"Vital force" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bird, so vastly 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, ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... 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 ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... quickly,—"I know them now. They have great absurdities, great vices even, but they have virtues, or, at the least, estimable qualities; in them lies the vital force of our ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... thinner 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
... would be to make sure that this glorious plant shall have the freedom, light, and warmth necessary for its development. We see from time to time a noble tree dragged down by parasitic runners. These the gardener can remove, though the vital force of the tree itself may lie beyond him: and so, in many a case you men of wealth can liberate genius from the hampering toils which the struggle for existence often ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... the body. This mystical or dualistic soul-hypothesis, which, as is well known, is to this day universally accepted, is fundamentally vitalistic, inasmuch as it regards the force which is bound up with the soul-substance, like the "vital force" of a past time, as a peculiar force quite independent of mechanical forces. This force does not depend on the material phenomena of motion, and is quite independent of the mechanics of atoms. The highest law of modern natural science, the law of the conservation of force, ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... 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
... nervous energy is expended unnecessarily while waiting. If we are obliged to wait for any length of time, it does not hurry the minutes or bring that for which we wait to keep nervously strained with impatience; and it does use vital force, and so helps greatly toward "Americanitis." The strain which comes from an hour's nervous waiting, when simply to let yourself alone and keep still would answer much better, is often equal to a day's labor. It must ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... novel, full of 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
... reservations. His 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, not loud of course but very ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... Dr. Stearns of Bangor, Maine, has developed it, in a book just published, with great breadth of theological knowledge; and a former Yale lecturer, Dr. Dale of Birmingham, has given a telling exposition of it at the same time.[49] This is the vital force of preaching. We are witnesses to Christ—not merely to a Christ who lived long ago and did wonders, but to a Christ who is alive now and is still doing moral miracles. And the virtue of any man's testimony lies in his being able ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... 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 well ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... violence of the majority than from the inertness of their opponents. No proclamation of false doctrines could be so great a disaster as the weakness of faith which would prove that the power of recovery, the vital force of Catholicism, was extinct in the episcopate. It was better to be overcome after openly attesting their belief than to strangle both discussion and definition, and to disperse without having uttered a single word that could reinstate the authorities of the Church in ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... for the fidelity with which she has executed her by no means easy task. The elevated, almost aerial conceptions of Liszt, often seeming as if they disdained the bonds of language, are presented in lucid, idiomatic English, which derives a certain vital force more from warmth of sympathy with the original than from the use of any of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... on the crumbling edge of poverty that they were hardened to its threat, and yet the failure of Robert's health had been of the sort which terrifies. It was a slow but steady sinking of vital force. It had its ups and downs, but it was a downward trail, always downward. The ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... 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 ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... touch with 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, ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... 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 the broadest contrast. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... favorable opportunities, and the ability and foresight to grasp them. The materials of which our American population is composed are various in origin and diverse in their ideas, their creeds, and their aims, but nevertheless full of vital force and energy, and with a less percentage of human weeds and refuse than any other nation on the globe. Nearly everybody is at work, from the manufacturer worth millions, to the tramp who earns his breakfast in the charity wood-yard. It is disreputable ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... us is a special and unrelated creation, just as men for ages saw no relationships between the fowls of the air, the beasts of the field, and the fish of the sea. But, thank God, we are beginning to learn that unity is as much a law of life as selfish struggle, and love a more vital force than avarice or lust of power or place. A Wandering Carpenter knew it, and taught it, ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... which there was no escape; his face only showed surprise and reproach as he looked his last on Ringfield and this world. When upon the bridge he had expected death, set his teeth and prayed, felt all vital force drop away, then by degrees flow back again, but now, when Death clutched him from behind and thrust him over those slippery precipices, to the last moment there was only a profound consternation in his staring blue eyes, as if he found ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... 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 of his ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... only about so much vital force in the average human being. If all this force is put into one's daily toil, there is none left for helpful conversation, for sympathetic communion at home, for uplifting reading, or for worship. Persevere in that course, and you reach barbarism: the ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... hanging down, his head bare, awaiting his punishment, and humbling 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 it down upon ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... room. I looked at her bare neck, lithe and perfumed, on which rested her knotted hair confined by a jewelled comb; that neck, the seat of vital force, was blacker than hell; two shining tresses had fallen there and some light silvern hairs balanced above it. Her shoulders and neck, whiter than milk, displayed a heavy growth of down. There was in that knotted mass of hair something ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... 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 in ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... the Earth.) Study, supplementary to the preceding lecture, of the supposed and actual relations of Athena to the vital force ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... 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 admitted to ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... 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 ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... 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
... 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 smaller ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... insolent—the people whose lives are spent in diminishing the joy of the community in which not so much Providence as the absence of providence has placed them, in impeding that community's natural activity, in diminishing its total output of vital force. Lazy and impertinent clerks, stuck-up shop assistants, inconsiderate employers, brutal employees, unendurable servants, and no less unendurable mistresses—what place will be left ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... the Army and the Royal Navy. And all ranks of society are becoming convinced that religion is the prime factor in the service efficiency and in the national well-being. Thus God is, after all, seen to be the greatest need, and the one true enrichment of human life and character—the vital force by which alone ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... us God's Breath of fire Cannot lose its vital force: Never can its might expire, Flowing from the Eternal Sire, Who ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... same thing. They were blue and 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 sorceress ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... 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
... blonde 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 watchful ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... power thus sacrificed is accurately restored by the combustion of the tree. The heat and work potential in our coal strata are so much strength withdrawn from the sun of former ages. Mayer lays the axe to the root of the notions regarding 'vital force' which were prevalent when he wrote. With the plain fact before us that in the absence of the solar rays plants cannot perform the work of reduction, or generate chemical tensions, it is, he contends, incredible that these tensions should be caused by the mystic play of the ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... as 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, suffer what it may, it is the master-passion ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... his broken 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 ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... great excuses for his follies, as there are for those of every 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 literally ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... thing of all was that she had never heard his music, knew nothing at first hand of his talent, yet believed in it with such vital force, such completeness. There was something almost great in that. She was a woman who absolutely trusted her instinct. And her instinct must have told her that in him, Claude Heath, there was some ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... 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 to ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... been too ill to share in the active work of the campaign, but her influence was everywhere—a vital force, a ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... 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, who lives upon his ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... priest had more than once endeavored to enlighten Dinah as to her husband's character, telling her that the man could hate; but women are not ready to believe in such force in weak natures, and hatred is too constantly in action not to be a vital force. Dinah, finding her husband incapable of love, denied ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... than twenty-four summers, he at one stride reached the topmost height of popularity. Everybody read his book. Everybody laughed over it. Everybody talked about it. Everybody felt, confusedly perhaps, but very surely, that a new and vital force had arisen in ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... principle, a conception that has taken protean forms. At one extreme it is little more than a mystic sentiment to the effect that evolution is the result of an inner driving force or principle which goes under many names such as Bildungstrieb, nisus formativus, vital force, and orthogenesis. Evolutionary thought is replete with variants of this idea, often naively expressed, sometimes unconsciously implied. Evolution once meant, in fact, an unfolding of what pre-existed in the egg, and the term ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... inefficiency of customary services and the high prices charged by selfish privilege were constant invitations to men to become competitors. Men strove to break over the barriers of custom and of prejudice. Their efforts to attain freedom to compete was the vital force of the time. The industrial history of the Middle Ages was largely the story of the struggle of the forces of competition against the ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... 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 to him, and ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... the question was, would the ammunition be of any use? Balls there were in abundance, for, in addition to piles standing pyramidally at the foot of each tower, half-covered now by flowers and shrubs, there were similar piles close to the carriage of each gun. But the vital force of the gun, the energy that should set the ball whizzing through the air, was the question, and to prove this, Ben asked for an order, and then walked with his young captain to the armoury, where he opened the great closet. One of the kegs was brought out and ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn
... courage! Looking back into her eyes I saw a light that by its own vital force was self-translated, requiring no words, nor the sight of her fingers grasping the handle of that small revolver at her waist, to tell of her determination. In spite of myself I shuddered; yet she was so calm, so wonderful in her abiding ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... vital flame, soul, spirit. 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) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... found to depend upon a progressive realisation of the nature of good "consumption." Just in proportion as our tastes become so qualitative that we require to put our own spontaneity, our sense of beauty and fitness, our vital force, into whatever work we do, and likewise require the same elements of spontaneity and individuality in all we enjoy, the economic conditions of a perfect society ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... to Christianity, in the same line with the doubtless anti-theistic and anti-Christian aposkopiology or negation of the idea of design, also the mechanistic system, or the negation of the organic vital force, and the Darwinian theory of descent. Besides, in reading his "Apologetics," we had earnestly wished, in the interest of science as well as of religion, that a theologian who writes a work which claims to be scientific and to advocate the ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... complete growth or development is damaging to that organ and interferes with its normal function, and "we cannot but believe that children developed in immature sexual organs must be deficient in true vital force and energy. It is often noticeable that a child apparently strong and vigorous, may have but little power to resist disease, or may even be strongly predisposed to some infirmity." The colored women in the section under ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... drenched with rains, scorched by the burning sun at times, and chilled by cool nights, subsisting on food not of the best and poorly cooked, cut off from news and kept in suspense, when the surrender finally came it found our army generally very greatly reduced in vital force. During the period following, from July 16th to about the same date in August the re-action fell with all its weight upon the troops, rendering them an easy prey to the climatic influences by which they were surrounded.[20] Pernicious malarial fever, bowel troubles ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... which was on every side of him. He knew her too well even to hope that she would not come. And her coming must mean death. His love made him afraid. He could not see even the barest possibility of victory, nor had he any hope that she could escape now. Love made him a coward—his vital force seemed numbed, and his hand shook. He had been an entire stranger to such a sense of fear until this moment, and it was only with a great effort that he was able to throw off the paralyzing effect ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... 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 world and life after death embodied in the teachings ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... intelligible forms. Take, for example, the parables of the mustard-seed and the leaven. They contain within themselves the whole history of Christ's kingdom in its inward principle. They unfold views of its steady progress from age to age, as a growth from an inward vital force, on which the most philosophical minds especially love to dwell; and yet they are perfectly intelligible to the most unlettered man. To teach by parables, without any false analogies, and in a way that interested and instructed alike the learned ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... to 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 the perfection of harmony. There certainly is some ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... able to demonstrate it in all of them. The Vitalists said that a dead body and a live one are physically and chemically identical, and that the difference can be accounted for only by the existence of a Vital Force. This seems simple; but the Anti-Mechanists objected to be called Vitalists (obviously the right name for them) on two contradictory grounds. First, that vitality is scientifically inadmissible, because ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... yet seemingly 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 is all physiological units: but his reason asks—What ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... religion 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 yet ...
— Fundamentals of Prosperity - What They Are and Whence They Come • Roger W. Babson
... remains a definite 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 ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... 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
... inorganic 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. ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... produced by a rending of the spiritual body is like a physical wound and, strange as it may seem, just as a deep wound may heal and its edges join, physical and spiritual wounds alike can yet heal completely only as the result of a vital force ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... so maddeningly stubborn. But he had hung on with bulldog tenacity, not knowing how to give up, until at last he had placed his stock to the extent of seventy-five thousand dollars, only to realize that he had exhausted his vital force as well as his list of acquaintances. In public he maintained a sanguine front, but in private he let go, and only his two Alaskan friends had sounded the ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... upon the contest with the world. Then follows a period of greater activity, more rapid growth, and larger victories. The influence of the one man upon the masses grows ever greater. Mightily he draws the whole nation to follow in his footsteps, and becomes its hero, its pattern; the vital force of millions appears summed ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... practise the piece as though you were playing it in public—that is to say, with all possible energy and emotion. Some of the pianists now before the public do this, and it always makes me sorry for them, for I know what a needless waste of energy and vital force it is. An actor, studying his lines, does not need to continually shout them in order to learn how they should be interpreted. Neither does the lyric actress practise her roles with full tones, for she is well ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... 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 ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... 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 ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... sapling. In civilization his descendant permits his back to bend. The chest caves in, squeezing the heart, lungs and liver. One is more liable to pneumonia and tuberculosis, and can not fight them successfully as these organs have lost much of their vital force because ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... 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 ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce
... with you upon the very core and essence of your being. These unknowns are the substance of your fate. You will in extreme intimacy love them, hate them, serve them, struggle with them, and in that interaction the vital force in you and the substance of your days will ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... planted the ear,' the Psalmist exclaims, 'shall he not hear?' And, considering his church and his day, that is not a bad remark of Cardinal Bellarmine on that psalm,—'the Psalmist's word planted,' says that able churchman, 'implies design, in that the ear was not spontaneously evolved by an act of vital force, but was independently created by God for a certain object, just as a tree, not of indigenous growth, is of set purpose planted in some new place by the hand of man.' The same thing is said in Genesis, you remember, about the Garden of Eden,—the Lord planted ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... 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 ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 ...
— The Machinery of the Universe - Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena • Amos Emerson Dolbear
... as acting, far less as speaking, but as a passive member of the social order. It is not its individual so much as its related life which is contemplated." The silent presence of children in the roles of the Greek drama is very impressive (350. 21). At Rome, though childhood is more of a "vital force" than in Greece, yet "it is not contemplated as a fine revelation of nature." Sometimes, in its brutal aspects, "children are reckoned as scarcely more than cubs," yet with refinement they "come to represent the more spiritual side of the family life." The folktale of Romulus and Remus and ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... herself or her own breakfast. Even while she buttered her toast and drank her steaming coffee, her bright blue eyes travelled unceasingly over the table, first to her husband's plate, then to Gabriella's, then to her son's. It was easy to see that she was the dominant and vital force in the household. She ruled Archibald, less indirectly perhaps, but quite as consistently as Cousin Pussy ruled ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... 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 charm ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... since the middle of the century the religious exaltation of the early missions had sensibly declined. In the nature of things, that grand enthusiasm was too intense and fervent to be long sustained. But the vital force of Jesuitism had suffered no diminution. That marvellous esprit de corps, that extinction of self, and absorption of the individual in the Order, which has marked the Jesuits from their first existence as a body, was no whit changed or lessened; a principle, which, ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... was born of a new civilization, and grew by its own vital force; a thing of the Middle Ages, original and spontaneous. But contemporaneous with the mediaeval revival was the resuscitation of antiquity; in proportion as the new civilization developed, the old civilization was exhumed; real Latin began to be studied only when ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... would ever generate force sufficient to turn a wheel without a fireman to light the fuel. So no amount of bread and meat in a man's stomach would ever generate enough force to produce a single blood corpuscle without the vital force to set in motion and keep up the process of digestion and assimilation. Without a God to endow the body with this vital force, there would be none, and consequently no digestion and no animal heat ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
... triumph, a national recognition of a great work and of a splendid career, and in the eyes of the world the justification of that mighty art of black-and-white, which through the printing-press is a greater vital force than any other existing form of art—though despised till now in all official quarters—the art by which Punch rose to his pinnacle of greatness. And added to all this was the emotional note that prevailed ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... 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 ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... of the artist, we may say, loosely enough, that art is a manifestation of the religious sense. If it be an expression of emotion—as I am persuaded that it is—it is an expression of that emotion which is the vital force in every religion, or, at any rate, it expresses an emotion felt for that which is the essence of all. We may say that both art and religion are manifestations of man's religious sense, if by "man's religious ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... Whenever 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 ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... maintained that life is a perpetual germinative process, controlled by the archaeus or vital force, which was supposed to preside over all organic phenomena. The principal archaeus was believed to have its residence in the stomach, but subordinates guarded the interests of the ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... 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 ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... man's value to society is found in his original endowment of physical strength. The child's birth-stock of vital force is his capital to be traded upon. Other things being equal his productive value is to be estimated mathematically upon the basis of physique. Born weak and nerveless, he must go to society's ambulance wagon, and so impede the onward march. ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... said he, "which is common to all ill-prepared tobaccos, that it lowers the vital force. You don't feel that yet, because you are young and healthy, and gifted with a superabundance of fine vitality; but you may by smoking one bad cigar bring the time a day nearer when you must feel it. And even now it would take a little off the keen edge of the appetite for ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... Aristocracy. He could not do otherwise, seeing that the democratic principle was then triumphant; Comedy is never laudatory, it lives upon criticism, it must bite to the quick to win a hearing; its strength, its vital force is contradiction. Thus the abuses of democracy and demagogy were the most favourable element possible for the development of Aristophanes' genius, just because his merciless satire finds more abundant subject-matter there ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... 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 at play in the ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... 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 diverted and it fertilizes tracts of our brain ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... prospered and grown strong—chiefly because of the impetus given to it by the growth of cotton, as was clearly shown by Webster in the speech just noted. We suppose no candid reader of our history will deny this point. But the system had no vital force within itself, and could not withstand those laws of nature and free emigration to which we have adverted. It sought protective legislation, and got it. Still, it was hampered by limitations, notwithstanding it had present control of the cotton growth. So the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... evidences of a different destiny, although such evidences might not be wanting. Yes, we might find the evidences which, duly weighed, would make us shudder in view of our possible or probable future. We might come to think it very problematical whether our country has sufficient vital force to work into good American citizens the hordes of infidels, paupers, criminals, cast upon our shores from the nations of the old world;—whether our country has sufficient wisdom to guide its own vexed domestic questions to a proper and satisfactory issue, and to balance and ...
— National Character - A Thanksgiving Discourse Delivered November 15th, 1855, - in the Franklin Street Presbyterian Church • N. C. Burt
... speak at all. But words ought not to harden into things 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 forever 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 related; that if we ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... history of this oil is one of great importance and interest, affording, as it does, one of the examples where the progress of modern chemistry has succeeded in producing artificially a complex organic body, previously only known as the result of vital force. ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... gain less hold on one whose blood is clean and pure and whose vital force is strong, than on one who dissipates his strength by partaking of meat, alcohol, tea, coffee and other stimulants, or who otherwise gets his blood into a bad state by ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... as a matter of course. He had evidently found out who and what I was. He had seen me address the Pigeon Charmer, and had recognized instantly, from my speech and bearing—both, perhaps—that dominating vital force, that breezy independence which envelops most Americans, and which makes them so popular the world over. In thus kotowing he was only getting in line with the citizens of most of the other effete monarchies of Europe. Every traveller is conscious of it. ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... 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, simply because the most pleasurable physical ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... amount of rage exhausted by poor humans upon wrong, the energy of indignation, whether issued or suppressed, and how little it has done to right wrong, to draw acknowledgment or amends from self-satisfied insolence, he naturally asks what becomes of so much vital force. Can it fare differently from other forces, and be lost? The energy of evil is turned into the mill-race of good; but the wrath of man, even his righteous wrath, worketh not the righteousness of God! What becomes of it? If it be not lost, and have but changed its form, in what shape ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... do the little ones keep up their strength? We do not like to suggest reserves supplied by the egg as rectifying the beastie'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 ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... fantasies that they had kept tied up in the stables of their mind, that these might meet in the streets and breed, and take home litters filthier than themselves. Men and women told tales that they could not have believed simply that they might evoke before their minds, and strengthened by the vital force of the listeners' hot-eared excitement, pictures of a strong man and a fine girl living like beasts in the fields. Not only did they tell lies of how they had watched her and Harry among the bracken, they said ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... and moon were not retained in their orbits by vital force (aut alia aligua aequipollenti), the earth and moon would ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... 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 ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... practices exercises by which he attains control of his body, and is enabled to send to any organ or part an increased flow of vital force or "prana," thereby strengthening and invigorating the part or organ. He knows all that his Western scientific brother knows about the physiological effect of correct breathing, but he also knows that ...
— The Hindu-Yogi Science Of Breath • Yogi Ramacharaka
... cosmogony of 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. His ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... basis of Astrological Science, and which 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; ...
— Within the Temple of Isis • Belle M. Wagner
... 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 aura." It is colorless, or rather ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... 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 favorable to his own growth, and ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... all appliances which are not natural food or stimuli, all medicines proper, cost a patient, on the average, five per cent. of his vital force, let us say. Twenty times as much waste of force produced by any of them, that is, would exactly kill him, nothing less than kill him, and nothing more. If this, or something like this, is true, then all these medications ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... concentration can the youth arrive at the stage of doing something with his knowledge, or get beyond the stage of absorbing, and arrive at the capacity for producing. As Emerson puts it, "Only so can that amount of vital force accumulate which can make the step from knowing to doing." The educational institutions of to-day have not yet fully appreciated this all-important step from knowing to doing. They are only beginning to perceive that, all along the course of education, the child ...
— Four American Leaders • Charles William Eliot
... delights, stretched along the car of his balloon, in floating aimlessly through 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, my fault, my sin. I have a sort of primitive horror of ambition, of struggle, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to see that Universal Life is not a blind vital force, but Creative Spirit, or Mind, or Consciousness, which unfolds itself in myriads of ways. Everything in the universe, according to Zen, lives and acts, and at the same time discloses its spirit. To be alive is identically the ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... subtler instinct as to its employment. The intrinsic musical interest of 'Der Fliegende Hollaender' is unequal. Wagner had made great strides since the days of 'Rienzi,' but he had still a vast amount to unlearn. Side by side with passages of vital force and persuasive beauty there are dreary wastes of commonplace and the most arid conventionality. The strange mixture of styles which prevails in 'Der Fliegende Hollaender' makes it in some ways ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... radiated those long lines of light which stretch to-day across 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 not the blind motions of nature merely, but ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... ease and speed in doing a thing do not give the work lasting solidity or exactness of beauty; the expenditure of time allowed to a man's pains beforehand for the production of a thing is repaid by way of interest with a vital force for its preservation when once produced. For which reason Pericles's works are especially admired, as having been made quickly, to last long. For every particular piece of his work was immediately, even at that time, for its beauty and elegance, antique; ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... belongs to the occiput and gentleness to the front. The occipital region is associated with the spinal column and the limbs, in which regions the vital forces reside. Hence the occipital action of the brain generates vital force and diffuses it in the body, while the frontal region, in its aggregate tendency, expends the vital force—the greatest tendency to expenditure being in the most extreme frontal region. Both the front lobe and the anterior extremity of the middle ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... 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 ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... I 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. ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... considered in two lights. We either represent it to our comprehension, and we try in vain to make an image or idea of it, or we refer it to our vital force, and we consider it as a power before which ours is nothing. But though in both cases we experience in connection with this object the painful feeling of our limits, yet we do not seek to avoid it; on ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... its unmodified application to the compounds of the inorganic world. At that time, and for a long time thereafter, it was supposed that substances of organic nature had some properties that kept them aloof from the domain of inorganic chemistry. It was little doubted that a so-called "vital force" operated here, replacing or modifying the action of ordinary "chemical affinity." It was, indeed, admitted that organic compounds are composed of familiar elements—chiefly carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen; but these elements were supposed to be united in ways that could not be imitated in ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... and the Madonna and Child have some natural ease, and the delicacy of feeling of primitive art. Bartolommeo, when he breaks away and sets out to paint by himself, is crude and strong, but full of vital force. In his altarpiece of 1464, in the Academy, he gives his saints reality by taking them off their pedestals and making them stand upon the ground, and though they are still isolated from one another in the partitions of an ancona, their sparkling ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... needs so much discipline, so much restraint and correction, and so many rules and regulations, that it is all that the parents can carry out, and all the children can bear. There is only a certain amount of the vital force for parents or children to use in this business of education, and one must choose what It shall be used for. The Aunt-Zeruah faction chose to use it for keeping the house and furniture, and the children's education proceeded accordingly. The rules of right and wrong ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... having. I would gladly be moral and keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly love, and allow the most to the will of man; but I have set my heart on honesty in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in success or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied from ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... particular application of the Darwinian theory which attributes male peculiarities of form, structure, colour, and ornament to female appetency or predilection. There is, it seems to me, undoubtedly something in the male organisation of a special, and sexual nature, which, of its own vital force, develops the remarkable male peculiarities so commonly seen, and of no imaginable use to that sex. In as far as these peculiarities show a great vital power, they point out to us the finest and strongest individuals of the sex, and show us which of them would most certainly ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... the Brahman in the morning is supposed to produce the sun, and we are told that "assuredly it would not rise, were he not to make that offering." The ancient Mexicans conceived the sun as the source of all vital force; hence they named him Ipalnemohuani, "He by whom men live." But if he bestowed life on the world, he needed also to receive life from it. And as the heart is the seat and symbol of life, bleeding hearts of men and animals were presented to the sun ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... visit him, and listened to them with intelligent attention when they came. As the result of these inquiries, he adopted the creed of pure deism and a ritual based upon the system of Zoroaster. The religion thus founded, however, having no vital force, never spread beyond the limits of the court, and died with Akbar himself. But though his eclectic system failed, the spirit of toleration which originated it produced in other ways many important results, and, indeed, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... same." While statesmen, philosophers, and divines represent the thinking power of society, the 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 ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... way, I thought it was lumbago or sciatica—but Rex said—"Simply nerve exhaustion from over-writing"—so I took to bed (for I couldn't walk!), high living and quinine! I hope I'll soon be round again. The vile body is a nuisance. I've got a story in my head—and that seems to take the vital force out of my legs!!! ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... press for solution. With the co-operation of the Intercollegiate Menorah office, the Society is gradually molding the sentiment of the individual student toward a more intelligent and favorable attitude. That the Menorah is already a vital force on the campus may be seen from the work being done, the zeal and enthusiasm displayed by the officers and members, many of them among the University leaders. Those who formerly scorned or stood aloof, including some who were in the position to mold student sentiment, have begun to show a sympathetic ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... 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 ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... 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 lies ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... abnormalized by therian or saurian malady; and the possibility of such failure, even when of small probability, is of great alleviation. The author before me is, apparently, the sole fabricator of his own premises. With vital force in the earth and continual creation on the part of the original Creator, he expands our bit of a residence as desired. But, as the Newtoness of Cookery observed, First catch your hare. When this is done, when you have a growing earth, you shall dress it with all manner of proximate causes, and ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... make laws; they were able to create administrators of the law; and they were able to influence those who interpreted the law. Barclay and his power were substantial, palpable, and translatable into terms of money, of power, of vital force. ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... most intense effort can you keep your feet for the first five minutes. You experience a sensation that recalls the poet's fancy of death-in-life, or old stories of sudden rising from the grave: it is as though all the electricity of will had ebbed away,—all the vital force evaporated, in the heat of ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... vital element in its dynamism which the other does not. You may apply as much physical force by means of a galvanic battery to a dead brain as you please, but you can't strike an idea out of it; and this vital force, while it is "conditioned force," like light and heat, differs in its mode of manifestation from every other manifestation of force, even more than they do from each other, in that it possesses a potency inherent to it, which they have not, and this potency ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... driller, but 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 ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... of manner with much real reserve. He was habitually reticent where his deeper feelings were concerned; and the impulsiveness and the reticence were both equally rooted in his poetic and human temperament. The one meant the vital force of his emotions, the other their sensibility. In a smaller or more prosaic nature they must have modified each other. But the partial secretiveness had also occasionally its conscious motives, some unselfish, and some self-regarding; and from this point of view ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... heart of a man so fashioned is stirred to love a woman, it has a new vital force, new health, and cannot play these solemn pranks. The flesh, and all its fatality, claims him. When Sir Purcell became acquainted with Cornelia, he found the very woman his heart desired, or certainly a most admirable picture of her. It was, perhaps, still ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... as the most important legislative act in our annals. Towns had 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 ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... 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 ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... In other lands that vital force frittered itself away in the frothy rhetoric of Deroulede and the futile prancings of Boulanger, in the gibberings of Italia Irredenta, or in the noisy obstruction of Czechs and Parnellites in the Parliaments ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... Whether we call the unknown and inexplicable ground back of all analysis, and which our analysis cannot reach, vital force, generic form, spirit of the nation, or God's thought, is for the present a matter of scientific indifference. All the more necessary are the self-knowledge and honesty, in general, which admit the existence ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... the room. In the flowing measure of her walk; in the free, almost defiant, movement of her upraised arms; and in the ample lines of her throat and bosom, which melted gradually into the low curves of her hips, she might have stood for an incarnation of vital force. One felt instinctively that her personality would be active rather than passive—that the events which she attracted to herself would be ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... like a bird, sobbing with the hopelessness of an infant, prophetic, yet astonished at the fulfilment of each prophecy, restless, fearless, clinging to love, yet unwearied in experiment—is not this the pervasive vital force, cause of the effect which we ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... only point on which I think it worth while to express decided dissidence is to be found in the paragraph where Mr M'Cabe makes a statement concerning what he calls "vital force,"—a term I do not remember to have ever used in my life. He claims for Haeckel what is represented by the following extracts from his ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... under my charge, Master Bob Roberts," said the doctor, panting with the heat, "I should reduce that vital force of ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... great element in it has been constancy of purpose—not allowing myself to be switched off the main road or tempted into bypaths of other movements. It always has been clear to me that woman suffrage is the one great principle underlying all reforms. With the ballot in her hand woman becomes a vital force—declaring her will for herself, instead of praying and beseeching men to declare it for her. It has been a long, hard fight, a dark, discouraging road, but all along the way here and there a little bright spot to cheer us on. And now we have four true republics, whose women are full-fledged ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper |
