The Collaborative International Dictionary
Vital \Vi"tal\, a. [F., fr. L. vitalis, fr. vita life; akin to vivere to live. See Vivid.]
Belonging or relating to life, either animal or vegetable; as, vital energies; vital functions; vital actions.
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Contributing to life; necessary to, or supporting, life; as, vital blood.
Do the heavens afford him vital food?
--Spenser.And vital virtue infused, and vital warmth.
--Milton. Containing life; living. ``Spirits that live throughout, vital in every part.''
--Milton.-
Being the seat of life; being that on which life depends; mortal.
The dart flew on, and pierced a vital part.
--Pope. -
Very necessary; highly important; essential.
A competence is vital to content.
--Young. -
Capable of living; in a state to live; viable. [R.]
Pythagoras and Hippocrates . . . affirm the birth of the seventh month to be vital.
--Sir T. Browne.Vital air, oxygen gas; -- so called because essential to animal life. [Obs.]
Vital capacity (Physiol.), the breathing capacity of the lungs; -- expressed by the number of cubic inches of air which can be forcibly exhaled after a full inspiration.
Vital force. (Biol.) See under Force. The vital forces, according to Cope, are nerve force (neurism), growth force (bathmism), and thought force (phrenism), all under the direction and control of the vital principle. Apart from the phenomena of consciousness, vital actions no longer need to be considered as of a mysterious and unfathomable character, nor vital force as anything other than a form of physical energy derived from, and convertible into, other well-known forces of nature.
Vital functions (Physiol.), those functions or actions of the body on which life is directly dependent, as the circulation of the blood, digestion, etc.
Vital principle, an immaterial force, to which the functions peculiar to living beings are ascribed.
Vital statistics, statistics respecting the duration of life, and the circumstances affecting its duration.
Vital tripod. (Physiol.) See under Tripod.
Vital vessels (Bot.), a name for latex tubes, now disused. See Latex.
WordNet
n. a hypothetical force to which the functions and qualities peculiar to living things are sometimes ascribed [syn: life principle]
Usage examples of "vital principle".
What they eat, for example, and their way of eating it - the noise, the open-mouthed champing, the primitive gestures, the borborygms, the belching, the roaring jocularity, the - I will spare you many aspects, but I assure you that to an educated man, who has no very robust vital principle, who knows nothing of the sea except perhaps the Dover packet, who has lived retired, and who has been much reduced by unhappiness, all these things together can bring about a morbid state, an anorexy.
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.
These wards, called townships in New England, are the vital principle of their governments, and have proved themselves the wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self- government, and for its preservation.
A vital principle of comic writing is not to laugh at your own humor-not to give a sign that either the author or the characters are amused at their own clever wit.
The Vital Principle--or, in other words, the essence of that mysterious Something which we call Life, and which extends down from Man to the feeblest insect and the smallest plant--has been an unguessed riddle from the beginning of the world to the present time.
After this deed of sacrilege and cruelty, they continued to infest the confines of Irak, Syria, and Egypt: but the vital principle of enthusiasm had withered at the root.
Or was there some vital principle, inaccessible to scientific explanations—.
Connected with each tomb was a chapel in which priests and relatives offered food and prayer to the hovering ka or vital principle of the deceased.
Sacrifice consisted in immolating a victim in order to absorb its vital principle - a custom sometimes implying cannibalism.