THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

Page 681
you will be amazed to find how ideas begin fairly pouring into your brain’: all America believes or believed in a psychic magnet and in the art of charging it. This includes
sentences like these (they do not lose the ‘hidden storehouse of energy’ in translation): ‘A wish, conceived and uttered, brings what is wished for closer, namely in
proportion to the strength of the wish and the increasing numbers of those who wish.’ Or: ‘Every imagination is an invisible reality, and the longer, the more intensively it
is retained the more it will be converted into that form which we can perceive with our external senses. According to the nature of our daydreams we pile up gold or
explosives in our destiny.’ Or: ‘We must cling to the thought of happiness and of health with every fibre of our being, week by week, month by month, year by year
dream up our own image, free of every evil, until this dream has become a fixed idea, second nature to us, and intervenes in destiny: — from castles in the air arise the
palaces of this earth.’ Prentice Mulford, a Californian journalist of concentration, wrote these sentences, as vested rights so to speak, indeed as native ideas of
Americanism. They are taken from his work: ‘Your forces and how to use them’, 1887, a veritable investment of will in things, of things in will. A technical college of
willpower is demanded, a theological laboratory as well, with departments as follows: ‘The slavery of fear; The Religion of dress; Positive and negative thought;
Immortality in the flesh; The doctor within; The church of silent demand’. It is a single capitalist Lord's Prayer and. that of a pantheistic engineer as well: if his machine
goes more slowly, man casts the will of his prayer like a transmission belt around the original dynamo of God. Or as it can only really be expressed in American Greek:
‘The man feels synchronized with the rhythm of Life.’ In this way the utopia of a psychodynamics surfaces in America, again and again with the hope of securing in
practice a daily experienced force­factor. Thus ultimately a certain, namely totally wild kind of will­magic was not lacking even in the modern West, though without
technology and system. As in America, it was not lacking in Europe either, although with less business sense and more interest in a newly redeemed spirit so to speak; it
is nevertheless a related intention. And here it has contacts with the end of naturalism, with a soon used or misused, but not yet irrational­reactionary recourse to the
soul. The neo­Romantic Maeterlinck thus wrote, at the turn of the century when mechanism was subsiding, of ‘an enormous receptacle of power which lies on the
summits of our consciousness’, of ‘psychic energy as an unexpected central property of matter at its highest level’. And the poet, when he called this power ‘the
transition of the world