"Vital principle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with horror from a notion, according to which man, whenever doing as he pleases with any material object, applying it, as likely as not, to some base or criminal purpose, is disposing at his pleasure of a portion of the Divine essence: few who will not greatly prefer to believe that the vital principle which manifests itself in the form of a dunghill or of a poisoned dagger, may be, for the time, as completely individualised and separate from all other life or mind, as every human being perceives his own conscious mind ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... work of a god wholly the artist; "and in this sense the object of the tragic myth is precisely to convince us that even the horrible and the monstrous are no more than an aesthetic game played with itself by the Will in the eternal plenitude of its joy." "The Will" is Schopenhauer's "Will," the vital principle. "If it were possible," says Nietzsche, in one of his astonishing figures of speech, "to imagine a dissonance becoming a human being (and what is man but that?), in order to endure life, this dissonance would need some admirable illusion ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... discuss the vital principle of our government and our institutions, property: I am in my right. I may be mistaken in the conclusion which shall result from my investigations: I am in my right. I think best to place the last thought of my book first: still am I ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... only expanded through war. War has been the national industry of the Prussian people. Therefore war is considered by Treitschke as the vital principle of national life ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... violent change in the channel of a boy's life, a change which is due to the normal channel (or channels) of his expansive energies having been blocked by years of educational repression. His wild, ruffianly outrages are perhaps the last despairing effort that his vital principle makes to assert itself, before it finally gives up the struggle for ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... exclusive use of cherries. The apple, they say, too, gives to the face of the fair ruddiness, but the tint is it not too bold, compared with maiden blush which bepaints the cheek of the beauty who rightly understands the use of the vital principle of the papaw? Those who have complexions to retain or restore let them understand and ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... 'vital principle' may be, neither chemists nor physiologists can tell us with any great degree of clearness; but it is this vital principle, whatever it may be, which prevents decay in a living organic substance, however complex. When life departs, the onslaught begins; the defender has been removed, and a number ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... Liberals, those temporisers, compromisers, a concourse of atoms! glorify themselves in the animal satisfaction of sucking the juice of the fruit, for which they pay with their souls. They have no true cohesion, for they have no vital principle. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to create species or organically to change them, attempts have been made to approach nearer to the source of vitality, and explain the chemical, electric, or mechanical laws by which the vital principle is influenced. For this purpose various hypotheses have been put forth; one is the noted conjecture of Lord MONBODDO, that man is only an advanced development of the chimpanzee or ourang-outang. A second explanation is that given by LAMARCK, who surmised, and with much ingenuity attempted to ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... work only may express that; but ours may never have that sentence written upon it,—"And behold, it was very good." And, observe again, it is not merely as it renders the edifice a book of various knowledge, or a mine of precious thought, that variety is essential to its nobleness. The vital principle is not the love of Knowledge, but the love of Change. It is that strange disquietude of the Gothic spirit that is its greatness; that restlessness of the dreaming mind, that wanders hither and thither among the niches, and flickers feverishly around the pinnacles, and frets and ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... the natural state of man! they have not seen that his desires were necessary; that his passions were essential to him; that to defend him from loving legitimate pleasures; to interdict him from desiring them, is to deprive him of that activity which is the vital principle of society; that to tell him to hate, to desire him to despise himself, is to take from him the most substantive motive, that can conduct him to virtue. It is thus, by its supernatural remedies, by its wretched panacea, superstition, far from curing those ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... matter? This is a problem of the highest importance, which would interest the ladies themselves, if one were to place it plainly before them. It would be sufficient to say: 'We inquire whether there is a vital principle—the source of all functions of the body, or if life be not merely the result of the regular play of the organs? The vital principle, in the eyes of Meiser and his disciple, does not exist; if it really existed, they say, one could not understand how it can leave a man and ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... seen a thousand times. I have also frequently told them that men in the Christian world are in such gross ignorance respecting Angels and Spirits as to suppose them to be minds without a form, or mere thoughts, of which they have no other idea than as something ethereal possessing a vital principle. To the first or ultimate heaven also correspond the forms of man's body, called its members, organs, and viscera. Thus the corporeal part of man is that in which heaven ultimately closes, and upon which, as on ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... property, with Haller, irritability, or, with Brown, excitability; or we may use vital principle, or any other term, could we find one more appropriate. I shall use the term excitability, as perhaps the least liable to exception, and in using this term, it is necessary to mention that I mean only to ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... busy years of my professional career, I had snatched leisure for some professional treatises, which had made more or less sensation, and one of them, entitled "The Vital Principle; its Waste and Supply," had gained a wide circulation among the general public. This last treatise contained the results of certain experiments, then new in chemistry, which were adduced in support of a theory I entertained as to the re-invigoration of the ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... life or Double was called, Ka, plur. Kau. This was the vital principle, necessary to the existence of man as an animal being on this earth. It was a spiritual double, a second perfect exemplar or copy, of his flesh, blood, etc., body; but of a matter less dense than corporeal matter, but having all its shape and features, ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... such rules we can scarcely conceive society to exist, since it is only through the general conformity to custom that men can understand each other, that each can know how the other will act under given circumstances, and without this amount of understanding the reciprocity, which is the vital principle of society, disappears. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... ancient than men walking cunning and erect, than the lithe life of sun-heated tangles, than the vital principle of flowering plants fertilized by the unerring chance of vagrant insects ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... with the enemy's naval base or in touch with your own landing force. Where the objective is the local naval base of the enemy these two points, of course, tend to be identical strategically, and the position of the covering squadron becomes a tactical rather than a strategical question. But the vital principle of an independent existence holds good, and no matter how great the necessity of support, the covering squadron should never be so deeply engaged with the landing force as to be unable to disentangle itself ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... to laud the conduct and address of King Ferdinand in this most arduous and protracted war, but the sage Agapida is more disposed to give credit to the counsels and measures of the queen, who, he observes, though less ostensible in action, was in truth the very soul, the vital principle, of this great enterprise. While King Ferdinand was bustling in his camp and making a glittering display with his gallant chivalry, she, surrounded by her saintly counsellors in the episcopal palace of Jaen, was devising ways and means to keep the king and ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... this is, that the oxygen, or vital principle of the air, which is more abundant in a given volume of cool air than in an equal amount of that which is warmer, will last longer when the room is cool, and the room will thus ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... which may be assumed as the foundation on which to build up the edifice of further knowledge. But, laying aside mathematical formulae, we may say that because the Infinite is infinite there can be no limit to the extent to which the vital principle of growth may draw upon it, and therefore there is no limit to the expansion of the individual's powers. Because we are what we are, we may become ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... I had thought that the vital principle for your Government was to get the independence out of the way. And here the independence of the two Republics, as far as foreign relations are concerned, is given away. I therefore thought that possibly the two parties would come to an arrangement ...
— The Peace Negotiations - Between the Governments of the South African Republic and - the Orange Free State, etc.... • J. D. Kestell
... Monstrous, because a little unusual, though many of them have all their principal parts as perfectly shap'd and adapted for their peculiar uses, as any of the most perfect Animals. If therefore the putrifying body, on which any kind of seminal or vital principle chances to be cast, become somewhat more then meerly a nursing and fostering helper in the generation and production of any kind of Animate body, the more neer it approaches the true nature of a Womb, the more ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... flock of God, that were hungering and thirsting for the truth. He firmly declared that Christians should receive no other doctrines than those which rest on the authority of the Sacred Scriptures. These words struck at the very foundation of papal supremacy. They contained the vital principle ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... knowledge of grammar may retrograde; for whatever loses the vital principle of renovation and growth, tends to decay. And if mere copyists, compilers, abridgers, and modifiers, be encouraged as they now are, it surely will not advance. Style is liable to be antiquated by time, corrupted by innovation, debased by ignorance, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... by the perfection of its incarnations." That Crawford invariably kept himself to "the height of this great argument" it were presumptuous to assert; but that he constantly approached such an ideal, and that he sometimes seized its vital principle, the varied and expressive forms yet conserved in his studio at Rome emphatically attest. He had obtained command of the vocabulary of his art; in expressing it, like all men who strive largely, he was unequal. Some of his creations are far more felicitous than others; he sometimes worked ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... by the Executive and required such an application of a religious test as a qualification for office under the United States as would have resulted in the practical disfranchisement of a large class of our citizens and the abandonment of a vital principle in our Government. The Austro-Hungarian Government finally decided not to receive Mr. Keiley as the envoy of the United States, and that gentleman has since resigned his commission, leaving the post vacant. I have ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... of Jesus, acting as a vital principle in the individual heart, and thus leaving the entire mass of humanity, to this alone are we to look as of sufficient power to do away the evils that are now rife in the world. Just so far as the true spirit of Jesus is infused ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... have who have not extinguished their freedom of thinking by notions previously adopted and confirmed by various arguments respecting the soul of man, which is held to be either pure thought, or some vital principle the seat of which is sought for in the body; and yet the soul is nothing but the life of man, while the spirit is the man himself; and the earthly body which he carries about with him in the world is merely an agent ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... States. "The cry of 'No compromise' is false in morals," he declared; "it is treason to the spirit of the Constitution; it is infidelity in religion; the cross itself is a compromise, and is pleaded by many who refuse all charity to their fellow-citizens. It is the vital principle of social existence; it unites the family circle; it sustains the church, and upholds nationalities.... But the Republicans complain that, having won a victory, we ask them to surrender its fruits. We do not wish them to give up any political advantage. ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... pleasing sounds; yet simple melodies, especially if connected with words and ideas, have as much effect on me as on most people. I cannot bear a voice that has no more life in it than a pianoforte or bugle-horn. There is in almost all the fine arts a something of soul and spirit, which, like the vital principle in man, defies the research of the most critical anatomist. You feel where it is not, yet you cannot describe what it is you want." Sir Joshua, or some other great painter, was looking at a picture on which much pains had been bestowed. "Why—yes," ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... not a folly, in a rude age, to speculate on the first or fundamental principle of things. Thales looked around him upon Nature, upon the sea and earth and sky, and concluded that water or moisture was the vital principle. He felt it in the air, he saw it in the clouds above and in the ground beneath his feet. He saw that plants were sustained by rain and by the dew, that neither animal nor man could live without water, and that to fishes it was the native element. What more important or vital than water? ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... world of nations having separate and conflicting wills. Thus we have a choice of evils—between a world of ardent, quarrelsome, but efficient groups and a world in which the chief motive of progress, the vital principle of national growth, ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... at the back of each set of motives is a vital principle. In the one case the lower self, in the other the higher self, that is to ...
— The Discipline of War - Nine Addresses on the Lessons of the War in Connection with Lent • John Hasloch Potter
... the colored school of Salem with the others of that city led to no disturbance. Speaking of the democracy of these schools in 1846 Mr. Richard Fletcher said: "The principle of perfect equality is the vital principle of the system. Here all classes of the community mingle together. The rich and the poor meet on terms of equality and are prepared by the same instruction to discharge the duties of life. It is the principle of equality cherished in the free schools on which our ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... proceed on that romantic errand, although of course it is equally clear that he insisted as the condition of his going at all that he should be ordered by his Government to proceed on this mission. Beyond this vital principle, which he held to all his life in never volunteering, he was far too eager to go himself to require any real stirring-up or compulsion. It was even a secret and unexpressed grievance that he should ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... centre, and moves in a spiral towards the centre of the whole, towards which centre they all tend with infinite passional ardour. For in this centre resides the sun of suns, the unity of unities, the temple, the altar of the universe, the sacred fire of Vesta, the vital principle of ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... either true or false, but which, were it true, annihilates all hope of existence after death, in any sense in which that event can belong to the hopes and fears of men. Suppose, however, that the intellectual and vital principle differs in the most marked and essential manner from all other known substances; that they have all some resemblance between themselves which it in no degree participates. In what manner can this concession be made an argument for its imperishability? All that we see or know perishes ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the same principle," said he; "we are all Republicans, we are all Federalists." Among the essential principles of government which he enumerated, appeared "absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority,—the vital principle of republics,—from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate ...
— Formation of the Union • Albert Bushnell Hart
... more destroy its essence than did the heat of the sun, and in your first mouthful of the produce, which may in appearance give no hint of its origin, you taste the cool sea depths and feel yourself nourished as if with some vital principle. ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... suffering to the most terrible shrieks; then declined into low and inarticulate moans; until a deep-drawn and agonized gasp for breath, and an occasional convulsion, alone remained to show that the vital principle had ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 478, Saturday, February 26, 1831 • Various
... do not at this moment mean the old abuses by which certain rights were conceded to a few, to the prejudice of the many; no, I am using it to express the social circle of the governing class. But throughout creation Nature has confined the vital principle within a narrow space, in order to concentrate its power; and so it is with the body politic. I will illustrate this thought of mine by examples. Let us suppose that there are a hundred peers in France, ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... lives without rushing hourly towards suicide, because his soul, with all its noble aspirations and imaginations, is sunk at the bottom of his stomach, and lies torpid there, unaspiring, unimagining, unconsidering, as if it were the vital principle of a mere four-footed beaver. A soul of a man, appointed for spinning cotton and making money, or, alas, for merely shooting grouse and gathering rent; to whom Eternity and Immortality, and all human Noblenesses and divine Facts that did ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... doctor who attended him in the afternoon) that the vital machinery, so far as its action is appreciable by our senses, had, in this case, unquestionably stopped; and I am equally certain (seeing that I recovered him) that the vital principle was not extinct. When I add, that he had suffered from a long and complicated illness, and that his whole nervous system was utterly deranged, I have told you all I really know of the physical condition of my dead-alive patient ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... of the newly-awakened mind. All that science could invent, all that art could embody, all that mechanical ingenuity could dare, all that wealth could lavish, whatever there was of human energy which was panting for pacific utterance, wherever there stirred the vital principle which instinctively strove to create and to adorn at an epoch when vulgar violence and destructiveness were the general tendencies of humanity, all gathered around these magnificent temples, as their aspiring pinnacles at last pierced the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... over the painful, touching scene oft-told, and felt sooner or later in every home. Like snow disappearing under the sunshine, the life of Madeleine was fast melting away. At length, as if she knew when the absorbing heat would melt the last crystal of the vital principle, she summoned her family around her to wish them that last thrilling farewell which is never erased from the tablet of memory. In the farewell of the emigrant, torn by cruel fate from country and friends, hope smiles in his tears; the fortune that drives away can bring back; ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... many of them is worse than ignorance. We are tired of works on chemical physics which discourse of "calorie" and "the electric fluid,"—of works on organic chemistry which ascribe the phenomena of life to "a vital principle which overrides chemical laws." A book at once clear, concise, and modern has long been the ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... turned our contemplation from the fame of the individual hero to the wrongs of the butchered millions. But their zeal for that HUMANITY, which those free and bold thinkers were the first to make the vital principle of a philosophical school, led them into partial and hasty views, too indiscriminately embraced by their disciples; and, in condemning the evils, they forgot the advantages of war. The misfortunes of one generation are ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... As a boy dreams of magnificent deeds of prowess, so he dreamed of deeds of violence and cruelty. In his life he had been secret, not vicious; he had enjoyed the power which comes from holding the secrets of others, and that had given him pleasure enough. But now, as if the true passion, the vital principle, asserted itself at the very last, so with the shadow of death behind him, his real nature was dominant. He was entirely sane, entirely ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... its administration, it would have to abolish the present-day mode of living. If it wishes to abolish this mode of living, it would have to abolish itself, for it exists only in opposition to the same. No living person, however, would believe that defects in his existence are due to the vital principle of his life, but would rather attribute them to circumstances outside his ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... believe with your Martin that "slavery lessens the sense of the equal rights of mankind, and habituates us to tyranny and oppression?" Is it fanaticism for her to believe with your Pinckney that "it will one day destroy the reverence for liberty, which is the vital principle of a Republic?" Is it fanaticism for her to believe with your Henry Clay, that "slavery is a wrong, a grievous wrong, and no contingency can make it right?" Surely, Senators who are wont to accuse Massachusetts of being drunk with fanaticism, should not ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... nymphs, air by sylphs, fire by salamanders (cf. with this, and with Paracelsus's theory of the world as a whole, Faust's two monologues in Goethe's drama); which are to be understood as forces or sublimated substances, not as personal, demoniacal beings. To each individual being there is ascribed a vital principle, the Archeus, an individualization of the general force of nature, Vulcanus; so also to men. Disease is a checking of this vital principle by contrary powers, which are partly of a terrestrial and ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... future state appears to have been entirely wanting, and this in quite a small clan, the Lower Pend d'Oreilles, of Oregon. This people had no burial ceremonies, no notion of a life hereafter, no word for soul, spiritual existence, or vital principle. They thought that when they died, that was the last of them. The Catholic missionaries who undertook the unpromising task of converting them to Christianity, were at first obliged to depend upon the ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... literature, exposed to the danger of perishing and impaired by much actual loss, exerted no influence on the minds of those who still used the tongues to which they belong. Greek letters, as we have seen, decayed with the Byzantine power, and the vital principle in both became extinct long before the sword of the Turkish conqueror inflicted the final blow. The fate of Latin literature was not less deplorable. When province after province of the Roman dominions was ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... our peace at home and safety abroad; a jealous care of the right of election by the people, a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided; absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which there is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism; a well-disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace, and for the first moments of war, till regulars may relieve ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... may seem odd to say so, just after inculcating that party organisation is the vital principle of representative government, but that organisation is permanently efficient, because it is not composed of warm partisans. The body is eager, but the atoms are cool. If it were otherwise, Parliamentary government would become the worst of governments—a sectarian government. ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... many bodies; each of them more subtle and more pure than the preceding; and each of them bears a different name and is independent of the material body. After death, when the earthly vital principle disintegrates, together with the material body, all these interior bodies join together, and either advance on the way to Moksha, and are called Deva (divine), though it still has to pass many stadia before the final liberation, or is left on earth, to wander and to suffer ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... of a cause. My father instead of being in a consumption, was endowed with a frame of almost super-human strength, and which was destined for half a century of continuous labour and sedentary life. The vital principle in him, indeed, was so strong that when he left us at eighty-two, it was only as the victim of a violent epidemic, against whose virulence he struggled with so much power, that it was clear, but for this casualty, he might have been spared to this ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... rights, which includes an equality of burdens, is a vital principle in our theory of government. The effect of the constitution has been obvious in the preponderance it has given to the slave-holding states over the other states. But the extension of this disproportionate power to the new states would be unjust ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... expression of what he heard within, those very outbursts which to-day ring longest in our consciousness) were considered at the time of their creation as the ravings of a mad-man. Dissonances, both acoustically and psychologically, are a vital principle in music. In no respect was his music more original than in his Promethean boldness in their use. One of his favorite conceptions was that music should strike fire from the soul of man; it was not meant to lull the hearer into a drowsy revery, but to awaken his spiritual consciousness ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... cooeperation in giving for education, I have felt, scored a real step in advance when Mr. Andrew Carnegie consented to become a member of the General Education Board. For in accepting a position in this directorate he has, it seems to me, stamped with his approval this vital principle of cooeperation in aiding the educational ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller
... spent. It comes to know itself in the motives which satisfy it, in the zest and power of rectitude. Christianity has liberated the world, not as a system of ethics, not as a philosophy of altruism, but by its revelation of the power of pure and unselfish love. Its vital principle is not its code, but its motive. Love, clear-sighted, loyal, personal, is its breath and immortality. Christ came, not to save Himself, assuredly, but to save the world. His motive, His example, are every man's key to his own gifts and happiness. The ethical code he taught may ...
— When a Man Comes to Himself • Woodrow Wilson
... round about a subject. To the fanatics of this modern method the style of George Eliot appears strange, impossible. It does not occur to them that her method has virtues which lack to theirs. They may give us a little laboured masterpiece of art in which the vital principle is wanting. George Eliot was great because she gave us passages from life as it was lived in her day which will be vital so long ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... or Babylon, or Carthage, the names of Rome might have been erased from the earth, if the city had not been animated by a vital principle, which again restored her to honor and dominion. A vague tradition was embraced, that two Jewish teachers, a tent-maker and a fisherman, had formerly been executed in the circus of Nero, and at the end of five hundred years, their genuine or fictitious relics were adored as ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... the top, to which point it rises by capillary attraction and a process called osmosis. Neither of them is a strictly vital process, since both are found in the inorganic world; but they are in the service of what we call a vital principle. Some physicists and biochemists laugh at the idea of a vital principle. Huxley thought we might as well talk about the principle of aqueosity in water. We are the victims of words. The sun does not ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... which deserve protection would be saved from the prejudice excited against them when that protection forms part of a system by which portions of the country feel or conceive themselves to be oppressed. What is incalculably more important, the vital principle of our system—that principle which requires acquiescence in the will of the majority—would be secure from the discredit and danger to which it is exposed by the acts of majorities founded not on identity of conviction, but on combinations of small minorities entered into for the purpose ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... Champion who like a great Gladiator fought the battle of civil freedom, Pym is no less conspicious in having grasped the principles on which it must be fought. He saw that if either Crown or Parliament must go down, better for England that it should be the crown. He saw also, that the vital principle in Parliament lay in the House of Commons. If the King refused to act with them, it should be treated as an abdication, and Parliament must act without him, and if the Lords obstructed reform, then they must be told ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... 2. The Vital principle-(or Jiva)- 2. Ushtanas-Vital heat a form of force indestructible, (or force). and when disconnected with one set of atoms, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... Chinese philosopher, the reason for thus renewing fire periodically is that the vital principle grows weaker and weaker in old fire, whereas in new fire it is young and vigorous. This annual renewal of fire was a ceremony of very great antiquity in China, since it is known to have been observed ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... imperfectly decomposes it cannot perfectly reconstruct. It is evidently as impossible to produce an Othello or a Macbeth by reversing an analytical process so defective, as it would be for an anatomist to form a living man out of the fragments of his dissecting-room. In both cases the vital principle eludes the finest instruments, and vanishes in the very instant in which its seat is touched. Hence those who, trusting to their critical skill, attempt to write poems give us, not images of things, but catalogues of qualities. Their characters are allegories—not good men and bad men, but ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... whom he imported, especially on two Greeks, brother and sister, who came from some isle on the Asian coast, for the supply of his trade. He was a good-natured man, self-indulgent, positive, and warmly attached to the reigning paganism, both as being the law of the land and the vital principle of the state; and, while he was really kind to his orphan nephews, he simply abominated, as in duty bound, the idiotic cant and impudent fee-fa-fum, to which, in his infallible judgment, poor old Strabo had betrayed his children. He would have restored them, you may be quite sure, to their country ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... with propriety, considered as the vital principle of the body politic; as that which sustains its life and motion, and enables it to perform its most essential functions. A complete power, therefore, to procure a regular and adequate supply of it, as far as the resources of the ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... assigned for the association. "A constant circulation of useful information, and a liberal communication of republican sentiments, were thought to be the best antidotes to any political poison with which the vital principle of civil liberty might be attacked;" and to give the more extensive operation to their labors, a corresponding committee was appointed, through whom they would communicate with other societies which might be established on similar principles ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... infinite pity and disdain for all students of philosophy and meta-physics, whomsoever. And of course everything can be expressed- -after a fashion, and 'theoretically'—in terms of chemistry and physics, that is, EVERYTHING EXCEPT THE VITAL PRINCIPLE OF THE WHOLE, and that, they say, there is no pragmatic use in trying to express; it has no bearings—FOR THEM. I for my part refuse to be persuaded that we cannot look beyond the obvious pluralism of the naturalist and the pragmatist to a logical unity in which ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... do you define the vital principle? What mysterious agency sets the heart beating and the blood flowing? By the small porter's lantern of to-day's so-called Science, will you fling a light on the dark riddle of an apparently purposeless Universe, and explain to me why ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... army at once increased and strengthened it, and the few slight barriers which the Act of Settlement opposed to its progress have all been gradually removed during the Whiggish reigns that succeeded; till at length this spirit of influence has become the vital principle of the state,—an agency, subtle and unseen, which pervades every part of the Constitution, lurks under all its forms and regulates all its movements, and, like the invisible sylph or grace which presides over ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... pains. Do you think they would be willing to relinquish one-tenth of their pleasures, or their possessions, to relieve the distresses of their fellows? If you do, you have but a slight conception of the callousness of their hearts. You were right in what you said was the vital principle of Christianity—brotherly love, not alone of the rich for the rich, but of the poor and rich for each other. But that spirit has passed away from the breasts of the upper classes. Science has increased their knowledge one hundred per cent. and their vanity one thousand per cent. The ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... blasted and too early withering away; want of exercise or mental anguish, or some lurking disease, has deranged the internal organs of digestion, assimilation or secretion, till they do their office ill. Her blood is vitiated, her health is gone. Give her these PILLS to stimulate the vital principle into renewed vigor, to cast out the obstructions, and infuse a new vitality into the blood. Now look again—the roses blossom on her cheek, and where lately sorrow sat joy bursts from every feature. See the sweet infant wasted with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... lays no bar against any additions that will be helpful, but it speaks in a firm resolution to stand against anything that disturbs the vital principle. We hear it said that interpretations are unnecessary. That may be true, but they will at least be reassuring to many of our citizens, who feel that in signing the treaty, there should be no mental reservations that are not expressed ...
— The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox • Charles E. Morris
... movement. It is an odd feeling, when you find that you yourself, once the most restless of living creatures, have come to this. I dare say Robinson Crusoe often sat for two or three hours together in his cave, without stirring hand or foot. The vital principle grows weak when isolated. You must have a number of embers together to make a warm fire; separate them, and they will soon go out and grow cold. And even so, to have brisk, conscious, vigorous life, you must have ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... there is an end also of inattention, for the discussion begins. The central and vital principle of all these clubs is that a poem by Robert Browning is a sort of prize enigma, of which the solution is to be reached rather by wild and daring guessing than by any commonplace process of reasoning. Although to an ordinary and uninspired intellect it may appear perfectly obvious that a lyric ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... bluffly. "You have been letting slip the vital principle, if you are a fair specimen of the race. You do not clothe yourself in substance. Your souls are not coated sufficiently. Beef and brandy would have saved you. You have exhaled ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... indeed past. Let us ever remember and cherish in our heart of hearts those golden fore-tastes of future eternity, or (according to Platonism) those rapturous reminiscences of past, which prove beyond logical demonstration, the existence of some vital principle in man, godlike in faculties, in essence immaterial, in duration, immortal! It is Christmas Day, a deep, unearthly calm possesses our minds; all passions are slumbering, save the beautiful and holy ones of adoring love, mingled with overwhelming gratitude towards our maker, and philanthropic love, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 406, Saturday, December 26, 1829. • Various
... same time, the air, which had been hot all day—hot, but buoyant, but stimulant, but quick with oxygen—seemed to become thick, sluggish, suffocating, seemed to yield up its vital principle, and to fall a dead weight upon the earth. And this effect was accompanied by a sudden silence—the usual busy out-of-door country noises were suddenly suspended: the locusts stopped their singing; not a bird twittered; ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... prejudice. Often the crowd, the mob, can be better controlled to right ends by conceding or seeming to concede a principle for the time. Don't strike a mortal blow at your own usefulness to good causes by making yourself a hasty martyr to some fancied vital principle that will seem of no consequence the next morning ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... its tender mind, can scarcely fail, unless it possesses a heart of great natural depravity, of becoming a good man, and it is thus that infant schools may become a great and lasting blessing to the country. But where this is overlooked—where the vital principle of the infant system is rejected, and the mere mechanical parts alone retained, as to any great and lasting benefit, it will be a complete and unhappy failure. That the grand object of the infant system ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... of God acts in a very different manner in the one case, from what He doth in the other. He may indeed act upon the mind of a natural man, but He acts in the mind of a saint as an indwelling vital principle. He acts upon the mind of an unregenerate person as an extrinsic, occasional agent; for in acting upon them, He doth not unite Himself to them; for notwithstanding all His influences that they may be the subjects of, they are still sensual, having ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... Consort to the first King of a new dynasty? You know this man, and from your record I learn that you are already willing to have him as King to follow me. Why not begin with him? He comes of a great nation, wherein the principle of freedom is a vital principle that quickens all things. That nation has more than once shown to us its friendliness; and doubtless the very fact that an Englishman would become our King, and could carry into our Government the spirit and customs which have made his own country great, would do much to restore the ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... thorough education and moral training has been widely felt. If the high educational standard presented in the scholastic treatise of Barclay and the moral philosophy of Dymond has been lowered or disowned by many who, still retaining the name of Quakerism, have lost faith in the vital principle wherein precious testimonials of practical righteousness have their root, and have gone back to a dead literalness, and to those materialistic ceremonials for leaving which our old confessors suffered bonds and death, Haverford, at least, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... suffrage plank in their platform, they would probably have carried the election. But they timidly clung to their old moorings, nominated a man who had an unpopular war record, and submitted a platform without one vital principle with which to rouse the enthusiasm ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... their moral motive, in anything but the law itself, or to place the disposition which is thereby brought into the maxims in anything but respect for this law, and hence commands us to take as the supreme vital principle of all morality in men the thought of duty, which strikes down all arrogance as well ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... your Lordships with the system of confederacy and connivance, which, under his auspices, was the vital principle of almost the whole service. There is one member of the service which I have omitted: but whether I ought to have put it first, or, as I do now, last, I must confess I am at some loss; because, though it appears to be the lowest (if any regular) part of the service, it is by far the most considerable ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... thought that the vital principle your Government had in view was the destruction of our independence, and in our proposal the independence of the two Republics with regard to foreign relations is given up. I was therefore of opinion that the two parties might come to an ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... many years in the Creek nation, says, "Joy, contentment, love and friendship without guile or affectation, seem inherent in them, or predominant in their vital principle, for it leaves them but with their breath. They are," says he, "just, honest, liberal and hospitable to strangers considerate and affectionate to their wives, children, and relations; frugal ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... for in the latter we have abundance of excitability, and a variety of stimuli, by which we can exhaust it to the proper degree, and thus bring about the healthy state; whereas, in indirect debility, the vital principle or excitability is deficient; and we have not the means of reproducing it, at pleasure, absolutely under our command. Besides, the subtraction of stimulants, which is one of the most certain means we have of ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... to his poetry, egotism is the vital principle of his imagination, which it is difficult for him to kindle on any subject with which his own character and interests are not identified; but by the introduction of fictitious incidents, by change of scene or time, he has enveloped his poetical disclosures ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... furnish no element capable of entering into the composition of blood, muscular fibre, or anything which is the seat of vital principle. If a man drinks daily 8 or 10 quarts of the best Bavarian beer in a year he will have taken into his system as much nourishment as is contained in a five-pound loaf of bread."—Liebig, the great ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... promoting the spirit of discord, must the tardy, tedious, desultory road, by way of impeachment, be traveled to overtake the man who, barely confining himself within the letter of the law, is employed in drawing off the vital principle of the Government?" The nature of things, the great objects of society, the express objects of the Constitution itself require that this thing should be otherwise. To unite the Senate with the President "in the exercise of the power" it was said, would involve us in the most serious difficulty. ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross
... and long suffering; and above all, of that which is the stock on which alone these dispositions can grow and flourish, that humility and lowliness of mind, in which perhaps more than in any other quality may be said to consist the true essence and vital principle of the Christian temper. These dispositions are not only neglected, but even disavowed and exploded, and their opposites, if not rising to any great height, are acknowledged and applauded. A just pride, a proper and becoming pride, are terms ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... other writers is obvious, there is no specific indebtedness not elsewhere acknowledged, except to Mr. Arthur Edward Phillips, whose vital principle of "Reference to Experience" has, in a modified form, been made the test for evidence. It is my belief that the use of this principle, rather than the logical and technical forms of proof and evidence, will make the training of debate far more applicable ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon
... indicated, is the mainspring and vital principle of Tragedy. The efforts of Aeschylus and Sophocles were sustained by it, and its inevitable decay through the scepticism which preceded Socrates was the chief hindrance to the tragic genius of Euripides. Yet the inequality of which we have consequently to complain in him is redeemed by pregnant ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... of the so-called "Liberals" in England have assailed Mr. Wilson bitterly because, as they declare, he yielded too much to their own Premier, Mr. Lloyd George, and to Mr. Clemenceau. But could he have failed to defer to them on questions in which no vital principle was involved? I well remember his declaration on the question, whether the Allies should refuse, for a period of five years during the time of France's recuperations to promise Germany reciprocal tariff provisions. What Mr. Wilson said to Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Clemenceau was this: "Gentlemen, ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... sentiment at home, and which popular sentiment, directly or indirectly, has clothed his language with the authority it carries in foreign countries; and there is every obligation of faith, fidelity, delicacy, and discretion, that he should do no discredit to that which he knows to be a distinguishing and vital principle with his constituents. As respects our agents in Europe, I believe little is hazarded in saying, that too many have done injury to the cause of liberty. I have heard this so often from various quarters of the highest respectability,[29] it has been so ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... The vital principle, in the human body, can so far resist the influences of a variety of poisons, slowly introduced into it, that their effects shall be unobserved, till, under the operation of an exciting or disturbing ...
— An Essay on the Influence of Tobacco upon Life and Health • R. D. Mussey
... the county court, would do its judiciary business, direct roads and bridges, levy county and poor rates, and administer all the matters of common interest to the whole county. These wards, called townships in New England, are the vital principle of their governments, and have proved themselves the wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self-government, and for its preservation. We should thus marshal our government into, 1. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... dynasties of Asia have been continually subverted by a crafty vizier in the palace, or a victorious general in the camp, the Ottoman succession has been confirmed by the practice of five centuries, and is now incorporated with the vital principle ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... although it is necessary to the classes who command. These boundaries, these clean cuts, permit the stakes of commercial conflict and of war; that is to say, the chance of big feats of glory and of huge speculations. That is the vital principle of Empire. If all interests suddenly became again the individual interests of men, and the moral law resumed its full and spacious action on the basis of equality, if human solidarity were world-wide and complete, it would no longer ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... the blessing of a hidden phoenix! Of late all for the sake of your honourable self, His Majesty, above, confers upon us his heavenly benefits; while we, below, show forth the virtue of our ancestors! And it is mainly because the vital principle of the hills, streams, sun, and moon, and the remote virtue of our ancestors have been implanted in you alone that this good fortune has attained me Cheng and my wife! Moreover, the present emperor, bearing in mind the great bounty shewn by heaven and earth in promoting a ceaseless succession, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... intellectual, and moral influences of the school and the home should be combined and mingled, or else the visible forms of government become a skeleton, merely indicating the figure, structure, and outline, of the perfect body, but destitute of the vital principle which alone could render it of any value to ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... repose of the sleeper,—deathlike and deep. Its very calmness was frightful. Her lips were apart, but no breath seemed to issue from them; and, but for a slight—very slight palpitation of the bosom, the vital principle might be supposed to be extinct. This lifeless appearance was heightened by the extreme sharpness of her features—especially the nose and chin,—and by the emaciation of her limbs, which was painfully distinct through her drapery. Her attenuated arms ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... water-conducting system consisting of bundles of vascular fibres. Haberlandt furthermore indicates especially that these organs when viewed in connection with the process of secretion give evidence of an active vital principle as well as ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... immediacy is the deepest possible immediacy, it is an immediacy of experience where the self comes into contact with its own vital principle—the Universal Spiritual Life—and brings about a fundamental change in the life of the individual. The inner life is no longer governed by sense impressions and impulses, but the outward life is lived and viewed from the standpoint of ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... say complacently that such characters must have been so weak that they would probably have gone that way, anyhow. But that is merely to close one's eyes to the understanding of a vital principle, the inner feelings of heart and soul which play such a large part in the formation of character, are subject to growth and alteration, like all other living things; and until they are given a fair ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... reality; truth &c 494; actual existence. presence &c (existence in space) 186; coexistence &c 120. stubborn fact, hard fact; not a dream &c 515; no joke. center of life, essence, inmost nature, inner reality, vital principle. [Science of existence], ontology. V. exist, be; have being &c n.; subsist, live, breathe, stand, obtain, be the case; occur &c (event) 151; have place, prevail; find oneself, pass the time, vegetate. consist in, lie in; be comprised in, be contained in, be constituted by. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... expressions. But no one truth is greater than any other truth. Each has a sphere of usefulness peculiar to itself. Thus we should treat with respect and reverence all truths, great and small. A truth is the complete work of nature, which can only be demonstrated by the vital principle belonging to that class of truths. Each truth or division as we see it, can only be made known to us by the self evident fact, which this truth is able ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... melted like metal in a furnace; it dissolves all, but destroys nothing; it disunites the first elements of life, yet the sufferer can never die. He is, as it were, divided against himself, without rest and without comfort; animated by no vital principle, but the rage that kindles at his own misconduct, and the dreadful madness ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... Vegetables, their organization Vital principle, its incomprehensible nature Virtue, its worth Virtuous exertion entitled to support Village promenades, proposal for Villages round London, their want of society Villas, no signs of public wealth Village bells, cause ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... were at length reduced to extreme distress for food. They ate the roots and stems of the herbage, and finally stripped the very bark from the trees and devoured it, in the vain hope that it might afford some nutriment to re-enforce the vital principle, for a little time at least, in the dreadful struggle which it was waging within them. There are certain forms of pestilential disease which, in cases like this, always set in to hasten the work which famine alone ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... It was published in 1672. 'In this work he maintains that the soul of brutes is like the vital principle in man, that it is corporeal in its nature and perishes with the body. Although the book was dedicated to the Archbishop of Canterbury, his orthodoxy, a matter that Willis regarded much, was called in question.' Knight's Eng. Cyclo. vi. 741. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... necessity of uniting in support of the laws and the rights of their country, and has thus long frustrated those usurpations and spoliations which, if resisted, involved war; if submitted to, sacrificed a vital principle of our ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 1: Thomas Jefferson • Edited by James D. Richardson
... form, and should receive burial, silent, somewhat sorrowful, yet not without hope of eventual resurrection in regard to the nobler part of it. The fair coloured petals of the flower fall away from the maturing fruit, the fruit rots to set free the seed. Yet the vital principle remains, life lives on, though the material clothing of it change. And, therefore, Katherine—an upspringing of patience and chastened fortitude within her, the result of her reconciliation to the Divine Light and resignation of herself to its ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... was based on the assumption that there was a "vital principle," the nature of which was unknown, but which differed from the thinking mind, and was the cause of the phenomena of life. This "vital principle" differed from the soul, and was not exhibited in human beings alone, but even in animals and plants. This force, or whatever it might be called, was ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... finds himself in what is to him a new and complex world of people and things; actual experience is the foundation for complete living, and the stronger the foundation the better the result of later building. The first vital principle then is that the teacher of young children must provide life in miniature; that is, she must provide abundant raw material and opportunities ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... may be, neither chemists nor physiologists can tell us with any great degree of clearness; but it is this vital principle, whatever it may be, which prevents decay in a living organic substance, however complex. When life departs, the onslaught begins; the defender has been removed, and a number of assailants make their appearance. Air, heat, and moisture are the principal of these; they attack ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... is, to take care of that vital principle of every state, its revenue. The next is, to preserve the magistracy and legal authorities in honor, respect, and force. And the third, to preserve the property, movable and immovable, of all the people committed ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... different bodily and mental organs, into Shakespeare's "old exhausted," and his "new imagined worlds." He was a critic and a moralist who would have been wholly wise, had he not been partly—constitutionally insane. For there is blood in the brain, James—even in the organ—the vital principle of all our "eagle-winged raptures"; and there was a taint of the black drop of ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... the gentleman's past record—he has been chairman of such committees for years past, and I find no trace that bills inimical to certain great interests have ever been reported back by him. The Pingsquit bill involves the vital principle of competition. I have read it with considerable care and believe it to be, in itself, a good measure, which deserves a fair hearing. I have had no conversation whatever with those who are said to be its promoters. If the bill ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of course they will. You surely cannot suppose I should, in cold blood, sit down to write a story in which nobody was to fall in love or be in love! Sir, scoff as you may, love is the one vital principle in all romance. Not only does your cheek flush and your eye sparkle, till "heart, brain, and soul are all on fire," over the burning words of some Brontean Pythoness, but when you open the last thrilling work of Maggie Marigold, and are immediately submerged "in a weak, washy, everlasting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... will not take a mean advantage of my neighbor because I have the chance, and thus traduce the precious name of the Holy Jesus by calling myself one of His followers. It is time this satanic Charity was swept out! The very first law, the very vital principle of true Charity, is righteousness. There is no Charity apart from righteousness. If your Charity is incompatible with righteousness, it is born of the ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... combination of forces called "brain," the physiologist is hindered and troubled by the views of the nature of those cerebral forces which the needs of dogmatic theology have imposed on mankind. How long physiologists would have entertained the notion of a "life," or "vital principle," as a distinct entity if freed from this baneful influence may be questioned; but it can be truly affirmed that physiology has now established and does accept the truth of that statement of Locke—"the life, whether of a material or immaterial substance, ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... confirmation, overwhelming my soul-fraught imagination, as the boiling streams of liquid lava, buried in one vast cinereous mausoleum—the palace-crowded city of the engulphed Pompeii. (Immense cheers.)—I therefore propose a Methusalemic elongation of the duration of the vital principle of the presiding anserian paragon." (Stentorian applause, continued for half-an-hour after the rising of the Prize Goose) ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... that no duty is more certain, none more important, than a free and fearless expression of opinion, by all persons, on all occasions. No wise or philosophic person would think of complaining of the diversities of sentiment it is likely to develop. Such diversities are the vital principle of free communities, and the only elements of popular intelligence. If the right to utter them is asserted by all and for all, tolerance is secured, and no inconvenience results. It is probable that there were many persons here in 1692 who doubted the propriety of ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... of the wishes of those who chose him to represent them; and if, moreover, the effect of voting against a measure of which he disapproves would be to overthrow a whole Ministry of which he strongly approves, then, unless some very vital principle indeed were involved, to give such a vote would be to prefer a small object to a great one, and would indicate a very queasy monkish sort of conscience. The journalist is not in the same position. He is an observer and a critic, ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... quickens each different seed is one and the same essence, but in no two does it find the same expression. He needs the whole Church to manifest His whole character and accomplish His appointed ministry, and so the individual development must differ widely in everything but the common vital principle. Life—eternal life—is the essence of all—life receiving and life-giving. There is no need to imitate the seed-vessel of a brother vetch!—only to draw into our own the fulness of grace that we may develop into its full individuality the mission ...
— Parables of the Christ-life • I. Lilias Trotter
... the clearest result of their short married life; a gulf had opened between them over which they looked at each other with eyes that were on either side a declaration of the deception suffered. It was a strange opposition, of the like of which she had never dreamed—an opposition in which the vital principle of the one was a thing of contempt to the other. It was not her fault—she had practised no deception; she had only admired and believed. She had taken all the first steps in the purest confidence, and then she had suddenly found the infinite vista of ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... feel about an anatomist who has dissected every fibre of an animal's body, classified every organ, traced every muscle and nerve, and bids you at the end take it on his authority that there is no such thing as the vital principle or the informing soul, because he has shown you everything that there is to see. Yet the finest essence of all, the living and breathing spirit, has ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... him always a dynamic principle of Life, working itself out in the frame and temper of the man and producing its characteristic effects in his actions. It does not operate "like a charm or spell"—it operates only as a vital principle[59] and we become eternally the self which we ourselves form. "We naturalize ourselves," to use his striking phrase, "to the employment of eternity."[60] We are lost, not by Adam's sin, but by our own; and we are saved, not by Christ's historical death, but by our own obedience to the law ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... within it has declined; if through want of efficiency, or moral energy, or moral purity, it ceases to win the respect of its several parts. It is no less true that the cohesion can only be permanently maintained by the wide diffusion of a larger and Imperial patriotism, pervading the whole like a vital principle; binding men by the ties of pride and of affection to the great Empire to which they belong, and subordinating to its maintenance local and party and class interests. If this spirit dies out, the movement of disintegration is sure to begin. No political ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... conquered territories. After the destruction of Carthage, the Romans had no jealousy of cities that once were equals. Their arts were made to subserve Roman greatness, indeed, but they were left free to develop their resources. The development of resources was a vital principle of the Roman government. Spain, Syria, and Egypt, were never more prosperous than under the imperial rule. All the provinces were more thriving under the emperors than they had been under their ancient kings, until the era of barbaric ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... mission. Indians gathered thither as of old, not from the baneful lure of brandy, for the traffic in it was no longer tolerated, but from the less pernicious attractions of gifts, kind words, and politic blandishments. To the vital principle of propagandism both the commercial and the military character were subordinated; or, to speak more justly, trade, policy, and military power leaned on the missions as their main support, the grand instrument of their extension. The missions were ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... perpetual interplay of opposites, manifested externally in an interplay of diastole and systole comparable to the process of breathing. He, therefore, traced the interchange of light-values in colourless after-images to a 'silent resistance which every vital principle is forced to exhibit when some definite condition is presented to it. Thus, inhalation presupposes exhalation; thus every systole, its diastole. When darkness is presented to the eye, the eye demands brightness, ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... successful brigand. Even in his metaphysics, Chuang Tzu is intensely humorous. He personifies his abstractions, and makes them act plays before us. The Spirit of the Clouds, when passing eastward through the expanse of air, happened to fall in with the Vital Principle. The latter was slapping his ribs and hopping about: whereupon the Spirit of the Clouds said, 'Who are you, old man, and what are you doing?' 'Strolling!' replied the Vital Principle, without stopping, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... and apparently so contrary to existing institutions, needed time for its real principle to become known. The external manifestation seemed to consist of nothing but defiant disregard of established religious custom and ceremonial. Thus, while the vital principle of love for humanity was working its way into individual lives and attracting them to the ranks of the organization, the world at large openly showed its antagonism. Gradually, however, the sense of public opposition ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... knows but a Cromwell? To our minds, though it may be obscure to Englishmen who look on Lancashire as the centre of the universe, no army was ever enlisted for a nobler service than ours. Not only is it national life and a foremost place among nations that is at stake, but the vital principle of Law itself, the august foundation on which the very possibility of government, above all of self-government, rests as in the hollow of God's own hand. If democracy shall prove itself capable of having raised twenty millions of people to a level of thought where they can appreciate this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... thereafter he is either a rebel or a citizen, as he lists. For us, born to the largest measure of freedom society has ever known, there is little fear lest the principle of authority should prove a dangerous element. The right of private judgment, which is, I believe, the vital principle of the intellectual life, is the first to be exercised by our young men who lead that life; and quite in the spirit of that education which would repeat in the child the history of the race, we are scarce out of the swaddling bands of the primer and catechism ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... closely related. Things that are good for one are good for the other. A girl who develops a strong agile body, at the same time improves her brain. A girl with weak, flabby muscles cannot have the strength of character that goes with normal physical power. It has been said, that "health is the vital principle of bliss, and exercise ...
— How Girls Can Help Their Country • Juliette Low
... personality of Satan be not a vital principle of your religion, I do not know what is. There is only one dogma higher. You think it is safe, and I daresay it is fashionable, to fall into this lax and really thoughtless discrimination between what is and what is not to be believed. ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... understands what is meant by the "life" of the body, but when he hears the "eternal life" of the spirit spoken of, or when he reads of it in the Bible, it is with the feeling that it cannot be so real and lifelike as that vital principle whose currents impart vigor and warmth to his bodily frame. And yet, the life of the spirit is more intensely real than the life of the body is; for it has power to overrule and absorb it. Spiritual life, when in full play, is bliss ineffable. It translates man ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd |
