HOMO VIATOR,
PROLÉGOMÈNES À UNE MÉTAPHYSIQUE DE L'ESPÉRANCE

" Perhaps a stable terrestrial order can't be put into place unless man keeps an acute conscience of his journeying condition. "

 
I'd like the reader to use this paradoxical sentence as an Ariadne's thread through what could be called - somewhat pretentiously - the labyrinth formed by the different essays included in this book… The idea of travelling, not usually considered to bear any specifically philosophical value, yet presents the invaluable advantage of bearing determinations which belong simultaneously to time and space... Here can Hope be made fully present. Hope is essentially… a soul commiting itself so intimately to an experience of communion that it is able to transcend the opposition between will and knowledge, by which very act it warrants and initiates perennial life.
 
The soul, I said. This word, so long disparaged, must here be restored into its prominence. How can we not see the tie that binds most intimately soul and Hope ? I would say that in some way Hope is to the soul what breathing is to the living organism - where Hope is missing the soul withers and weakens, there isn't anything left but functions ; the soul is then readily dissected by a psychology that will solely be able to locate its presence or its absence. But it is of the soul - and of the soul only - that one can say with supreme confidence that to be is to be on the way.

GABRIEL MARCEL (1944)