"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
... Tchelisheff arrived on the scene with his splendid vital force and practical solutions of the financial and other problems (or suggestions for them) that arise from prohibition, (especially when a Government monopoly and revenue are concerned,) which he most strenuously advocated when Mayor of Samara, as ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... command of its resources, and a 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 even less satisfactory as a work of art than 'Rienzi,' which at any rate has the merit of homogeneity. ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... be sufficient; but it may be necessary to repeat the packing. Give frequent sips of hot water. It will be well also to use the cold injection, as it will be found to take good effect whenever the vital force has been increased by the hot packing. If cramp has shown itself, it will be needful to cool the spinal nerves (see Angina Pectoris), but this only when you are effectually ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... the arm and of the leg, and judge by their increase in size of the value of the exercise. This is not a correct measurement. Individuals may weigh themselves down by development of muscles until they have not sufficient internal vital force to carry so much weight. If we could only balance between the organs which supply nutriment and the organs which use it up, we would keep ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... is his duty to become a Holbein. You plant your acorn in favorable 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, ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... Kano shuddered at this foreign marking out of hours. A melancholy, intense as had been his former ecstacy, began to enfold his spirit. Perhaps he had waited too long for the simple breakfast; perhaps the recent glory had drained him of vital force. A hopelessness, alike of life and death, rose about him ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... inert atmosphere in which it flies? What subtle power paints the rose, and tunes the merry songster's voice? To explain this mystery, philosophers of olden time supposed the existence of a certain peculiar force which is called life, or vital force, or vitality. This supposition does nothing more than furnish a name for a thing unknown, and the very existence of which may fairly be doubted. In fact, any attempt to find a place for such a force, to understand its origin, or harmonize its existence with that of other ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... sentimental fancy, contradicted by human reason and the aspect of the world. Evil is often the active form of good; as F. W. Newman says, so likewise is Evil the revelation of Good. With him all existences are equal: so long as they possess the Hindu Agasa, Life-fluid or vital force, ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... forbearing, but fierce and implacable in action; at once loved and most terribly feared; shy as a wild animal, but straightforward and undeviating in his human relations; most remarkably quiet and unassuming, but with tremendous vital force in his deep eyes and forward-thrust jaw; informed with the widest and most understanding humanity, but unforgiving of evildoers; and with the most direct and absolute courage, Bwana C. was to me the most interesting man I met in ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... equipment and his expanding character—as well as his physical prowess—against the circumstances of active vitality. It is just this sort of thing that for so long made the "public schools" of England, however limited or defective may have been the curriculum, a vital force in the development of ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... which is composed of ether is called the "vital body" in Western Mystery Schools, for, as we have already seen, ether is the avenue of ingress for vital force from the sun and the field of agencies in nature which promote such vital activities as assimilation, ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... combined impulsiveness 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 ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... of golden light seemed to pulse, and a tiny ruby flame appeared within it, that waxed and waned, and as it waxed, there shot through each of those watching beings a feeling of rushing, exhilarating power, the very vital force of well-being. ...
— The Last Evolution • John Wood Campbell
... who found industries and carve out new careers, as well as the common body of working-people, from whom the national strength and spirit are from time to time recruited, must necessarily furnish the vital force and constitute the real backbone of ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... equally true that the use of any organ before it has attained its 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 ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... 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 still; subject to no artificial ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... 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
... intermingling of the races in sexual relationship was sapping the vitality of the Negro race and, in fact, was slowly but surely exterminating the race. It demonstrated that the fourth generation of the children born of intermarrying mulattoes were invariably sterile or woefully lacking in vital force. It asserted that only in the most rare instances were children born of this fourth generation and in no case did such children reach maturity. This is a startling revelation. While this intermingling was impairing the vital force of our race and exterminating ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... 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 to ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... Look here, have you never noticed how brilliant and lively Mrs. Krauss is at times, with shining eyes and a colour in her cheeks? Then on other days, if she does appear, she is limp as a wet rag, depressed and old; there is a complete lack of all vital force. Now tell me how ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... agents, 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 are, ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... alternation of the same substance, an interior cause,—sometimes even a successive development, starting from a central heat; but can the term "life" be applied to this kind of movement? Limestone does not generate sandstone. I do not know that there exists what physiologists call a vital force, different from, or opposed to, the physical forces which we recognize in all matter; I think the vital process is only a particular mode of action, of limitation of those physical forces; action, the nature of which we have not yet fully sounded. I believe there are nervous ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... of others. Mazzini, that greatest of all democrats, who broke his heart over the condition of the South European peasantry, said: "Education is not merely a necessity of true life by which the individual renews his vital force in the vital force of humanity; it is a Holy Communion with generations dead and living, by which he fecundates all his faculties. When he is withheld from this Communion for generations, as the ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... end might have been gained by other and simpler means, for instance dichogamy. It may be that the production of the male and female reproductive elements and the maturation of the ovules was too great a strain and expenditure of vital force for a single individual to withstand, if endowed with a highly complex organisation; and that at the same time there was no need for all the individuals to produce young, and consequently that no injury, on the contrary, good resulted from half ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... has a tremendous influence in Belgium, and is sincerely respected. They will be a vital force in holding the people together in their patriotic devotion, and in maintaining ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... fault, that they wished to bring New England back within reach of the invigorating influence of national sympathies, and to rescue it from a tradition which had become empty formalism. Puritanism was dead, and its profession had become a wearisome cant before the Revolution of 1688 gave it that vital force in politics which it had ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... perhaps, more mysterious in nature than this fact of the existence of a living land: a land that repairs itself, when injured, by vital processes, and resists the eternal attack of the sea by vital force, especially when we think of the extent of some of these lagoon islands or atolls, whose existences are an eternal battle ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... Revelation does not reveal God on this theory. We have no knowledge of God in the gospel, any more than we had in nature. Instead of knowledge, we have only law. But this seems to despoil Christianity of its vital force. Christ says, "This is life eternal, to know thee, the only true God." But Mr. Mansel tells us that such knowledge of God is impossible. Therefore, instead of the gospel, he gives us the law; for it is certain that his regulative truths are simply moral ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... than that," Maggie declared nervously. "She is the inspiration of the President himself. She is the most vital force in Russian politics. She is the woman whom I wanted you to know, to whom I told you that I wished you to pay attentions. And now that you know her, I ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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, has, therefore, no application ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... ages of darkness and unbelief, saw in it the common yearning of the human soul to find rest on a loving Father's almighty arm; yet when our oriental missionaries and scholars found such fundamental truths of their own religion as the common brotherhood of man, and that love is the vital force of all religion, which consists not in blood-oblations or in forms and creeds, but in shunning evil and doing good, and that we must overcome evil by good and hatred by love, and that there is a spiritual world and life after death embodied in the teachings ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... personalities. He lacked curiosity. His fine mind seemed to want the energy to interest itself in the details of any subject that filled it, and this was one of his fatal weaknesses at the Peace Conference. Perhaps it was a deficiency of vital force. Moreover he came to his great task tired. His life till he was past fifty was one of defeat. There was the early disappointment and turning back from law practice, the giving up of his youthful ambition for a public career to which he had trained himself passionately by ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... beyond its own borders grew as constantly in volume and extent as the work within its borders, so that Tuskegee soon became the vital force—the yeast that was raising the level of life and well-being throughout, first, the town and neighborhood of Tuskegee, then the County of Macon, then the surrounding counties and the State of Alabama; and finally, in conjunction ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... 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
... nature, which he has annexed. A man of receptive mind and heart, on the other hand, meditating on what he sees, and getting at its meaning by the divining-rod of the imagination, discovers the law behind the phenomena, the truth behind the fact, the vital force which flows through all things, and gives them their significance. The first man gains information; the second gains culture. The pedant pours out an endless succession of facts with a monotonous uniformity of emphasis, and exhausts while he instructs; the ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... earlier period of childhood, from three to seven years, bodily growth is very rapid. Much of the vital force is thus consumed, and less energy is available for physical activity. The child has also less power of resistance and is thus susceptible to the diseases of childhood. His movements are for the same reason ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... motion, nutrition and reproduction, produces its like, and in all forms of life the capacity for reproduction undeniably stamps the feminine. Not only does science establish the fact that primordial life is feminine, but it also proves that a greater expenditure of vital force is requisite for the production of the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... off by rocks and impervious strata from springs from below. Dr. Livingstone, struck with this phenomenon in Southern Africa, asks: "Can the white ants possess the power of combining the oxygen and hydrogen of their vegetable food by vital force so as to form water?"—Travels, p. 22. And he describes at Angola, an insect[A] resembling the Aphrophora spumaria; seven or eight individuals of which distil several pints of water every night.—P. 414. It is highly probable that the ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... ministered to by the rest, and if there be in my nature or in the order of my life something which is drawing away to itself the energy that ought to go in that other direction, then, howsoever innocent it may be, per se, it is harming me. It is a wen that is sucking all the vital force into itself, and turning it into poison. And there is only one cure for it, and that is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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
... spread a bushel or more of coarse litter about each shrub in fall. Not because it needs protection in the sense that a tender plant needs it, but because a mulch keeps the frost from working harm at its roots, and saves to the plant that amount of vital force which it would be obliged to expend upon itself if it were left to take care of itself. For it is true that even our hardiest plants suffer a good deal in the fight with cold, though they may not seem to be much injured by it. Mulch some of them, and leave some of them ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... actuating principle. They brought together a circle of men and women of the best quality, who endeavored to live up to their standard, and by work and daily life, rather than by active propagandism, to crystallize opinions into a vital force. For several years the regular meetings were held at our house, the "festivals" of the year being often given at the residences of other members of the society—Mr. T.B. Wakeman, or Mr. Courtlandt Palmer. There is still an "old guard" left, of as good, brave, and unselfish men and ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... of confines, the largeness and movement, vibration and life,—these are the things which the modern painter has discovered in landscape and has emphasized; and this is what has made modern landscape a vital force in modern art. Whatever you do or do not see, feel, and express in your painting, these you must see, feel, and express; for once these qualities are recognized and accepted they are as universal as the law of gravity, and ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... 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 ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 he coined a near-word and a sign, and by a graphic and exalted ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... Oriental's fatalistic attitude towards disease and death. Perhaps only those who have had close dealings with the British officer in time of action or emergency realise, to the full, the effective qualities hidden under a careless or conventional exterior:—the vital force, the pluck, endurance, and irrepressible spirit of enterprise, which—it has been aptly said—make him, at his best, the most romantic figure of ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... persons who are convinced of the justice of their cause. These unknown and suddenly elevated chiefs, whom the revolution has singled out, are they all unworthy of our esteem, and devoid of capacity? They possess, perhaps, a new and vital force that it would be right and perhaps necessary to utilise somehow. The ideas which they represent ought to be studied, and if they prove useful, put into practice. This is what the Assembly has understood and what it has done. By concessions which enlarge ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... Nature's non-admission of a break, Nature's vis medicatrix, were offered as explanations of phenomena; when the qualities of things were mistaken for real entities dwelling in the things; when the phenomena of living bodies were thought to be accounted for by being referred to a "vital force;" when, in short, the abstract names of phenomena were mistaken for the causes of their existence. In this sense of the word it can not be reasonably denied that the metaphysical explanation of phenomena, equally with the ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... and very narrow one—and, at its side, was his wife, Veronica, almost his equal in years. In a clear and sonorous voice he told me why he would be able to leave this life with a valiant soul.... Feeling a little later the failure of vital force, he exclaimed, 'Glad and full of hope will I go with you, my good God!' He then composed himself; and having closed his eyes, as though about to sleep, with a slight sigh, ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... in 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 ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... 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
... 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 of this background, and which do not, by denying it, deny the connection of the whole, which ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... to employ the Serajewo crime as a lever to put Russia, as a vital force, out of the domain of European politics. In spite of denials, there is reason to believe that Austria was inclined to listen to reason, but Germany forestalled and prevented this by despatching an ultimatum to Russia and then ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... may be produced. But in the animal body we recognise as the ultimate cause of all force only one cause, the chemical action which the elements of the food and the oxygen of the air mutually exercise on each other. The only known ultimate cause of vital force, either in animals or in plants, is a chemical process. If this be prevented, the phenomena of life do not manifest themselves, or they cease to be recognisable by our senses. If the chemical action be impeded, the vital phenomena must ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... we develop all the faculties, the germs of which lie within our borders? Perhaps because we have each only a certain amount of what I'll call vital current. If the Nile could overflow the whole desert it would all be fertilized, and perhaps if we had sufficient vital force we could develop all the faculties whose germs we inherit. Suppose by some accident, owing to a shock or strain, as you say, the flow of this vital current of ours is stopped in the direction in which ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... evolved. The oxydation of carbon, for instance, in the fireplace, is the formation of the stable compound called carbon dioxide, and light and heat are evolved. The explosion of dynamite, again is the decomposition of an unstable compound. Hence, we begin to perceive that force— the vital force— which keeps the rabbit moving, is supplied by the decomposition and partial oxydation of compounds continued in its food, to carbon dioxide, water, urea, and smaller quantities of ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... seriousness of the situation in Canada, will inevitably force England to consider these matters. It is in anticipation of this that I am anxious to have you play a leading part in this situation. It would do much to make the League of Nations a living, vital force in the affairs of the world. There are no boundary lines ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... 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
... only has the advantage of the time saved from dillydallying and procrastination, but he also saves the energy and vital force which is wasted by the perplexed man who takes up every argument on one side and then on the other, and weighs them until the two sides hang in equipoise, with no prepondering motive to enable him to decide. He is in stable equilibrium, and so does not move ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... ruined. Her face, too, followed this inner change. Soft lines merged into something more vivid. She was usually pale, and her sweet, small mouth had a weary droop, but her eyes were keen and living, and lit with vital force. ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... 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 ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... no obvious machinery here, however, to impel it forward. It journeys on of itself, as it were, under the action of laws which have never been satisfactorily explained, but all of which are dependent on the vital force or life-power of the tree, inasmuch as without it there is no circulation. One agent, but by no means the principal, or it would act as well in a dead tree as a living one, is capillary attraction; and, if you wish to know what that is, you have only to think of what happens to a towel, ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... contact with the crowds of eager pilgrims and devotees which throng the streets and temples of Benares that one may realize the vital force which Brahminism exercises in India. Next to Mohammedanism it is the livest and most influential and practical of all religions. The devotee lives and breathes and feels his faith. It enters every experience ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... phenomena of life are all dependent upon the working of the same physical and chemical forces as those which are active in the rest of the world. It may be convenient to use the terms "vitality" and "vital force" to denote the cause of certain groups of natural operations, as we employ the names of "electricity" and "electrical force" to denote others; but it ceases to do so, if such a name implies the absurd assumption that either "electricity" or "vitality" is an entity, playing ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... a man and an emotion they were, not the drudging machines of the mines, but a vital force ready ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... of ships. To work! To rise! To own yards like these, build ships like these and send them rushing on their courses out to all parts of the ocean world! This had been his vision, at the time when it was bright and clear. And as now he made me feel it, the crude vital force that had been in his dream poured into me deep, made me feel how shut in and one-sided had been my own vision and standards of life, gave me that profound surprise which many sons, I ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... this discussion only a limited part of this great subject. Phenomena modified by the action of the vital force, either in plants or in animals, will be excluded; I shall not, therefore, consider such subjects as botany or zooelogy. Geology and related branches will also be omitted by restricting our study to phenomena which take place in short, definite, measurable ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various
... utmost. She did many things well, but did nothing with that sort of conviction, so to say, which proceeds from conscious inward vigour. When she was not actually riding or fencing, or doing something of the sort, there was a languor in her movements and her manner which told that she had no great vital force upon which to draw. Those who already know something of her story, will remember that her life was short ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... been too ill to share in the active work of the campaign, but her influence was everywhere—a vital force, a continual inspiration. ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... 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. Born vigorous ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... white fruit whose core is ashes, and which we call death, has set beneath the pallid and drooping flower of sickness. There is a singular sagacity very often shown in a patient's estimate of his own vital force. His physician knows the state of his material frame well enough, perhaps,—that this or that organ is more or less impaired or disintegrated; but the patient has a sense that he can hold out so much longer,—sometimes that he must and will live for a while, though by the logic ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... object may be 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 ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... can answer his question about the divine—his own soul. The soul said, "No eyes nor ears can impart to thee what is in me. For I alone can tell thee, and I tell thee in an unquestionable way." "Men may be doubtful whether vital force is situate in air or in fire, but who can doubt that he himself lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges? If he doubts, it is a proof that he is alive, he remembers why he doubts, he understands that he doubts, he will assure ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... were the dim nuclei from which 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 ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... has stood almost unmoved for thousands of years. But now disintegration threatens, and the nations of Europe may yet divide that great country among themselves, and a new world may arise. In such a change, the influence of Christianity must be a vital force, to ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 1, March, 1898 • Various
... the sceince of healing diseases, instead of defining and dividing 'em and lengthening their names and their durashin, and shortening nothing but the pashint. Th' Antiphlogistic Therey is this: That disease is fiery, and that any artificial exhaustion of vital force must cool the system, and reduce the morbid fire, called, in their donkey Latin 'flamma,' and in their compound donkey Latin 'inflammation,' and in their Goose Greece, 'phlogosis,' 'phlegmon,' &c. And accordingly th' Antiphlogistic Practice is, to ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... 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 ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... "The wrong way is to continually 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 used to saving her voice. Why then should the pianist ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... 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, ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... the blind; And, while around his sad companions crowd, He guides the unhappy victim to the shroud: "Hie thee aloft, my gallant friend!" he cries; "Thy only succour on the mast relies." The helm, bereft of half its vital force, Now scarce subdued the wild unbridled course; Quick to the abandon'd wheel Arion came, The ship's tempestuous sallies to reclaim: The vessel, while the dread event draws nigh, 560 Seems more impatient o'er the waves ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... sense involves, as a process, the highest and truest development of a race, and, as a product, the most enduring spiritual expression of race genius and experience. The culture of the Greeks was the highest form of their vital force; and the product of that culture was not only their imperishable art, but their political, social, and religious organisation and ideals. Their deepest life went into their culture, and the most enduring fruits of that culture are also the most ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... of that idea; and under every form of Christ is the Christ. The truth of every man, I say, is the perfected Christ in him. As Christ is the blossom of humanity, so the blossom of every man is the Christ perfected in him. The vital force of humanity working in him is Christ; he is his root—the generator and perfecter of his individuality. The stronger the pure will of the man to be true; the freer and more active his choice; the more definite his individuality, ever the more ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... might with a comparatively small army have crushed Bolshevism and re-established order in Russia. On the other hand, it was objected that even heavy guns will not destroy ideas, and that the main ideas which supplied the revolutionary movement with vital force were too deeply rooted to have been extirpated by the most formidable foreign army. That is true. But these ideas were not especially characteristic of Bolshevism. Far from that, they were incompatible with it: the ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... and sweet" is said to be excellent for weak people; it gives them vital force. When little Georgette Beck was recovering from her illness, I used to take her in my arms and walk with her in the garden by the hour together, beneath a certain wall hung with grapes, which the Southern sun was ripening: that sun cherished her little pale frame quite as effectually as it ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... and water 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 or physical force. If animal life and force result from organization and chemical digestion, ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
... generation and of fecundation, the character of his vapeur subtile (aura vitalis) which he supposes to take an active part in the act of fertilization, because the notion is quite as objectionable as that of the vital force which he rejects. He goes on to say, however, that we cannot penetrate farther into the wonderful mystery of fecundation, but the opinions he expresses lead to the view that "nature herself imitates her procedures in fecundation in another state of ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... product of this interplay and balance between the state and the people. The original and vital force of the people, through the organization of the state, realizes itself fully in the unified communal ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... He and his National Provisions Company were real. They were able to 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
... order of truth in the reason, as an order of virtue in the will, as an order of joy in the emotions, as an order of beauty in the senses. It is the same order, the same body of law, operating in each case; it is the vital force of our fourfold life,—it has one unity in the intellect, the will, the emotions, the senses,—is equal to the whole nature of man, and responds to him and sustains him on every side. A lover of beauty in whom conscience is feeble cannot wander if he follow beauty; nor a cold ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... not the girl who had run the Carillon Rapids, for that adventuress was full of a vital force like a man's, and this girl had the evanishing charm of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Church had less to fear from the 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 ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... which for lack of the ideal word we call "spring." Spring does not visit the tropical coast, where vegetation does not tolerate any period of rest. When plants are not actually romping with excess of vital force, as during the height of the wet season, they grow with the haste of summer. And yet immediately on the dispersal of the mists of July the least observance could not fail to recognise that a certain and elaborate change had taken place. The ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... in our twilight existence, as if there were some truth in the strange old theory that very aged people can withdraw vital force from young companions and live upon it. But every day and hour of my stay made me love and reverence my great-grandmother more and more, and be more and more glad that I had come to know her, and perhaps be of ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... peoples, of naming a male child after his grandfather; examples are given in Gray, Hebrew Proper Names, p. 2 f. All such theories appear to rest on a dim conception of the vital solidarity of the tribe or clan—the vital force is held to be transmissible; cf. the idea of mana, a force inherent ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... steam and the electro-magnetic telegraph, that the same people, when overrun by a terrible crisis, moved slowly, waited patiently, and suffered from the mismanagement of its leaders. This is to be exclusively explained by the youthful self-consciousness of an internal, inexhaustible vital force, ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... very important part of a man's entity went into heaven, namely, his SEKHEM. The word literally means "to have the mastery over something," and, as used in the early texts, that which enables one to have the mastery over something; i.e., "power." The SEKHEM of a man was, apparently, his vital force or strength personified, and the Egyptians believed that it could and did, under certain conditions, follow him that possessed it upon earth into heaven. Another part of a man was the KHAIBIT or "shadow," which is frequently mentioned in connexion with the soul and, in late times, was always ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... behind us, it is impossible to realize that others have not the same vision, the same mind as our own. Kate had accused Jack of cold-blooded murder. She had reasoned herself out of that hateful spirit, and, forgetting that her father had not the vital force of love to act as a fulcrum, she could not quite comprehend how difficult it was to shift the wrathful burden in his mind. She had gone too far to recede now with honor. Olympia had trusted her, had indeed given over into her hands the ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... disposition of outward authority, but in the beliefs and convictions which touched the life of the soul. This was yet to come; and the work so far was but the initial step or prelude leading up to the more solemn struggle. Yet where the enemy who is to be conquered is strong, not in vital force, but in the prestige of authority, and in the enchanted defences of superstition, those truly win the battle who strike the first blow, who deprive the idol of its terrors ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... any vital force is impressed on any organic substance, so as to die gradually away as the substance extends, an infinite curve is commonly produced by its outline. Thus, in the budding of the leaf, already examined, the gradual ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... nature. And that is the reason why, in a sort of panic, I abruptly pulled up stakes and left it for good and all. It is not in the true American idea to be too content; it means running to seed, a weakening of the will and the vital force. If I remained too long in that lovely land—so admirably governed that I could not have lost myself, or my cat, had I possessed one—I should in no long course yield utterly to a certain resentfully admitted tendency to dream and drift and live for pure beauty; finally desert ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... not the graces which are its product and manifestation in the Christian life. And this distinction, which is in accordance with Paul's habitual teaching, leads us to the conclusion, that the essential character of the grace given through the act of our individual faith is that of a new vital force, flowing into and transforming the individual life. From that unspeakable gift which Paul supposed to be verifiable by the individual experience of every Christian, there would follow the graces of Christian character in which would be included the deepening and purifying of all ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... Adamhood. Eyes of gods! ye must have seen, O'er your ramparts as ye lean, The general debility; Of genius the sterility; Mighty projects countermanded; Rash ambition, brokenhanded; Puny man and scentless rose Tormenting Pan to double the dose. Rebuild or ruin: either fill Of vital force the wasted rill, Or tumble all again in heap To weltering Chaos ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... science is bound to do its very utmost to solve. This is what, as a matter of fact, is happening; and it is of the very deepest interest to observe the nature of the suggested explanation. It is no other than a revived form of the ancient doctrine of a "vital force," which we had imagined to have been finally discarded. There is this difference, however, and it is all-important. The force is not, as formerly supposed, some unique kind of energy; is not, indeed, energy at all. But we shall do best to state the new doctrine in the words ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... me, mellow me for use. Pervade my being with Thy vital force, That this else inexpressive life of mine May become eloquent and full of power, Impregnated with life and strength divine. Put the bright torch of heaven into my hand, That I may carry it aloft And win the eye of weary wanderers here below ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... cast aside, but duties only, which are pleasures in the doing of them well, and which you must help me do. It is in old age that power comes. An old man in English politics may exert enormous power without effort, and with no drain at all upon his health and vital force. The work of thirty or forty years of political life goes in England to the building-up of political reputation and position. During that long period no power is exercised except by irregular means, such as the ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... magnificent cause but a lonely death when they had brought the "master" to the sea. When their stomachs, pinched by hunger; when their limbs, stiff from travel; when their eyes, dim with the mists of death; when every vital force was slain by an heroic ambition to serve the great Stanley; when the fires of endeavor were burnt to feeble embers,—then, and only then, would these faithful Negroes fail in the fulfilment of their mission, ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... the world furnishes a finer type of man, physically and intellectually, than the Irish gentleman. He is handsome, large, courageous,—a man of fine instincts, brilliant imagination, courtly manners, and full, vital force. By the side of the Irish gentleman, there has grown for centuries the Irish peasant. He is ugly, of stunted stature, and pugnacious; and he produces children like himself. The two classes started from a common blood; they now present the broadest contrast. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... 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 ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... countries where the masses have reached a certain degree of political education such views, if carried to their logical conclusion, are sure to be rejected by the majority, and even the Socialist leaders realize that Nationalism is a vital force which has to be reckoned with, and that a sane Imperialism and efficient military policy are as necessary in the interests of the masses as in those of the classes. In Italy, on the other hand, where even the bourgeoisie took but a lukewarm ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... the meanwhile, suffered a corresponding agitation, more penetrative in proportion to the finer substance of her nature. She did not know until the scene was over how much vital force it had cost her; when she took off the veil a fire danced before her eyes, and her limbs ached and trembled as she lay down in the darkness. All night long she was acting her part over and over; when she ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... Isabelle! Barbadoes happens to be the creme de la creme of the British Indies. I would not advise you to display your ignorance before Evadne, or your future lecturettes on the conventionalities may prove lacking in vital force." ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... without the expenditure of force (nervous energy), even though it be only the winking of an eyelid; and the labor entailed upon the system, of raising the temperature of the stomach to normal figures, after deluging it with ice water, involves a ruinous waste of vital force, in addition to the other reasons urged against it. It cannot be doubted that this essentially American habit is responsible for a large proportion of the dyspepsia that sits like an incubus upon the nation. Every substance taken into the stomach, whether fluid or ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... in their dispersion, their laws and religious customs, especially their observance of every seventh day, attracted attention, and even secured a certain amount of acceptance. The Jews, therefore, even when, as a nation, they were ruined and crushed, proved themselves possessed of such vital force, of such tenacity, as to impress their conquerors with interest in, and respect for, their sabbatic customs. Of their tenacity and force in general, of their power to influence the nations amongst whom they have been scattered, the history of the last two thousand ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... and thanks to any one who will wake us up and warm us! . . . He is not an actor, as I called him, nor a cheat, nor a scoundrel; he lives at other people's expense, not like a swindler, but like a child. . . . He never does anything himself precisely, he has no vital force, no blood; but who has the right to say that he has not been of use? that his words have not scattered good seeds in young hearts, to whom nature has not denied, as she has to him, powers for action, and the faculty of carrying out their own ideas? . . . I drink ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... 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, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... with what do 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 Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... carried on the old classical tradition, bringing forth monuments like the Annals of Tigearnac; and there was the same vigor and vital force in every part of the nation's life. The coming of the Normans changed this in no essential regard. There was something added in architecture, the Norman modifying the old native style; the castle and keep gradually taking the place of the earthwork and stone fort. And in the tenure of land certain ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... indelibly written in the athletic annals of Williams, and his influence, apparently cut off by his early death, is still a vital force among those who cheered his memorable gains on the gridiron and who admired him ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... placed in the plan of planting them during the last quarter of the moon, but such confidence is found to be misplaced. The plan of removing the stamens has had its supporters, but as this must be done at an early stage of development, and could only influence the result by diverting the vital force which would be expended in the maturation of the pollen, to the perfecting of the seeds, it is obvious that the plan is impracticable for all ordinary purposes, even if in any degree efficient, which from the plasticity ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... discover this and to repudiate the prevailing terminology were the physiologists, who early announced their disbelief in a vital force, and their belief that all physiological activities were of purely physical and chemical origin, and that there was no need to assume any such thing as a vital force. Then came the discovery that chemical force, or affinity, ...
— The Machinery of the Universe - Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena • Amos Emerson Dolbear
... the chaff upon the dung heap, and after various mutations, have come in contact with a clod of earth, through which they have sent their roots, and have finally grown into thrifty plants. A thought thrown out on the world, if it possesses vital force, never dies. How much is remembered of the work of our greatest men? Only a sentence here and there; and many a man whose name will go down through all the ages, owes it to the truth or the vital force of the thought embedded in a ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... 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 ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... represent only the partial growth of the thought seed, and future lives may be necessary for its full blossoming and fruition. Of course, the individual who understands the Truth, and who has mentally divorced himself from the fruits of his actions—who has robbed material Desire of its vital force by seeing it as it is, and not as a part of his Real Self—his seed-thoughts do not spring into blossom and fruit in future lives, for he has killed their germ. The Yogis express this thought by the illustration of the baked-seeds. They show ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... 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 ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence |
