hating. So I am; this is the nature of me, — to strive, to long, to will; and I cannot rest in this striving. My life is a longing to be somewhere else in life than here, where I am.
Here, then, is the solution of our mystery in so far as it can have a solution. The world is the Will. In time and space I see only the behavior of phenomena. I never get at things in themselves; but I, in my timeless and spaceless inner nature, in the very heart, in the very germ, of my being, am not a mere outward succession of jihe- nomena. I am a Will, — a will which is not there for the sake of something else, but which exists solely because it desires to exist. Here is the true thing in itself. The whole world, owing to the utter illusoriness of time and space, has collapsed into one single and ultimate nature of things. This nature, immediately experienced in the inner life, is the Will. This Will, then, is that which is so wealthy that the whole show world is needed to express its caprice. Look, then, on the whole world in its infinite complication of living creatures and of material processes. These, indeed, are remote enough from your body. Seen in space and time, you are a mere fragment in the endless world of phenomena, a mere drop in the ocean, a link in an endless chain. But look at the whole world otherwise. In its inmost life and truth it must be one, for space and time are the mere forms in which the one interest of the observer is pleased to express itself. Look upon all things, then, and it can be said of you as, once more, the Hindoos loved to say, “The life of all these things, — That art Thou.”
Schopenhauer himself was fond of quoting this well-known phrase of the Hindoo philosophy as expressing the kernel of his own doctrine. New about his philosophy was, he felt, the synthesis that he had made of Kant’s thought and the Hindoo insight; but with this insight itself he essentially agreed. “The inmost life of things is one.
