The ideas and practices of Franz Anton Mesmer, an 18th-century Australian healer, had spread to the United States and, by the 1840s, held the country in thrall. Mesmer proposed that everything in the universe, including the human body, was governed by a 'magnetic fluid' that could become imbalanced, causing illness.
Life must be considered sui generis; it is not a form of energy, nor can it be expressed in terms of something else.
The vital spirit. L'élan vital
There is no God other than life itself.
If the blood humor is too strong and robust, calm it with balance and harmony.
Life is the greatest of blessings and death the worst of evils.... all great, powerful souls love life.
Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.
It was a reaction from the old idea of "protoplasm", a name which was a mere repository of ignorance.
All theory, my friend, is grey, But green is life's glad golden tree.
The will of the world is always a will to death, a will to suicide. We must not accept this suicide, and we must so act that it cannot take place.
In some aspects of alternative medicine we are fighting an almost medieval belief in magic but debunking such beliefs is like telling people that the tooth fairy is sniffing glue.
Life is the expression of tone. In that sentence is the basic principle of Chiropractic.
Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.
Science regards man as an aggregation of atoms temporarily united by a mysterious force called the life-principle. To the materialist, the only difference between a living and a dead body is that in the one case that force is active, in the other latent.
Exact knowledge is the enemy of vitalism.
Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality man is endowed with - the love of life
The idea of protoplasm, which was really a name for our ignorance, [is] only a little less misleading than the expression "Vital force".
I am life which wants to live admidst of lives that want to live.
There are living systems; there is no living "matter." No substance, no single molecule, extracted and isolated from a living being possess, of its own, the aforementioned paradoxical properties. They are present in living systems only; that is to say, nowhere below the level of the cell.
There is a world of created beings - living things, animals, entelechies, and souls - in the least part of matter.... Thus there is nothing waste, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe; no chaos, no confusions, save in appearance.
Life is not a mixture of matter and energy but energy in matter, bound in such a way that dissociation is impossible so long as the living process continues.
Without being aware, I think I was being indoctrinated into what was called Vitalism, the idea that what makes life worth living, the good life, consists of accepting challenges, solving problems, discovery, personal growth, personal change.
I am life that wants to live, in the midst of life that wants to live.
All space and matter, organic or inorganic, has some degree of life in it, and matter/space is more alive or less alive according to its structure and arrangement.
As long as vitalism and spiritualism are open questions so long will the gateway of science be open to mysticism.
