"Vital principle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in tetanus, 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 ...
— A Dissertation on the Medical Properties and Injurious Effects of the Habitual Use of Tobacco • A. McAllister
... 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 ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... that are good for one are good for the other. A girl who develops a strong agile body, at the same time improves her brain. A girl with weak, flabby muscles cannot have the strength of character that goes with normal physical power. It has been said, that "health is the vital principle of ...
— How Girls Can Help Their Country • Juliette Low
... interesting as being one of the few allusions to be found in the Zu-Vendi ritual to a vague divine essence independent of the material splendour of the orb they worship. 'Taia', the word used here, has a very indeterminate meaning, and signifies essence, vital principle, spirit, ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... 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 may be developed. He will, therefore, detach a ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous
... general, for all those matters which will call for disbursements out of the national treasury. The conclusion is, that there must be interwoven, in the frame of the government, a general power of taxation, in one shape or another. Money is, with propriety, considered as the vital principle of the body politic; as that which sustains its life and motion, and enables it to perform its most essential functions. A complete power, therefore, to procure a regular and adequate supply of it, as far as the resources of the community will permit, may be regarded as an indispensable ingredient ...
— The Federalist Papers
... life with which it 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 World, the Law cannot therefore apply. All which is as true ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... 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, in the matter of quantity, that while ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... 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 back of each set of motives is a vital principle. In the one case the lower self, in the other the higher self, that is to say "I" ...
— The Discipline of War - Nine Addresses on the Lessons of the War in Connection with Lent • John Hasloch Potter
... 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 ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... 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, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... 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 it. It is useless that I should recount my researches. You would scarce comprehend ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... evinced, and, no doubt, increased 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 whole powers of his nature, physical ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 475 - Vol. XVII, No. 475. Saturday, February 5, 1831 • Various
... have troubled your Lordships with the system of confederacy and connivance, which, under his auspices, was the vital principle of almost the whole service. There is one member of the service which I have omitted: but whether I ought to have put it first, or, as I do now, last, I must confess I am at some loss; because, though it appears to be ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... sentence written upon it,—"And behold, it was very good." And, observe again, it is not merely as it renders the edifice a book of various knowledge, or a mine of precious thought, that variety is essential to its nobleness. The vital principle is not the love of Knowledge, but the love of Change. It is that strange disquietude of the Gothic spirit that is its greatness; that restlessness of the dreaming mind, that wanders hither and ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... and anatomy had taught me the fallacy of the medical superstition which holds the gray matter of the brain and the vital principle to be inseparable. I had seen men living with pistol balls imbedded in the medulla oblongata. I had seen the hemispheres and the cerebellum removed from the crania of birds and small animals, and yet they did ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... the house of a female friend, oppressed with grief, quitted her carriage, to sit for a few moments near the fountain of Trevi; before that abundant cascade, which, falling in the midst of Rome, seems like the vital principle of this tranquil abode. When this cascade ceases to play for some days, one would say that Rome is struck with stupor. It is the noise of carriages that we expect to hear in other capitals; but ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... this point; 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 last five-and-twenty years, will tolerate the reintroduction of ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... 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, camp ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... my professional career, I had snatched leisure for some professional treatises, which had made more or less sensation, and one of them, entitled "The Vital Principle; its Waste and Supply," had gained a wide circulation among the general public. This last treatise contained the results of certain experiments, then new in chemistry, which were adduced in support of a theory I entertained as to the re-invigoration of the human system by principles similar to those ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... before they were made in the laboratory. It used to be thought that organic compounds, the products of vegetable and animal life, could only be produced by organized beings, that they were created out of inorganic matter by the magic touch of some "vital principle." But since the chemist has learned how, he finds it easier to make organic than inorganic substances and he is confident that he can reproduce any compound that he can analyze. He cannot only imitate the manufacturing ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... Candidate has appeared amongst us, and concluded, for the present, his labours in the County. They require no further notice here than an expression of thanks for the success with which he has co-operated with the Author of these pages to demonstrate, by the whole of his itinerant proceedings, that the vital principle of the Opposition ostensibly headed by him, is at enmity with the bonds by which society is held ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... 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 ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... because love moves man 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," he ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... more intelligible, this vital principle is compared to magnetism, to electricity, and to galvanism; or it is roundly stated to be oxygen. 'Tis like a camel, or like a whale, or ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... fought the battle of civil freedom, Pym is no less conspicious in having grasped the principles on which it must be fought. He saw that if either Crown or Parliament must go down, better for England that it should be the crown. He saw also, that the vital principle in Parliament lay in the House of Commons. If the King refused to act with them, it should be treated as an abdication, and Parliament must act without him, and if the Lords obstructed reform, then they ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... abolish the present-day mode of living. If it wishes to abolish this mode of living, it would have to abolish itself, for it exists only in opposition to the same. No living person, however, would believe that defects in his existence are due to the vital principle of his life, but would rather attribute them to circumstances outside his ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... 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, it would ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... 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 ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... 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 ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... To expand the idea of the State into that of humanity, and thus to entrust apparently higher duties to the individual, leads to error, since in a human race conceived as a whole struggle and, by Implication, the most essential vital principle would be ruled out. Any action in favour of collective humanity outside the limits of the State and nationality is impossible. Such conceptions belong to the wide domain ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... to certain religions a character of their own, acharacter which, if I am not mistaken, constitutes the vital principle of our own religion, and of the other two which, in that respect, stand nearest to Christianity—Buddhism and Mohammedanism. This is not a mere outward difference, depending on the willingness of others to join or not to join; it is an inward difference ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... 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 machinery, no ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... dynasties of Asia have been continually subverted by a crafty vizier in the palace, or a victorious general in the camp, the Ottoman succession has been confirmed by the practice of five centuries, and is now incorporated with the vital principle ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... 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 ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... injuries; makes up losses; overcomes and cures diseases. Von Helment called it "Archeus"; Stahl called it "Anima;" Whytt called it the "sentiment principle;" Dr. Cullen called it "Caloric;" Dr. Darwin called it "Sensorial energy"; Rush called it "Occult cause;" and many other names such as "Vital Principle," "Living power," "Conservative Power," "Odic Force," etc., etc., have been given to it. We of India have recognised it and devised Yoga methods for controlling it; we call it Prana and only in India do you come across men who possess pranic control ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... self-government 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... never regarded himself as what is called a religious man—it was more than ten years since he had entered a church or heard a sermon—yet in this very relinquishment of self, was there not something of the vital principle, of the quickening germ of all great religions? Though he had never said in his thoughts "I believe this" or "I hold by this creed or that commandment," his nature was essentially one in which the intellect must be supreme either for good or for evil; and in his soul, which had been ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided; absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital, principle of republics, from which there is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism; a well disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war, till regulars may relieve them; the supremacy of the civil over the military authority; economy in the public expense, that labor may ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... immediacy is the deepest possible immediacy, it is an immediacy of experience where the self comes into contact with its own vital principle—the Universal Spiritual Life—and brings about a fundamental change in the life of the individual. The inner life is no longer governed by sense impressions and impulses, but the outward life is lived and viewed from the standpoint of ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... is finished, there is an end also of inattention, for the discussion begins. The central and vital principle of all these clubs is that a poem by Robert Browning is a sort of prize enigma, of which the solution is to be reached rather by wild and daring guessing than by any commonplace process of reasoning. Although ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... pride of wealth and arrogance of power" displayed within the United States, was the motive assigned for the association. "A constant circulation of useful information, and a liberal communication of republican sentiments, were thought to be the best antidotes to any political poison with which the vital principle of civil liberty might be attacked;" and to give the more extensive operation to their labors, a corresponding committee was appointed, through whom they would communicate with other societies which might be established on similar ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... 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 strike her ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... the organic conception carried {203} out in Aristotle's discussion of the Vital principle or Soul in the various grades of living creatures and in man. It will be sufficient to quote at length a chapter of Aristotle's treatise on the subject (De Anima, ii. p. 1) in which this fundamental conception of Aristotle's philosophy is very ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... Further, the corporeal members obey the concept of the soul as regards local movement, as having in themselves some principle of life. In natural bodies, however, there is no vital principle. Therefore they do not obey the angels in ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... evident danger signal) to an adulation of science and of instinct. From one side comes the cry, 'Man is a beast'; from the other, 'Trust your instincts.' The sole manifest employment of reason is to overthrow itself. Yet it should be, in conjunction with the imagination, the vital principle of control. ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... visage, action, and deportment of the Seminoles form the most striking picture of happiness in this life; joy, contentment, love, and friendship, without guile or affectation, seem inherent in them, or predominant in their vital principle, for it leaves them with but the last breath of life.... They are fond of games and gambling, and amuse themselves like children, in relating extravagant stories, to cause surprise and mirth." [Footnote: ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... never 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 ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... truth &c. 494; actual existence. presence &c. (existence in space) 186; coexistence &c. 120. stubborn fact, hard fact; not a dream &c. 515; no joke. center of life, essence, inmost nature, inner reality, vital principle. [Science of existence], ontology. V. exist, be; have being &c. n.; subsist, live, breathe, stand, obtain, be the case; occur &c. (event) 151; have place, prevail; find oneself, pass the time, vegetate. consist in, lie in; be comprised in, be contained in, be constituted by. come into existence ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... the width of only a foot or two in the centre. This circumstance, and the generally sleepy air of the whole prospect here, together with the animated and contrasting state of the reverse facade, suggested to the imagination that on the adaptation of the building for farming purposes the vital principle of the house had turned round inside its body to face the other way. Reversals of this kind, strange deformities, tremendous paralyses, are often seen to be inflicted by trade upon edifices—either ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... had not heard. "Every act of your business career, sir, has been a refusal to recognize those who have worked with you. Your whole life has been an over assertion of your personal independence and a denial of the greatest of all laws—the law of dependence, which is the vital principle of life itself. And so you have, through these years, upheld and exemplified to the working people the very selfishness to which Jake Vodell appeals now with such sad effectiveness. It is the class ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... 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 ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... closes over me, 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 which have made his ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... 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 ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... 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 is to pass, it has little enough time to get to the Senate. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... as 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 they have not, a soul wherewith ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... 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 United States—can be ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - February 2003 • United States
... of Edith had been severely tried, and her head now rested upon the bosom of her father, whose arms were required for her support, in a state of feebleness and exhaustion, leaving it doubtful, at moments, whether the vital principle had not ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... the vital principle your Government had in view was the destruction of our independence, and in our proposal the independence of the two Republics with regard to foreign relations is given up. I was therefore of opinion that the two parties might come to an arrangement on this basis. ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... would have obtained the blessing of a hidden phoenix! Of late all for the sake of your honourable self, His Majesty, above, confers upon us his heavenly benefits; while we, below, show forth the virtue of our ancestors! And it is mainly because the vital principle of the hills, streams, sun, and moon, and the remote virtue of our ancestors have been implanted in you alone that this good fortune has attained me Cheng and my wife! Moreover, the present emperor, bearing in mind the great bounty shewn by heaven and earth in promoting a ceaseless succession, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... 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
... which includes an equality of burdens, is a vital principle in our theory of government. The effect of the constitution has been obvious in the preponderance it has given to the slave-holding states over the other states. But the extension of this disproportionate power to the new states would be unjust and odious. The ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... that of active vegetation, they will not 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 ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... 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 ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... 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 agitation. Without too great disregard of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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 ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... front rank of recent essayists by the three 'Obiter Dicta' and 'Res Judicatae' volumes of manly, luminous, penetrating essays, full of racy humor and sudden wit; of a generous appreciativeness that seeks always for the vital principle which gave the writer his hold on men; still more, of a warm humanity and a sure instinct for all the higher and finer things of the spirit which never fail to strike chords in the heart as well as the brain. No writer's work leaves a better taste in the mouth; he makes us think ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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
... injustice of State law, we are fighting the same battle as 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
... had differed not only regarding the interpretation of various 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 ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... his ground and let the stone strike him in the side. Then, with a screech like the vital principle of forty thousand tom-cat fights—a screech that left a sediment in the ear-drums of the listeners for the balance of the morning—he fairly flew up the straight side of the cliff, followed by ...
— The Mascot of Sweet Briar Gulch • Henry Wallace Phillips
... 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 for ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Ferdinand in this most arduous and protracted war, but the sage Agapida is more disposed to give credit to the counsels and measures of the queen, who, he observes, though less ostensible in action, was in truth the very soul, the vital principle, of this great enterprise. While King Ferdinand was bustling in his camp and making a glittering display with his gallant chivalry, she, surrounded by her saintly counsellors in the episcopal palace of Jaen, ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... 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 ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... looked at each other with eyes that were on either side a declaration of the deception suffered. It was a strange opposition, of the like of which she had never dreamed—an opposition in which the vital principle of the one was a thing of contempt to the other. It was not her fault—she had practised no deception; she had only admired and believed. She had taken all the first steps in the purest confidence, and then she had suddenly found the infinite vista of a multiplied life to ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... 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 ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... 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 in the invisible ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... through war. War has been the national industry of the Prussian people. Therefore war is considered by Treitschke as the vital principle ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... replied, "I have many things to say; for in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled underfoot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... 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 ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet
... Machaon, Pythagoras, Democritus, Praxagoras, who invented the arteries, and Dioctes, 'qui primus urinae animum dedit.' All these taught orally. Then came Hippocrates, the eighteenth from Aesculapius, and of him we have manuscripts; to him we owe 'the vital principle.' He also invented the bandage, and tapped for water on the chest; and above all he dissected; yet only quadrupeds, for the brutal prejudices of the pagan vulgar withheld the human body from the knife of science. Him followed Aristotle, who gave ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... itself in the motives which satisfy it, in the zest and power of rectitude. Christianity has liberated the world, not as a system of ethics, not as a philosophy of altruism, but by its revelation of the power of pure and unselfish love. Its vital principle is not its code, but its motive. Love, clear-sighted, loyal, personal, is its breath and immortality. Christ came, not to save Himself, assuredly, but to save the world. His motive, His example, are every man's key to his own gifts and happiness. The ethical code he taught may no doubt be matched, ...
— When a Man Comes to Himself • Woodrow Wilson
... the 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 ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... 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 is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism; a well-disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war, till regulars may relieve them; the supremacy ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 1: Thomas Jefferson • Edited by James D. Richardson
... of 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
... thorough education and moral training has been widely felt. If the high educational standard presented in the scholastic treatise of Barclay and the moral philosophy of Dymond has been lowered or disowned by many who, still retaining the name of Quakerism, have lost faith in the vital principle wherein precious testimonials of practical righteousness have their root, and have gone back to a dead literalness, and to those materialistic ceremonials for leaving which our old confessors suffered bonds and death, Haverford, at least, has been in ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of Satan be not a vital principle of your religion, I do not know what is. There is only one dogma higher. You think it is safe, and I daresay it is fashionable, to fall into this lax and really thoughtless discrimination between what is ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... declared; "it is treason to the spirit of the Constitution; it is infidelity in religion; the cross itself is a compromise, and is pleaded by many who refuse all charity to their fellow-citizens. It is the vital principle of social existence; it unites the family circle; it sustains the church, and upholds nationalities.... But the Republicans complain that, having won a victory, we ask them to surrender its fruits. We do not wish them to give up any political advantage. We urge measures which are ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... 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 they are watchful over their ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 4) of Volume 1: George Washington • James D. Richardson
... destroy its essence than did the heat of the sun, and in your first mouthful of the produce, which may in appearance give no hint of its origin, you taste the cool sea depths and feel yourself nourished as if with some vital principle. ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... apple, they say, too, gives to the face of the fair ruddiness, but the tint is it not too bold, compared with maiden blush which bepaints the cheek of the beauty who rightly understands the use of the vital principle of the papaw? Those who have complexions to retain or restore let them understand ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... vital principle in systematic beneficence is developed, which challenges our special attention. It is, the duty of making provision for the dissemination of charity previous to the reception of our income. This is a point ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... circumstances: for example, the men who threw the bomb at Sarajevo which started the present war were not Anarchists, but Nationalists. And those Anarchists who are in favor of bomb-throwing do not in this respect differ on any vital principle from the rest of the community, with the exception of that infinitesimal portion who adopt the Tolstoyan attitude of non-resistance. Anarchists, like Socialists, usually believe in the doctrine of the class war, and if they use bombs, it is as Governments use bombs, ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... world around us has compromised the same. 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 we ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... explained when it is ascribed to a power of which nothing is known except that it is the hypothetical agent of the process, gave rise, in the next century, to the animism of Stahl; and, later, to the doctrine of a vital principle, that "asylum ignorantiae" of physiologists, which has so easily accounted for everything and explained nothing, down ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... he accepts the conditions attached to his decision. On this he is presented with the potion, which immediately destroys his memory and sense of identity, and dissipates the thin gaseous tenement which he has inhabited: he becomes a bare vital principle, not to be perceived by human senses, nor appreciated by any chemical test. He has but one instinct, which is that he is to go to such and such a place, where he will find two persons whom he is to importune till they consent to undertake him; but whether he is ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... change in the channel of a boy's life, a change which is due to the normal channel (or channels) of his expansive energies having been blocked by years of educational repression. His wild, ruffianly outrages are perhaps the last despairing effort that his vital principle makes to assert itself, before it finally gives up the struggle ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... 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. This plan philosophy strives ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... 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." ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... compliments to Mr. Kerby, the artist, and is desirous of having his portrait done, to be engraved from, and placed at the beginning of the voluminous work on 'The Vital Principle; or, Invisible Essence of Life,' which the Professor is now ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... 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 ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... their mouths! Those Liberals, those temporisers, compromisers, a concourse of atoms! glorify themselves in the animal satisfaction of sucking the juice of the fruit, for which they pay with their souls. They have no true cohesion, for they have no vital principle. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to his poetry, egotism is the vital principle of his imagination, which it is difficult for him to kindle on any subject with which his own character and interests are not identified; but by the introduction of fictitious incidents, by change of scene or time, he has enveloped his poetical disclosures in a system impenetrable except to a ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... history of the Redeemer is re-enacted. In the several passages which refer to this subject the idea is that the changed life is based upon an ethical dying and rising again with Christ.[4] The Christ within the heart is the vital principle and dynamic energy by which the believer lives and triumphs over every obstacle—the world, sin, sorrow, and death itself. 'I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.'[5] All that makes life, 'life indeed'—an ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... treasures of Greek and Latin literature, exposed to the danger of perishing and impaired by much actual loss, exerted no influence on the minds of those who still used the tongues to which they belong. Greek letters, as we have seen, decayed with the Byzantine power, and the vital principle in both became extinct long before the sword of the Turkish conqueror inflicted the final blow. The fate of Latin literature was not less deplorable. When province after province of the Roman dominions was ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... 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
... they differed on many points of faith (for Isabel held that Catholicism was the highest form of Christian mysticism, and in this Gordon did not agree with her), they were at one in regarding religion as a vital principle and a guiding rule of life and action. They were at one too in ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... added to what He had brought to light—for in Him all diverging lines at last found their origin and their end. As to whether or no He would prove to be personally immortal was an wholly irrelevant thought; it would be indeed fitting if through His means the vital principle should disclose its last secret; but no more than fitting. Already His spirit was in the world; the individual was no more separate from his fellows; death no more than a wrinkle that came and went across the inviolable sea. For man had learned at last that the race ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... the newly-awakened mind. All that science could invent, all that art could embody, all that mechanical ingenuity could dare, all that wealth could lavish, whatever there was of human energy which was panting for pacific utterance, wherever there stirred the vital principle which instinctively strove to create and to adorn at an epoch when vulgar violence and destructiveness were the general tendencies of humanity, all gathered around these magnificent temples, as their aspiring pinnacles ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... products of the later mediaeval genius. But 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 ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... law of Nature, which declares that all sublunary shapes of matter shall be limited in their duration, but which decrees, also, that their element shall never perish. Generation after generation, both in animal and vegetable life, passes away, but the vital principle is transmitted to posterity, and the species continue to flourish. Thus, also, do authors beget authors, and having produced a numerous progeny, in a good old age they sleep with their fathers, that is to say, with the authors ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... melancholy memories of the past. They were interesting, too, from this very pretty but very ignorant little girl in this backward little Southern town. She was a flash of sunlight through a soft gray cloud; a vigorous shoot from an old moss-covered stump—she was life, young life, the vital principle, breaking through the cumbering envelope, and asserting its right to ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... 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 sense of ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... nature to Matter. In the mind they are as 'anticipations of morality' springing up, not indeed 'from certain rules or propositions arbitrarily printed on the soul as on a book,' but from some more inward and vital Principle in intellectual beings, as such whereby these have within themselves a natural determination to do some things ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... 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 the experience of ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... to reach any rational conclusion on the question of the nature and origin of life on this planet, he soon finds himself in close quarters with two difficulties. He must either admit of a break in the course of nature and the introduction of a new principle, the vital principle, which, if he is a man of science, he finds it hard to do; or he must accept the theory of the physico-chemical origin of life, which, as a being with a soul, he finds it equally hard to do. In other words, he must either draw an arbitrary line between the inorganic and the organic when he ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... 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 example of such a geometric axiom is that only one straight line can be drawn between ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... extraordinary power—extraordinary because you cannot tell where it is, nor how it is—you raise it. Why cannot a dead person do the same? Strange question you will say to yourself with a smile—but one easily answered! Why, because in such a person life is extinct—there is no vital principle—the heart is stopped—the blood has ceased to flow in its regular channels! Ay! but let me ask you why that life is extinct?—why that breath has stopped?—and why that blood has ceased to flow? There was just the same amount of air when the person died as before! ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... attraction; each turns round its own centre, and moves in a spiral towards the centre of the whole, towards which centre they all tend with infinite passional ardour. For in this centre resides the sun of suns, the unity of unities, the temple, the altar of the universe, the sacred fire of Vesta, the vital principle ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... these had no shelves, and served for storing firewood and bottles of various kinds. From this he removed the contents, and lifting the statue, which, possibly because its substance had been affected in some subtle and inexplicable manner by the vital principle that had so lately permeated it, proved less ponderous than might have been reasonably expected, he pushed it well into the recess, and turned the ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... scarcely fail, unless it possesses a heart of great natural depravity, of becoming a good man, and it is thus that infant schools may become a great and lasting blessing to the country. But where this is overlooked—where the vital principle of the infant system is rejected, and the mere mechanical parts alone retained, as to any great and lasting benefit, it will be a complete and unhappy failure. That the grand object of the infant system may be accomplished, namely, of raising up a generation superior to ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... foreign nations the moderation and firmness which govern our councils, and to our citizens the necessity of uniting in support of the laws and the rights of their country, and has thus long frustrated those usurpations and spoliations which, if resisted, involved war; if submitted to, sacrificed a vital principle of our national independence. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... The vital principle, in the human body, can so far resist the influences of a variety of poisons, slowly introduced into it, that their effects shall be unobserved, till, under the operation of an exciting or disturbing cause, their accumulated force breaks out, in the form of some fearful or incurable ...
— An Essay on the Influence of Tobacco upon Life and Health • R. D. Mussey
... new and unsettled country, in the wilderness and forest, they performed great labors. "Long and unremitting exposures to wet, cold, and fatigue, with a diet which, under existing circumstances, could not prove nutritious, exhausted the vital principle, and diarrhoea and typhus fever supervened. The production of animal putrefaction and excrementitious materials were also sources of these diseases. Armies always accumulate these noxious principles about their encampments in a few days, when attention is not called to their daily removal."[60] ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... like conquered territories. After the destruction of Carthage, the Romans had no jealousy of cities that once were equals. Their arts were made to subserve Roman greatness, indeed, but they were left free to develop their resources. The development of resources was a vital principle of the Roman government. Spain, Syria, and Egypt, were never more prosperous than under the imperial rule. All the provinces were more thriving under the emperors than they had been under their ancient kings, until the era of barbaric invasions. If war had been ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... as a vital principle in the individual heart, and thus leaving the entire mass of humanity, to this alone are we to look as of sufficient power to do away the evils that are now rife in the world. Just so far as the true spirit of Jesus is infused into the soul, and acts in the life of man, we know ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... moral influences of the school and the home should be combined and mingled, or else the visible forms of government become a skeleton, merely indicating the figure, structure, and outline, of the perfect body, but destitute of the vital principle which alone could render it of any value to ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... now an avenging flame, the very 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 ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... gives. Patriotism, 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, ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... all men, 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
... 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
... which a Pacata Hibernia can be secured within the Empire. It is a compromise, but it has this one virtue which compromises rarely possess—that it will satisfy the great mass of the Irish people, and it concedes, as we hold, no vital principle. ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... gathered thither as of old, not from the baneful lure of brandy, for the traffic in it was no longer tolerated, but from the less pernicious attractions of gifts, kind words, and politic blandishments. To the vital principle of propagandism both the commercial and the military character were subordinated; or, to speak more justly, trade, policy, and military power leaned on the missions as their main support, the grand ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... Honor, I 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
... promote behind the Imperial Parliament! The measure itself, containing the provisions it does, is a shameful deception upon the Canadian public—is a wanton betrayal of Canadian rights—is a disgraceful sacrifice of Canadian, to selfish party interests—is a covert assassination of a vital principle of Canadian constitutional and free government—is a base political and religious fraud which ought to excite the deep concern and rouse the indignant and vigorous exertion of every friend of justice, and freedom, and good government ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... 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 from that vast flood of active ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... Babylon, or Carthage, the names of Rome might have been erased from the earth, if the city had not been animated by a vital principle, which again restored her to honor and dominion. A vague tradition was embraced, that two Jewish teachers, a tent-maker and a fisherman, had formerly been executed in the circus of Nero, and at the end of five hundred years, their genuine or fictitious relics ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... first excited, 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 not ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 478, Saturday, February 26, 1831 • Various
... 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 to uphold this act, and the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... an animal is a piece of mechanism, the moving power of which is the vital principle, which like fire to the steam engine sets the whole in motion; but whatever quantity of fire or vital energy may be applied, neither the animal machine nor the engine will work with regularity and effect, unless the individual parts of which the machine is ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale
... by 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... grew out of a resolution brought forward by Senator Foot, of Connecticut, just at the close of the previous year with a view of some arrangement concerning the sales of the public lands. But this immediate question was soon lost sight of in the discussion of a great vital principle of constitutional law, namely: The relative powers of the States and the ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... 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 crossed upon her breast; and her ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth |
