluging it with ice water, involves a ruinous waste of vital force, in addition to the other reasons urged against it. It cannot be doubted that this essentially American habit is responsible for a large proportion of the dyspepsia that sits like an incubus upon the nation. Every substance taken into the ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... of Tuskegee beyond its own borders grew as constantly in volume and extent as the work within its borders, so that Tuskegee soon became the vital force—the yeast that was raising the level of life and well-being throughout, first, the town and neighborhood of Tuskegee, then the County of Macon, then the surrounding counties and the State of Alabama; and finally, in conjunction with its mother, Hampton, and its children situated at strategic ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... doubtful whether the world furnishes a finer type of man, physically and intellectually, than the Irish gentleman. He is handsome, large, courageous,—a man of fine instincts, brilliant imagination, courtly manners, and full, vital force. By the side of the Irish gentleman, there has grown for centuries the Irish peasant. He is ugly, of stunted stature, and pugnacious; and he produces children like himself. The two classes started from a common blood; they now present ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... conclusive in favor of the electric nature of vegetable vitality, notwithstanding that this theory best explains the phenomena; yet, when considered in connection with the fact that the nervous fluid of the animal kingdom is evidently a modification of electricity, and probably constitutes the vital force of the animal, the theory of its identification, under another modification, with the vital principle in the vegetable kingdom also, as deduced from experiments like those just adverted to, receives strong confirmation, and is now, I believe, being adopted ...
— A Newly Discovered System of Electrical Medication • Daniel Clark
... and thinner in body and fainter in strength until, one day, as he was slowly walking about and meditating, his vital force suddenly left him and he fell ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... nothing, perhaps, more mysterious in nature than this fact of the existence of a living land: a land that repairs itself, when injured, by vital processes, and resists the eternal attack of the sea by vital force, especially when we think of the extent of some of these lagoon islands or atolls, whose existences are an eternal battle with ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... subjected to a psychologic analysis. From the given historical facts or the ideas that have become the common treasure of a nation, thinking men, living life consciously, can, in one way or another, derive the origin, development, and vital force of its national feeling. The results of such an analysis, arranged in some sort of system, form the content of the national idea. The task of the national idea it is to clarify the national feeling, and give it logical sanction for the benefit of those who cannot rest satisfied ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... Venice was a pyramid resting upon the basis of the Grand Council and rising to an ornamented apex, through the Senate, and the College, in the Doge. But in adopting this old simile—originally the happy thought of Donato Giannotti, it is said[1]—we must not forget that the vital force of the Grand Council was felt throughout the whole of this elaborate system, and that the same individuals were constantly appearing in different capacities. It is this which makes the great event of the years 1297-1319 so all-important for the future destinies of Venice. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... said to Mrs. Martin in a whisper—for explication was a necessity of Miss Bowyer's nature, or perhaps essential to the potency of her measures—"now I will gently place the right hand on the fore brain and the left over the cerebellum, willing the vital force of the cerebrum to retreat backward to the cerebellum. This is the condition of the brain in the somnambulic state and in ordinary sleep. The right hand, you must know, acts from without inward, while the left acts from within outward." She suited the action ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... the Cimetiere de Marnes that day a very aged colleague of mine who, to use the words of Goethe, had consented to die. The great Goethe, whose own vital force was something extraordinary, actually believed that one never dies until one really wants to die—that is to say, when all those energies which resist dissolution, and teh sum of which make up life itself, have been totally destroyed. In other ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... territory outside his own nature, which he has annexed. A man of receptive mind and heart, on the other hand, meditating on what he sees, and getting at its meaning by the divining-rod of the imagination, discovers the law behind the phenomena, the truth behind the fact, the vital force which flows through all things, and gives them their significance. The first man gains information; the second gains culture. The pedant pours out an endless succession of facts with a monotonous uniformity of emphasis, and exhausts ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... the child," he said. "I can see nothing. It is on the mother I rely. In the splendour of life, at thirty-seven she was the full-blown perfection of womanhood, with every vital force at its highest tension——" ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... that," Maggie declared nervously. "She is the inspiration of the President himself. She is the most vital force in Russian politics. She is the woman whom I wanted you to know, to whom I told you that I wished you to pay attentions. And now that you ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... here, however, to impel it forward. It journeys on of itself, as it were, under the action of laws which have never been satisfactorily explained, but all of which are dependent on the vital force or life-power of the tree, inasmuch as without it there is no circulation. One agent, but by no means the principal, or it would act as well in a dead tree as a living one, is capillary attraction; and, if you wish to know what that is, ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace |
