Vital energy

“ The phenomena of functional activity are exothermal.
Real vital phenomena thus lie between the chemical energy which gives rise to them, and the thermal phenomena to which they in their turn give rise. The place of the vital fact in the cycle of universal energy is therefore completely determined. This conclusion is of the utmost importance to biology. It may be expressed in a concise formula which sums up in a few words all that natural philosophy can teach as to energetics applied to living beings. “Vital energy is a transformation of chemical energy into thermal energy.” ”

“ Now it is a significant fact that the single exception to this rule consists in, and is constituted by, life, or vital energy, which is constantly building lower forms of energy into higher forms. Life is certainly the highest form of energy which we know in this world, and all energies are below this in rank—as may readily be proved by an appeal to the facts of nutrition and metabolism. ”

“ My understanding of the doctrine is, that there are five chief powers or forces in Nature: one mechanical, or molar, the momentum of moving matter; the others molecular, or embodied in the molecules, also supposed in motion—these are, heat, light, chemical force, electricity. To these powers, which are unquestionable and distinct, it is usual to add vital force, of which, however, it is difficult to speak as a whole; but one member of our vital energies, the nerve-force, allied to electricity, fully deserves to rank in the correlation. ”

“ In all of these applications of motion, energy travels from inanimate to animate matter; non-vital contributes to vital energy: and the various processes through which vital power is developed are promoted and carried forward in a degree till the point which constitutes health is attained. ”

“ The cause, the intervention of a stimulus which starts the transformation or displacement.
2. The possibility, the necessary fall of potential.
3. The condition, the conservation of the energy concerned, since being indestructible its total quantity cannot alter.
Every living being is a transformer of energy. The lower animals and man himself receive from food and air the potential energy which becomes actual under the process of oxydation. This chemical combustion is the source of all vital energy ”

“ The form of energy is continually changing, but the sum of energy in the universe remains invariable and constant. Therefore, it seems to follow, there can be no specific vital phenomena. The energies concerned in the up-building, growth, and decay of the organism, and the sum of the functions performed by it, must be the exact resultant and equivalent of the potential energies stored in its material substance and the co-operative energies of its environment. ”

“ The act of transforming latent, non-vital force which exists pent-up in food, as heat is in coal, into vital energy, requires the simultaneous elimination from the system of a like amount of worn-out matter. ”

“ And then let us realize that the vital energy or Prana that man uses in his life work is but a portion of that great universal energy which permeates everything and everywhere, the portion being used by us at any particular moment being drawn from the universal supply, and again passing out from us into the great ocean of force or energy. ”

“ If it were true that vital energy turned into, or was anyhow convertible into, inorganic energy, if it were true that a dead body had more inorganic energy than a live one, if it were true that 'these inorganic energies' always, or ever, 'reappear on the dissolution of life,' then, undoubtedly, cadit quaestio, life would immediately be proved to be a form of energy, and would enter into the scheme of physics. ”

“ The total cycle of energy from the start of storage to the end of liberation of energy, starting once more with the storing of energy, may be regarded as the cycles of organic functional activity which is classified under metabolism. We deal here with a reservoir of vital energy whose life activities or reactions depend on the amount of energy contained in the cell or the neuron, and whose functioning and reactions vary with the level of energy in the reservoir. ”

“ But in the first place it must be remarked that life is not a simple term like heat or electricity; it is a complex term, and includes all those phenomena which a living body exhibits. In this discussion, therefore, we shall use the term vital force to express only the actual energy of the body, however manifested. As to the attractions or the potential energy of the organism, nothing is more fully settled in science than the fact that these are precisely the same within the body as without it. ”

“ According to the first principle of energetics, for the vital fact to be derived from the thermal fact, the heat must be preliminarily transformed into chemical energy, since chemical energy is necessarily an antecedent and generating form of vital energy. ”

“ Feeling accordingly must have originated, and the question how feeling originates is a problem that suggests itself naturally to the psychologist as well as the philosopher.
#Vital energy a unique form of energy.#
The kinetic energy liberated in our actions, in brain-activity as well as muscular motions, is produced from the potential energy stored up in our tissues. This energy, qua energy, is the same energy which we meet everywhere in nature. All kinds of energy are interconvertible. ”

“ The energy used in the constructive processes is stored up as potential energy, as an essential condition or constituent of all organic substances, and on their disintegration in the processes of destructive metabolism it is liberated in the form of heat—as in the digestion of foods, and in the wear and tear of the tissues that are constantly taking place in all vital activities. ”

“ The remedials I propose to teach how to manufacture, will revive energy lost from whatever cause, for they are nervous force and vital power in tangible form, and act, not by stimulation, but by invigoration, restoring magnetic and dynamic power, when nothing else on earth can do it. ”

“ Every motive or thought demands the combustion of a certain amount of material which has been already assimilated in the microscopic cellular laboratories of our body. Every vital activity is manifested at least through chemical and physical forces. And the elements of the fuel for our engines we receive through plants from the inorganic world. For the plant, as we have seen, stores up as potential energy in its compounds the [212] actual energy of the sun's rays. And thus man lives and thinks by energy, obtained originally from the sun. ”

“ There seems no good reason why we should hesitate to regard the vital force as correlated with the physical forces known to us as heat, light, electricity, and actinism. That some relation exists there can be no doubt, for the effect of physical forces upon organic life is marked, and their energy is made potential in the tissues of both vegetables and animals. This potential energy is, after a time, transformed into active energy, and new phenomena result. ”

“ This liberated active energy is then used as a motive power to carry on the internal and external work of the body, and the heat, which is invariably the consequence of any active energy (motion) , leaves the body as such. ”

“ Generalizing this teaching of experiment the illustrious biologist divined the fundamental law of energetics before the idea of energetics had made much way in France. Every act which expends energy, which produces heat or motion, any manifestation whatever that may be looked upon as an energetic transformation, necessarily expends energy, and that energy is borrowed from the substance of the organism. These substances are simplified, broken up, and destroyed. Now the functional activity of the muscle produces heat and movement in warm-blooded as well as in cold-blooded animals. ”

“ Nothing is lost in Nature’s distribution of force and energy. Everything accomplished in life, either in the physical handling of material, the brain work in planning the constructions, the mental movements of thought in art, literature, or science, are all representatives of the heat and energy released from the body, and it is the effort of every man and woman to make the body yield as large an income as possible in the expression of this energy. ”

“ The Main Problems of Physiology briefly Stated. We shall learn in a subsequent chapter that the living body is continually losing energy, but by means of food is continually restoring its substance and replenishing its stock of energy. A great deal of energy thus stored up is utilized as mechanical work, the result of physical movements. We shall learn later on that much of the energy which at last leaves the body as heat, exists for a time within the organism in other forms than heat, though eventually transformed into heat. ”

“ Indeed, when we consider the production of electricity by osmose, and of heat and electricity both by inhibition, both capillary phenomena, the wonder is not that so much energy is evolved by the organism, but that it is so little. If the physical and chemical changes which take place within the body took place without it, there would be an abundant evolution of energy. Can we doubt that these changes are the cause of the energy exhibited by the organism? ”

“ This physical universe is permeated by energy lanes which effectively activate material creation, even as the human body is nourished and energized by the circulatory distribution of the assimilable energy products of nourishment. ”

“ Because of the law, the conservation of energy, which shows that no energy in the universe can be lost, it is possible to study, with great accuracy, the energy produced in, and given off by, the human body. ”

“ The second truth taught us by general physiology, a truth which physiology learned from experiment, is enunciated as follows:—The maintenance of life consumes none of its energy. It borrows from the external world all the energy which it expends, and borrows it in the form of potential chemical energy. This is a translation into the language of energetics of the results acquired in animal physiology during the last fifty years. ”

“ I was simple enough to think that no one who had as much knowledge of physiology as is to be found in an elementary primer, or who had ever heard of the greatest physical generalisation of modern times—the doctrine of the conservation of energy—would dream of doubting my statement ”

“ At the beginning of the chapter were set down the things which make a substance fit for food. These are: the ability to yield power by oxidation, and a composition suitable to be used by the body. The ability to yield power involves the possession of a store of it. Power, or energy, which means the same thing in our present use of the words, is never present anywhere except as the result of an earlier exhibition of power. It is not made out of nothing. The sun is a reservoir of energy on which the earth draws, and we do not know with any certainty from whence the sun got its power. ”

“ For every motion we make, from turning the head to the most violent exercise, and for all the internal workings of the body in digestion and assimilation, tearing down old tissues, building up new ones, and eliminating waste—for all this we need energy. And we get energy from the food we put into our bodies, as we get warmth for the house from the wood and coal we put into the furnace. ”

“ This bodily activity, visible and invisible, is the result of a third mysterious process, more or less continuous as long as life endures, of chemical2 disintegration, decomposition, and oxidation, by which arises the evolution of energy to maintain the heat of the body and the power for mental and physical work. ”

“ It is an accepted physiological law that nothing taken as food or drink can support expenditure of human energy in sensible motion, in heat, or in the nervous waste of mental or emotional exercise without first being built up into living tissue; the breaking down or chemical decomposition of which tissue, and subsequent oxidation of less complex compounds or their constituents, is the direct source of bodily energy of every description. ”

“ Each system transforms such amounts of potential into kinetic energy as are required to perform its specific work; but no one of them transforms latent into kinetic energy for the purposes of escaping, fighting, pursuing, nor for combating infection. The stomach, the kidneys, the lungs, the heart strike no physical blow-their role is to do certain work to the end that the blow may be struck by another system evolved for that purpose. I propose to offer evidence that there is in the body a system evolved primarily for the transformation of latent energy into motion and into heat. ”

“ A bent bow, a piece of stretched rubber, a suspended weight, the water above a mill dam, all have the capability of causing motion and all have potential energy. Examples of kinetic energy are found in the movements of machinery, in steam and electricity, in winds, and in currents of water. Kinetic is the active, and potential the inactive, form of energy.
70.As the atoms of hydrogen and oxygen that make up the molecules of water separate, they unite with atoms of their own kind—the hydrogen with hydrogen and the oxygen with oxygen atoms. ”

“ Granting that the human being takes in energy as food and drink and builds it up into dischargeable tissues, we are not further concerned with the details of its physiology. How does the feeling of energy arise, what increases the energy discharge and what blocks, inhibits or lowers it? For from day to day, from hour to hour, we are conscious either of a desire to be active, a feeling of capacity or the reverse. We depend on that feeling of capacity to guide us, and though it is organic, it has its mysterious disappearances and marvelous reenforcements. ”