THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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to the motions of happiness’, in an essay with the characteristic title ‘The olive­branch’, — the poet found himself with this secessionist optimism of his, as far as orbits
of willpower are concerned, in far­reaching philosophical company at that time, in such various and yet such spontaneity­loving company as that of both James and
Bergson. James, on the strength of the practice of yoga among primitive peoples, arrived at the assertion that the will, in so far as it was concentrated, had no limits.
Bergson proclaimed psychic energy to be the raising counter­force to mechanical decline and sleep; it guaranteed, at the human extreme, the struggle against stifling
habit, as the constantly threatening subsidence of life, and it used the brain and indeed all physical determinisms in the same sovereign manner as a virtuoso uses his
instrument. Finally, as far as the often felt ‘vital thrust’ of a person is concerned, as a raw force as it were, which is everywhere felt and nowhere explored, let us recall
one of the few inventories of this phenomenon itself. It comes from Simmel, an impressionist of philosophy, for whom the ‘abundance of life’ admittedly remained
formal, but who turned to impressions from the above­mentioned area in a thoroughly notational way. Simmel's impressionistic inventory, concerning vital thrust as
subjective energy, runs: ‘I am convinced — naturally without the possibility of any proof — that the human individual does not yet end so to speak where our senses of
sight and touch reveal his limits; but instead that beyond them there still lies that sphere, whether it is conceived as substantial or as a kind of radiation, whose extent
defies every hypothesis and which is just as much a part of his character as the visible and palpable nature of the body. It is related to these in the same way as the
infra­red and the ultra­violet rays, which we cannot see but whose effectiveness is nevertheless undeniable, are related to the colours of the spectrum … As extremely
important for all real community life as this component of individual existence appears to me to be — the mysterious phenomenon of prestige, the antipathies and
sympathies between people which cannot be rationalized at all, the frequent feeling of being ensnared as it were by the mere existence of a person, and much else which
is often decisive even in events which have become historical may be traced back to this component —, this sphere still clearly defies tradition and reconstruction more
than the qualities of character accessible to the five senses and therefore possessing a linguistic formulation. At any rate this sphere is probably connected with the latter
qualities, together with which it forms the totality of man, linked in some way which still admittedly defies all conjecture at the moment, so that sometimes a glimmer of
this expanded region of