THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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Paracelsus himself teaches against exaggerations, as a magic realist, but still as a realist: spontaneity extends exactly as far as the reality allows it to from whose strength
it stems, and towards whose process it is correlatively directed. And this reality is of course further advanced than that of mechanics which only represents the part of it
which is turned away from man, indeed one which is often still artificially isolated and reified in this superficiality. Man's possible field of action in nature is definitely
more extensive, more unenclosed; and it is able to be this — whereby the main theme returns — by virtue of that possible subject of nature which gives birth to and
dynamizes itself in utopian terms not merely subjectively, but also objectively.
Co­productivity of a possible natural subject or concrete technology of alliance
Even the external forces do not always exist as unequivocally as it seems. Often they were just a name for that which cannot be explained, a flashy name as well, which
concealed ignorance. Opium, for example, is soporific because it contains a ‘vis dormitiva’; vital force also belongs in this series. What is to be explained is thus turned
into the explanation itself, and analytical work stops at a mere word, quickly invented and turned into a ‘capacity’. And there is something else behind this, something
preserved in the linguistic form: the belief in spirits. The more specific a force appears (like the ‘soporific force’ of opium or, as in a joke by Mörike, that of scarlet
fever, the wicked ‘fairy Briscarlatina’), the closer it is to animistic ideas. That is why physics sought more and more to level the individually designated forces in general
mechanical terms, along the lines of pressure and thrust. Chemical affinity is the real force by which the atoms stick together in the molecule, cohesion the force by
which the molecules stick together, and its opposite, in gases, is then called expansive force. But as early as a hundred years ago Davy and Berzelius tried to explain
chemical affinity further by means of electrical attraction or repulsion, an explanation which only foundered on the chemical combination of atoms of the same kind,
namely of carbon atoms (into chains and rings); electron research working on the basis of quantum theory is on the point of tracing the so­called force of chemical
affinity uninterruptedly back to sub­atomic processes. The general theory of relativity ultimately seeks to dismiss even the so­called force of gravity as a separate form
of energy, indeed as energy