Definition of "vital" []

• Of, relating to, or characteristic of life: See Synonyms at living. (adjective)
• Necessary to the continuation of life; life-sustaining: a vital organ; vital nutrients. (adjective)
• Full of life; animated: "The population of the teeming, vital slum . . . declined” ( Rick Hampson). (adjective)
• Imparting life or animation; invigorating: the sun's vital rays. (adjective)
• Necessary to continued existence or effectiveness; essential: "Irrigation was vital to early civilization” ( William H. McNeill). "A vital component of any democracy is a free labor movement” ( Bayard Rustin). (adjective)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "The geologic records attest the fact, as well as the ever-acting vital law; and it is enough for us to know, with sturdy old Richard Hooker, that all law -- and especially all _vital_ law -- "has her seat in the bosom of God, and her voice is the harmony of the world.""
• "If I love my mother, it is because there is established between me and her a direct, powerful circuit of vital magnetism, call it what you will, but a direct flow of dynamic _vital_ interchange and intercourse."
• "But if religion is not consciously vital to the Filipinos, as they themselves would conceive and act on it (and I make the assertion in the assumption that the reader understands as I do by _consciously vital_ that for which the individual or the race is willing to die singly or collectively), the unprejudiced observer must admit that it is vital to their ultimate evolution, vital in just the sense that any function is vital to one who is in need of it."