nervous spirits

If any man disagree with me, I shall desire him to look at the Conrector, who demonstrates my experimental maxim like a very syllogism.—One might arrive at some philosophic views, if one traced out the causes, why liquors—that is to say, in the long-run, more plentiful secretion of the nervous spirits—make men at once pious, soft and poetical.

Long after we are past we can see them thinning down gradually as some keep dropping back on to their island home, while the more restless, nervous spirits still circle and swoop in loops and curves.

Let me beg your patience,—quoting, in my own justification, no less a historian than James Grant Wilson: "This Commodore Warren was one of those indefatigable and nervous spirits who did such wonders at Louisbourg, and it is with particular pride that his achievement should be remembered in a history of New-York, as he was the only prominent New-Yorker that contributed to Massachusetts' greatest Colonial achievement."

We bubbled over with spirits—nervous spirits, to be sure, but none the less vivacious ones.

He had rightly pointed out that nerves were merely connections between the brain and spinal-cord and distant muscles and organs, and had recognized that there were two kinds of nerves, but his explanation of the action of these nerves was that "nervous spirits" were carried to the cavities of the brain by blood-vessels, and from there transmitted through the body along the nerve-trunks.