"Vital force" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... science, and claimed its autonomy. The result was a fatal breach in the defences of materialism, for biology is being driven to accept final causes, and would be glad to adopt some theory of vitalism, if it could do so without falling back into the old error of a mysterious 'vital force.' Biological truth, it is plain, cannot be reduced to the purely quantitative categories of mathematics and physics. Then psychology aspired to be a philosophy of real existence, and attacked both absolutism and materialism. The pretensions of psychology rehabilitated subjectivism and ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... saw, carried on the old classical tradition, bringing forth monuments like the Annals of Tigearnac; and there was the same vigor and vital force in every part of the nation's life. The coming of the Normans changed this in no essential regard. There was something added in architecture, the Norman modifying the old native style; the castle and keep gradually taking the place ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... destroying agencies of sun or frost. To any place that begins to weaken under toil comes an accession from the abundant internal heat collected and stored up against the day of need; it fills the vacancy, restores the vital force, and lengthens endurance to the utmost. Past exertion means not dissipation but increase of force, which can be fanned into ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... beaten man; but Hereward was spent. He had lived his life, and had no more life which he could live; for every man, it would seem, brings into the world with him a certain capacity, a certain amount of vital force, in body and in soul; and when that is used up, the man must sink down into some sort of second childhood, and end, like Hereward, very much where he began; unless the grace of God shall lift him up above the capacity of the mere flesh, into a life ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... idea of him, must come to the truth 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 is the ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
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