"Vital principle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... standing for the integrity of historic entities, makes the world a 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, is ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... 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 ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... 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 government ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... of the Church was now become the only resource of all their operations in finance, the vital principle of all their politics, the sole security for the existence of their power. It was necessary, by all, even the most violent means, to put every individual on the same bottom, and to bind the nation in one guilty interest ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the distant reflex of the grand struggle between Indra, the god of the sky, and Vritra, the demon of night and darkness, which forms the constant burden of the hymns of the Rig-veda. In this view there is some truth, but we doubt whether it fully exhibits the vital principle of the Zoroastrian religion, which is founded on a solemn protest against the whole worship of the powers of nature invoked in the Vedas, and on the recognition of one supreme power, the God of Light, in every ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... spirits who are joined with man. This intuition those 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 whereby the spirit, which is the man himself, is enabled ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... religion of vitality, of progress, of advancement. The contrast between it and Islam is that of movement with fixedness, of participation with sterility, of development with barrenness, of life with petrifaction. The first vital principle and the animating spirit of its birth must, indeed, abide ever the same, but the outer form must change with the changing days, and new offshoots of fresh sap and greenness be continually thrown out as witnesses to the vitality within; else were the vine withered and the branches ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... makes a further objection which, however, will only be of weight in the eyes of Vitalists. He says,[226] Pangenesis is not to be received because "it leads directly to the negation of a specific vital principle, co-ordinating and regulating all the movements, acts, and functions of the individuals in which it is incarnated. For Pangenesis of the individual is a term without meaning. If, in contemplating an {216} animal of high organization, we regard it purely as ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... 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
... a foreign government upon the right of selection 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 made no new nomination, and the ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the derangement of his digestion. When to all this we add the wasteful wear of spirits and strength from the slow corrosion of sensibility, the warfare of the passions, and the workings of a mind that allowed itself no sabbath, it is not to be wondered at that the vital principle in him should so soon have burnt out, or that, at the age of thirty-three, he should have had—as he himself drearily expresses it—"an old feel." To feed the flame, the all-absorbing flame, of his genius, the ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 475 - Vol. XVII, No. 475. Saturday, February 5, 1831 • Various
... vital principle remains in the sperm-cell, it lies dormant. That part of the cell which contains this principle is called the spermatozooen, which consists of a flattened body, having a long appendage tapering to the finest ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... sound basis; but they feel confident that, in the present circumstances, the measure which they have proposed may be safely adopted; and that, at the same time, the main provision of that law and the vital principle of preserving the convertibility of the bank-note may ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... honestly adhered to, the branches of industry 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 ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, - Vol. 2, Part 3, Andrew Jackson, 1st term • Edited by James D. Richardson
... 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
... left to his wife, but absolutely persisted in ignoring the plain fact that his visit to me sprang from the serious pecuniary interest which he and Annabella now had in the life and health of your humble servant. I made all the necessary jokes about the strength of the vital principle in Lady Malkinshaw, and the broken condition of my own constitution; but he solemnly abstained from understanding one of them. He resolutely kept up appearances in the very face of detection; not the faintest shade of red came over ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... passages of the Kuran, but regarding the moral character of Muhammad himself. The storm raised by Abulfazl's motion was, therefore, terrible. There was not a doctor or lawyer present who did not recognise that the motion attacked the vital principle of Islam, whilst the more clear-sighted and dispassionate recognised that the assertions made in their previous discussions had broken through 'the strong embankments of the clearest law and the ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... sober 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 ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... is, 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 ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... streams, limiting the amounts that can be withdrawn, restricting the filling up or silting of such streams, and qualifying the bridging or damming of such waterways. In small streams, such as are generally found in rural communities, the vital principle of ownership is always limited by the requirement that no owner shall so interfere with the normal quantity or quality of water in the stream as to prevent their full enjoyment by the next man downstream whose rights are equal with his own. This means, ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... 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] ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... or the creative activity of the universe. From the union and action of the "Tao" and the "Teh" proceeded the universe, including the human soul, which he taught was composed of several parts, among them being the "huen," or spiritual principle; and the "phi," or semi-material vital principle, which together animate the body. Lao-Tze said: "To be ignorant that the true self is immortal, is to remain in a grievous state of error, and to experience many calamities by reason thereof. Know ye, that there is a part of man which is subtle and spiritual, and which is ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... 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
... possesses 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
... pestilence, have not produced an equal amount of suffering. Indeed, it has combined the characteristics of the worst of those evils. It has devastated, like the storm, the busy hives of industry; it has exhausted, like famine, the life and vital principle of trade; and, like the pestilence, it has "walked in the darkness and wasted at noon-day." When we read of thousands of miserable wretches, in all the cities and towns of a great nation, huddled together like so many swine in a pen; in rags, squalor, and want; without ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... 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
... glimmering of consciousness attendant at the same time on the fearfully opening and shutting eyes and mouth of the one, and the beating heart and jerking neck of the other. The lower we descend in the scale of being, the more striking the instances which we receive of this divisibility of the vital principle. I have seen the two halves of the heart of a ray pulsating for a full quarter of an hour after they had been separated from the body and from each other. The blood circulates in the hind leg of a frog for many minutes after the removal of the heart, which meanwhile keeps up an independent ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... a 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 in the time of the first dynasty, about two thousand years before Christ. ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... 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 ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... poets, and 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 often necessary to the prosperity of another. The stream ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... savage Indian are cheered by it as well as the inhabitants of London and Paris;—its spirit takes up and incorporates surrounding materials, as a plant clothes itself with soil and climate, whilst it exhibits the working of a vital principle within independent of all accidental circumstances. And to judge with fairness of an author's works, we ought to distinguish what is inward and essential from what is outward and circumstantial. It is essential to poetry that it ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... have 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 its ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... us distinguish between the Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit: by the Spirit, the apostle meant the vital principle of new life from God, common to all believers—the animating Spirit of the Church of God; by the gifts of the Spirit, he meant the diversities of form in which He operates on individuals; its influence varied according to their respective peculiarities and characteristics. ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... 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 his army in existence. She had pledged ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... and rich a word to serve the limited purpose of numbering the years of undeveloped boys and girls. It should stand rather for the vital principle in men and women, ever expanding, and rebuilding, and refreshing the human organism, partly a physical, but perhaps in a greater degree ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... he championed 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 ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... authenticated instance where all notion of a 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 imperfect translations of half-breed interpreters. These "made the idea of soul intelligible ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... geometric reasoning some propositions are necessarily taken for granted. These are called axioms, and are commonly regarded as self-evident. Yet their vital principle is not so much that of being self-evident as being, from the nature of the case, incapable of demonstration. Our edifice must have some support to rest upon, and we take these axioms as its foundation. One ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... have many things to say; for in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... conditions has become the abiding faith of vast numbers of Americans, supposed that he was entering the field of practical politics, or dreamed of influencing elections by his hopes of economic equality. But he virtually founded the Populist party, which, as the vital principle of the Democratic party, came so near electing its candidate for the Presidency some years ago; and he is to be named first among our authors who have dealt with politics on their more human side since the days of the old antislavery ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... centralization—that is the doom of man, 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, ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... commitment has four other basic advantages. First, it reaffirms the primacy of local efforts—the vital principle that each nation bears primary responsibility for fighting terrorism within its territory. Second, it provides an internationally recognized baseline against which the efforts of all nations—including the ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - February 2003 • United States
... rising from his seat and adopting a tone at once contemptuous and dictatorial. "Do you not know," he continued, "that the Philosopher's Stone was and is but a figure of speech, which stands as some say for the perfect element in nature, or as others say for the vital principle—that vivifying power which evades and ever must evade the search of men? Do you not know that the sages whose speculations took that direction were endangered by accusations of witchcraft; and that it was to evade these and to give their researches such an aspect as would ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... spiritual source of the corporeal 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... sheet-anchor of 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 ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... 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 ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... material dissolution would be a relief. He 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 ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... will endeavour to prevent interference with his plans and future movements, and while striving to surprise and outwit the enemy he will exert every endeavour to prevent the application of this vital principle by the enemy. The commander of a force that is at rest will require security for that force in order that its rest may be undisturbed, and he will require the security to be assured in order that his plans for the overthrow of the enemy ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous
... which has been devised to explain the purpose of Egyptian embalming, is that "it was to unite the soul permanently to its body, and keep the vital principle from perishing or transmigrating; the body and soul ran together through the journey of the dead and its dread ordeal." 5 This arbitrary guess is incredible. The preservation of the body does not appear in any way not even to the rawest fancy to detain or unite the soul with it; for the thought ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... of their impending grave. Infanticide is practised as extensively and as legally in England, as it is on the banks of the Ganges; a circumstance which apparently has not yet engaged the attention of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. But the vital principle is an impulse from an immortal artist, and sometimes baffles, even in its tenderest phasis, the machinations of society for its extinction. There are infants that will defy even starvation and poison, unnatural mothers and demon nurses. Such was the nameless one of whom ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... information furnished by 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... soul is 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 that results ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... and Georgia distinctly avowed that, without this guarantee of protection to their property in slaves, they would not yield their assent to the Constitution; and the freemen of the North, reduced to the alternative of departing from the vital principle of their liberty, or of forfeiting the Union itself, averted their faces, and with trembling hand subscribed ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... way; but one feels at the end as one might 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
... submit the question of slavery to the decision of the bona fide people of Kansas, without any restriction or qualification whatever. All were cordially united upon the great doctrine of popular sovereignty, which is the vital principle of our free institutions. Had it then been insinuated from any quarter that it would be a sufficient compliance with the requisitions of the organic law for the members of a convention thereafter to be elected to withhold the question of slavery from the people ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... ocean to clamber on the rocks. Roswell had often seen that very coast peopled with seals, as it now appeared to be in activity with fragments of ice, that were writhing, and turning, and rising, one upon another, as if possessed of the vital principle. ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... our people is the vital principle of their political existence; without it, they are dead, or they live only to servitude; without it, there are two estates acting upon and against the third, instead of acting in co-operation with it; without it, if the people are oppressed by their judges, where is the tribunal ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... of the Federalist, argued that the power belonged to the judiciary; but it was not constitutionally recognised until 1801. "This," said Madison, "makes the judiciary department paramount, in fact, to the legislature, which was never intended, and can never be proper. In a government whose vital principle is responsibility, it never will be allowed that the legislative and executive departments should be completely subjected to the judiciary, in which that characteristic feature is so faintly seen." Wilson, on the other hand, justified the practice on the ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... essential to the formation of sugar, whilst on the contrary, mucilage, fecula, and the other vegetable materials that are secreted from the sap by appropriate organs, whose powers immediately depend on the vital principle, cannot be produced but during the ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... which attracted me there were none over which I laboured so long as over those which concern themselves with the nature of life. I probed deeply into the vital principle. The aim of medicine had been to drive away disease when it appeared. It seemed to me that a method might be devised which should so fortify the body as to prevent weakness or death from ever taking hold of ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the man of the proletariat, who uses his hands, his tongue, his back, his right arm, his five fingers, to live—well, this very man, who should be the first to economize his vital principle, outruns his strength, yokes his wife to some machine, wears out his child, and ties him to the wheel. The manufacturer—or I know not what secondary thread which sets in motion all these folk who with their foul hands mould ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... thou be, O Man! Power to thyself; no Helper hast thou here; 210 Here keepest thou in singleness thy state: No other can divide with thee this work: No secondary hand can intervene To fashion this ability; 'tis thine, The prime and vital principle is thine 215 In the recesses of thy nature, far From any reach of outward fellowship, Else is not thine at all. But joy to him, Oh, joy to him who here hath sown, hath laid Here, the foundation of his future years! ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... with what is due to a protective nationality. Here intrepid representatives of the people, on the gravest occasion that had arisen in an American assembly, justly refused to comply with an arbitrary royal command. Here first in modern times was recognized the vital principle of publicity in legislation. Here James Otis, as a pioneer patriot, poured forth his soul when his tongue was as a flame of fire,—John Adams, on the side of freedom, first showed himself to be a Colossus in debate,—Joseph Hawley first publicly denied ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... 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 ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... Therefore we, as Jews, must always insist upon the maintenance of the pure monotheistic idea for which we suffered and struggled, and for which our fathers died. We must maintain this as the mainstay and vital principle of Judaism. For this very reason, and for no other, we insist, especially from the point of view of a Jewish theological college, that this idea of a pure Jewish religion, the pure monotheistic idea, must be held unshakenly and without any change or any concession. And for that very reason ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • 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
... my daughter should be Queen 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 ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... purpose. It suffices if science permits me to postulate (a concession by science which I much doubt if it could make) that matter, as we know it, has the semblance of being what we call a substance, charged with a something which we define as energy, but which at all events simulates a vital principle resembling heat, seeking to escape into space, where it cools. Thus the stars, having blazed until their vital principle is absorbed in space, sink into relative torpor, or, as the astronomers say, die. The trees and plants diffuse their energy ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... blows at length quelled. They had gradually increased with the 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
... dead, according to its existing 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 indwelling—set herself, not to arrest ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... unassailable symbol. Here the vital principle of his faithfulness was entrenched as in an impregnable fortress. He would see Isabel's heart break ere she should ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... to save border 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. ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... best know you to be, I will take especial care that you shall be placed in some position after death where the revivifying moonbeams may not touch you, so that this shall truly be your end, and you shall rot away, leaving no trace behind of your existence, sufficient to contain the vital principle." ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... we find it in St. John's prologue, and as it was developed by the mystical philosophy of a later period. Not only is His pre-existence "in the form of God" clearly taught,[87] but He is the agent in the creation of the universe, the vital principle upholding and pervading all that exists. "The Son," we read in the Epistle to the Colossians,[88] "is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in Him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth; all things have been created through Him, and ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... 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, ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... 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 natural, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... important to note that this new organ is immediately connected with the 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 ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... 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 ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... interesting the more it is seen; and when it does not proceed in the order of this "modest charm of not too much," this remoteness of meaning where far more is inferred than is directly shown, there we may be sure the vital principle of ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... considered, into a sudden and 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 ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... and spirits 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
... constituents, such as clouds, vapors, gases, are well understood; as well as the modifying influence of those atmospheric elements upon what we call sunlight, and sun-heat. But the intangible and vital principle, or basis of the atmosphere, has in a measure escaped recognition. This principle is vito-magnetic in its character, and may be designated as static,[12] from its habit when in equilibrium, and also in contradistinction ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... disastrous, that of our cruisers was nearly always successful. By again sending these forth, with instructions not to compromise themselves with an enemy superior to them in numbers, we shall inflict great loss on English commerce. To attack that commerce is to attack the vital principle of England—to ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... 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, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... purchased with money. We owe it to ourselves and to posterity, and to the free institutions which we have inherited, to crush this hateful evil in its infancy, before it attains sufficient growth to endanger our political system. The honest and independent exercise of the right of suffrage is a vital principle in the theory of representative government. It is the only enduring foundation for a republic. Not only should the law punish every violation of this principle as a crime against the integrity of the State, but any person concerned in giving or receiving ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... 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 life. Suicide ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... 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 and persevering, charitable ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... given measure, it is his duty to think 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, and can afford, and is bound, to speak the truth. ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... 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 ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... call this 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 express a fact, without the smallest intention ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... nor yet at the next halting- point beyond; nor at the one beyond that. How often is this process to be repeated? and in what can it end but in the rehabilitation of the soul as an ethereal, spiritual, vital principle, apart from matter, which, nevertheless, it animates, vivifying the clay of our bodies? No one who has followed the course either of biology or psychology during this century, and more especially during the ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... a time when temptation to slaveholding was a third part what it is to-day, aside from the threat of danger hanging over it from the continuance of the war, and the supposed determination of the Northern conquerors to put an end to it. The vital principle of Slavery which overrides every other consideration, is the extra-profitable nature and state of slave-labor products. The writer has himself seen Slavery firmly seated in the saddle and unassailable in an exposed region of the South, with cotton at from eight to twelve cents on the pound, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... "chemical" because so much it is possible to know experimentally; and the very interesting examination of such higher forces as constantly seem to intrude in any nervous disturbance would here involve the discussion of a theoretical "vital principle"—something apart from and between the soul and physical activities—which ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... 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, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... is another, which yields all the consolations which you have drawn from it. It has demonstrated to the candid world, as well as to the American people themselves, that the great body of them everywhere are equally attached to the luminous and vital principle of our Constitution, which enjoins that the will of the majority shall prevail; that they understand the indissoluble union between true liberty and regular government; that they feel their duties no less than ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 4) of Volume 1: George Washington • James D. Richardson
... well from Shakspere. Rotten members, though small in themselves, are yet large enough to taint the whole body. And those impurities, like rank growths of vine, may be lopped away without injuring any vital principle. In perfect art the utmost purity of intention, design, and execution, alone is wisdom. Every tree—every flower, in defiance of adverse contingencies, grows with perfect will to be perfect: and, shall man, who hath what ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... for all fires. For nothing bears such a resemblance to an animal as fire. It is moved and nourished by itself, and by its brightness, like the soul, discovers and makes everything apparent; but in its quenching it principally shows some power that seems to proceed from our vital principle, for it makes a noise and resists, like an animal dying or violently slaughtered. And can you (looking upon ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... 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 ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... 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
... first characteristic of the war, a conflict between the two principles, the moribund principle of Nationality—in the Transvaal an oppressive, an artificial nationality—and the vital principle of ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... worth of the object in question. The insight, then, to which—in contradistinction to those ideals—philosophy is to lead us, is, that the real world is as it ought to be—that the truly good, the universal divine Reason, is not a mere abstraction, but a vital principle capable of realizing itself. This Good, this Reason, in its most concrete form, is God. God governs the world; the actual working of His government, the carrying out of His plan, is the history of the world. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... is a significant comment on the limitations of the baronial opposition that the ordinances should be the last great English law in the passing of which the commons were not consulted, and that a royalist triumph should be the occasion of the declaration of a vital principle. ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... from celestial to terrestrial things. What is there in them which does not prove the principle of an intelligent nature? First, as to vegetables; they have roots to sustain their stems, and to draw from the earth a nourishing moisture to support the vital principle which those roots contain. They are clothed with a rind or bark, to secure them more thoroughly from heat and cold. The vines we see take hold on props with their tendrils, as if with hands, and raise themselves as if they were ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... Antipater might have reasonably expected to arise from his connection with Olympias and Eurydice, were destined to a very short continuance, so far as he personally was concerned; for, not long after his return to Macedon, he fell sick of a dangerous disease, under which it was soon evident that the vital principle, at the advanced age to which he had attained, must soon succumb. In fact, Antipater himself soon gave up all hopes of recovery, and began at once to make arrangements for the final surrender of ...
— Pyrrhus - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... explaining everything by continual miracles; the metaphysical state (modern times) consists in man explaining everything by ideas, which he still continues to consider somewhat as beings, by abstractions, entities, vital principle, attraction, gravitation, soul, faculty of the soul, etc. The positive state consists in that man explains and will explain all things, or rather limits himself and will limit himself to verifying them, by the links that he will see they have with ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... '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, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... the running the risk entirely myself), you may permit me to choose my own time and mode of publication. With regard to the late volume, the present run against it or me may impede it for a time, but it has the vital principle of permanency within it, as you may perhaps one day discover. I wrote to you on another ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... no doubt, that the vital principle of The Union from the beginning had been compromise, mutual concession, and if it was to be severed, preferred that it should be peacefully. Still, his moods and wishes varied as did those of many careful watchers ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... 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, there are only one hundred causes of offence. ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... Vital principle-(or Jiva)- 2. Ushtanas-Vital heat a form of force indestructible, (or force). and when disconnected with one set of atoms, becoming attracted ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... 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 invasions. If war had been the ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... Office, and the Colonial Office to the House of Commons, in which every lash which was inflicted under magisterial authority would be told and counted. My apprehension is that the result of continuing for twelve years this dead slavery,—this state of society destitute of any vital principle,—will be that the whole negro population will sink into weak and drawling inefficacy, and will be much less fit for liberty at the end of the period than at the commencement. My hope is that the system will die a natural death; that ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... over trees, producing and regulating their phaenomena, every plant or animal has now a Vegetative Soul, the [Greek: Threptike phyge] of Aristotle. At a later period the Vegetative Soul has become a Plastic Force, and still later, a Vital Principle. Objects now do all that they do because it is their Essence to do so, or by reason of an inherent Virtue. Phaenomena are accounted for by supposed tendencies and propensities of the abstraction Nature; which, ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... 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
... another. "The Universe is simply a rushing together of atoms." "There can be no immortality," asserts a third. "We are but dust, and to dust we shall return." "What is called by idealists the SOUL," argues another, "is simply the vital principle composed of heat and air, which escapes from the body at death, and mingles again with its native element. A candle when lit emits flame; blow out the light, the flame vanishes—where? Would it not be madness to assert the ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... 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 ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... Jefferson and Hamilton fought in 1776, as Calhoun and Clay in 1828, as Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis in 1860, namely, the limit of State rights and federal power. The enfranchisement of woman involves the same vital principle of our government that is dividing and distracting the two great political parties at ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... appointment could have stood firm against such terrible and reiterated shocks. Nothing less than a Divine Foundation, and a strength not of this world could have borne the Church through the ages of persecution, not only without loss of all vital principle, but even with actual invigoration ...
— A Key to the Knowledge of Church History (Ancient) • John Henry Blunt
... the profession: pharmacopolists, instead of compounding medicine, must compound with their creditors; they are utterly ruined. Mercury is no longer in the ascendent; all doctors have to do now is to carry a small battery about them, a sort of galvanic pocket-pistol, I may say, and restore the vital principle ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... trismus, and other spasmodic affections. Of its power to relieve spasm there can be no doubt. What has been related of its sedative qualities, is abundantly sufficient to establish that fact. Cramps, convulsions, and even the vital principle itself, give way before the exhibition of this deadly narcotic. Hence, to its power of prostrating the muscular energy, it owes its efficacy in preventing ...
— A Dissertation on the Medical Properties and Injurious Effects of the Habitual Use of Tobacco • A. McAllister
... 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 of the Turkish nation. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... rapidly and powerfully advancing. One thing, and only one, can prevent its entire success. The frenzy of drunkenness cannot arrest its goings. The hundreds of thousands in the armies of intemperance cannot resist its march. But the temperate can. If backward to come up to the vital principle of this work, they will prevent its accomplishment. But the banner of triumph will wave in peace over all the land, hailed by thousands of grateful captives from the gripe of death, in spite of all ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... 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 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 blend. 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 worms. Its wan, sickly features tell ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Locke's work may have been not seldom confused and stumbling; but it gave to the principle of consent a permanent place in English politics. It is the age which saw the crystallization of the party-system, and therein it may perhaps lay claim to have recognized what Bagehot called the vital principle of representative government. Few discussions of the sphere of government have been so productive as that in which Adam Smith gave a new basis to economic science. Few controversies have, despite its dullness, so carefully investigated the eternal problem of Church and State as that ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... 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 were ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... 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
... deals in the Natural World does not enter at all into the Spiritual World, and therefore, it might be argued, the Law of Biogenesis cannot be capable of extension into it. The Law of Continuity seems to be snapped at the point where the natural passes into the spiritual. The vital principle of the body is a different thing from the vital principle of the spiritual life. Biogenesis deals with {bios}, with the natural life, with cells and germs, and as there are no exactly similar cells and germs in the Spiritual ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... 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 for lack ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... them, to tolerate religious differences, and to incorporate into their legislation the spirit of liberty which is now the life-blood of our institutions. The religion of the Society of Friends is still an active force, having its full share of influence upon our civilization. The vital principle—'The Inward Light'—scoffed at and denounced by the Puritans as a delusion, is recognized as a profound spiritual ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... the southern and western counties. In the province of Ulster, in the north of Ireland, the tenantry were of another sort, and there were other means of livelihood than agriculture. Out of this condition had sprung the so-called "Ulster tenant-right," the vital principle of which was that a tenant could not be evicted so long as he paid his rent, and "could sell the good will of his farm for what it would fetch in the market." This tenant-right was what Palmerston dismissed with the scornful remark that it was another name for "landlord's wrong." ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... design (see pp. 370, 375), astriving to ignore or forget the past rather than a reaching out after any well-understood, positive end; as such, it possesses the negative strength of protest rather than the affirmative strength of a vital principle. Its lack of cohesion is seen in the division of its adherents into groups, some looking to nature for inspiration, while others decry this as a mistaken quest; some seeking to emphasize structural lines, and others to ignore them altogether. All, however, are ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... the soul in sleep has its dangers, for if from any cause the soul should be permanently detained away from the body, the person thus deprived of the vital principle must die. There is a German belief that the soul escapes from a sleeper's mouth in the form of a white mouse or a little bird, and that to prevent the return of the bird or animal would be fatal to the sleeper. Hence in Transylvania ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... with that of Gregory, it may be said that we have touched upon the vital principle of modern music. The novelty in the Gregorian chant consisted in its absolute emancipation from the tyranny of actual words and declamation; while the idea, the poetic principle, or religious ecstasy still remained the ideal to be expressed in the ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... but it was thick and not easily absorbed. This led Dr. Harry T. Hollman, a member of the Government Medical Corps at Honolulu, to call for a more diluted form of the oil, one freed from extraneous matter, an ethyl ester, or the vital principle, if there was one. The decomposition of the oil, he said, should be accomplished outside ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... the poor mother. For hours she lay in blessed oblivion. But the vital principle, which often displays its wondrous power in the feeblest frames, asserted its triumph over death, and she awoke again to the remembrance of losses that could never be ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... mind and matter which is about him. He fails to see, however, that the thing which demonstrates must necessarily precede the thing demonstrated, as life must necessarily precede its manifestation. In admitting the existence of "vital manifestation," therefore, he virtually admits an antecedent vital principle, lying back of an effect as a cause, which must exclude anything like a contradictory judgment, so long as the laws of the human mind, in respect to logical antecedents and consequents, remain ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... living things were supposed to possess souls.[470] Probably the soul was conceived of at first as simply the vital principle, and the power of the plant was thought of as similar to the power of an animal or any other living thing. In the course of time this soul, the active principle, was distinguished from the vital principle, was isolated and regarded as an independent being dwelling in ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... the same we must fight It out. Compromise is, in the nature of the case, impossible. It can mean only surrender. Had there been an inch more of ground for us to yield without total submission, the war would have been, for the present, staved off. We turned to bay only when driven back to the vital principle of our polity and the vital ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... that there is a greater temptation to exercise some of the functions of the General Government through the States than to trespass on their rightful sphere. The "absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority" was at the beginning of the century enforced by Jefferson as "the vital principle of republics;" and the events of the last four years have established, we will hope forever, that there ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... 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 Peace Negotiations - Between the Governments of the South African Republic and - the Orange Free State, etc.... • J. D. Kestell
... 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 would be too slow in performing. Accordingly, as was to have been expected, ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... sprout; while, not being above one or two degrees below the freezing-point, the tubers will not be frostbitten. Another mode is to scoop out the eyes with a very small scoop, and keep the roots buried in earth; a third mode is to destroy the vital principle, by kiln-drying, steaming, or scalding; a fourth is to bury them so deep in dry soil, that no change of temperature will reach them; and thus, being without air, they will remain upwards of ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... considered in connection with the fact that the nervous fluid of the animal kingdom is evidently a modification of electricity, and probably constitutes the vital force of the animal, the theory of its identification, under another modification, with the vital principle in the vegetable kingdom also, as deduced from experiments like those just adverted to, receives strong confirmation, and is now, I believe, being adopted by many of the ...
— A Newly Discovered System of Electrical Medication • Daniel Clark
... 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 ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... did not find in Pope—has been contended for here as a necessity in the best, if not in all good, letters; and "violence" is almost fatal to them. Of a certain kind of letter Byron was no doubt a skilful practitioner.[26] But to some it will or may always seem that the vital principle of his correspondence is to that of the real "Best" as stage life to life off the stage. These two can sometimes approach each other marvellously: but they ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... fanaticism for her to 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 forget that the noblest men the South has ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... when the bodily constitution is gone, life is no longer endurable, though pampered with all kinds of meats and drinks, and having all wealth and all power; and shall we be told that when the very essence of the vital principle is undermined and corrupted, life is still worth having to a man, if only he be allowed to do whatever he likes with the single exception that he is not to acquire justice and virtue, or to escape ...
— The Republic • Plato
... without this reversion to the remaining models of antique culture, how could the European races have become conscious of historical continuity; how could the corrupt system of Papal domination have been broken by Reform; how, finally, could Science, the vital principle of our present civilization, have ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... to desire and seek the presence of the beloved, as of something suitable and belonging to him. The second union is caused formally by love; because love itself is this union or bond. In this sense Augustine says (De Trin. viii, 10) that "love is a vital principle uniting, or seeking to unite two together, the lover, to wit, and the beloved." For in describing it as "uniting" he refers to the union of affection, without which there is no love: and in saying that "it seeks to unite," ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... 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, and vice versa: it reveals ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... 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 ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... the functions of the 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, is not the substance ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... movement so sudden 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 and antagonism ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... derangement was an effect instead 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
... designed only as a temporary measure; and thus a temporary measure, passed merely for the convenience of Congress, is made to affect the vital principle of an important act. If the proviso of the act of September, 1841, can be suspended for the whole period of a temporary law, why not for the whole period of a permanent law? In fact, a doubt may be well entertained, according to strict legal rules, whether the condition, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... into 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
... commodities encourages British industry as much as the purchase of British commodities" (Principles of Political Economy, p. 152). The important exception to this theorem arising from the nature of the commodities exported and imported has been already dealt with. Let us examine the vital principle of the theorem. "The capital," says Adam Smith, "which is employed in purchasing in one part of the country in order to sell in another, the produce of the industry of that country, generally replaces by every such operation two distinct capitals, that had both been employed in the ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke |
