élan vital

It’s hard to determine whether this lack of Iowan élan vital is because Trump is the front-runner or if Trump is the front-runner because of the lack of élan vital.

For example, philosopher Daniel Dennett, commenting on Conway’s invention in the Times, points out that Life’s “higher-order patterns” emerge from processes that are “completely unmysterious and explicable.... No psionic fields, no morphic resonances, no élan vital, no dualism.”

No psionic fields, no morphic resonances, no élan vital, no dualism.

You can open this novel anywhere and find lines like: “He is so disgusting it makes you wonder about his poo”; “he considered the raccoon to be the least susceptible of all animals to moral instruction”; “Feeding off her elan vital like a yeast infection”; “in the space of a few months we got the ‘wheel,’ eggs and the Awkward Silence.”

Later, Henri Bergson’s idea of élan vital — described by the French philosopher as “the explosive internal force that life carries within itself” — fueled her work.