Since my own deepest nature is beneath and behind the time form of the apparent world, it follows that, in an essential and deep sense, I am one with all that ever has been or that ever will be, either millions of ages ago or millions of ages to come. And as for space, there is no star so remote but that the same essential nature of things which is manifest in that star is also manifest in my own body. Space and time are, as the Hindoos declared, the veil of Maya or Illusion, wherewith the hidden unity of things is covered, so that, through such illusion, the world appears manifold, although it is but one.
To answer, therefore, the question. What is the nature of things? I have only to find what, apart from my senses and my thought, is my own deepest essence. And of this I have a direct, an indescribable, but an unquestionable awareness. My whole inner life is, namely, essentially my will. I long, I desire, I move, I act, I feel, I strive, I lament, I assert myself. The common name for all this is my will. By will, of course, Schopenhauer does not merely mean the highest form of my conscious choice, as some people do. He means simply the active nature of me, the wanting, longing, self-asserting part. This, in truth, as even the romantic idealists felt, lies deeper than my intellect, is at the basis of all my seeing and knowing. Why do I see and acknowledge the world in space and in time? Why do I believe in matter, or recognize the existence of my fellow-men, or exercise my reason? Is not all this just my actual fashion of behavior? In vain, however, do I seek, as the idealists of Fichte’s type often pretended to seek, for an ultimate reason why I should have this fashion of behavior. That is a mere fact. Deeper than reason is the inexplicable caprice of the inner life. We want to exist; we long to know; we make our world because we are just striving to come into being. Our whole life is as ultimate and inexplicable an activity as are our particular fashions of loving and of
