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Vital force   /vˈaɪtəl fɔrs/   Listen
Vital force

noun
1.
(biology) a hypothetical force (not physical or chemical) once thought by Henri Bergson to cause the evolution and development of organisms.  Synonyms: elan vital, life force, vitality.






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"Vital force" Quotes from Famous Books



... came into his face with a rush. He was so used to expressing power, sitting silent and a little grim, and moving weaker men to his will, that it was a new experience to be talked to by a person who quite visibly had vital force. ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason

... I began to see him I could not say. Every impulse and vital force of nature centered in my eyes, and they fastened themselves upon that one irregular shadow in the opposing corner which slowly—oh! with such agonizing slowness—assumed the outlines of a man. My fascinated gaze wandered not ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson

... explains the influences which he propagates. The substance or independent existence attributed to objects is therefore by no means only or primarily a physical notion. What is conceived to support the physical qualities is a pseudo-psychic or vital force. It is a moral and living object that we construct, building it up out of all the materials, emotional, intellectual, and sensuous, which lie at hand in our consciousness to be synthesised into the hybrid ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... into her marrow that holy waters had not yet exorcised the devil lurking there? Was the sight of him for whom her angelic efforts were made, necessary to the poor soul, whom God would surely forgive for mingling human and sacred love? One had led to the other. Was there some transposition of the vital force in her involving her in inevitable suffering? Everything is doubtful and obscure in a case which science scorns to study, regarding the subject as too immoral and too compromising, as if the physician and the writer, the ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac

... from the nourishing yelk around the germ, each being at first roundish in shape, and having a spot near the centre, called the nucleus. The reason why cells increase must remain a mystery, until we can penetrate the secrets of vital force—probably forever. But the mode in which they multiply is as follows: The first change noticed in a cell, when warmed into vital activity, is the appearance of a second nucleus within it, while the cell gradually becomes oval ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe


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