vis vitae

The tailor's vis vitae must have been powerful, or he would have died.

The abrasions of later life do not compare with the rubs of Boyhood, because none of the aids of experience and philosophy are attainable by the tyro, who lives upon his inherent vis vitae, as his kinsman in the frozen zone subsists upon his own fat during long intervals of torpidity.

It can only be defined as the coordination of the vis vitae in nature, which is an undisguised form of reasoning in a circle.

There are states and conditions of matter in respect to which it is idle to predicate the vis vitae.

The first three days from the commencement of this grain by grain descent was marked by obviously increased impatience with any thing like contradiction or opposition, by an absolute aversion to reading, and by a very humiliating sense of the fact that the vis vitae had somehow become pretty thoroughly eliminated from both mind and body.