loosed blindfolded, but after some one has taken off the blind from his eyes, and has said, “Yonder lies the land of the Gandharis; yonder go,” he, asking the way in village after village, instructed and understanding, comes home at last to the Gandharis, — even so, too, is the man who here in the world has found a teacher; for he knows “to this (world) I belong only until I am delivered; then shall I come to my home.” What this fine (substance) is, of whose essence is all the world, that is the Reality, that is the Soul, — That art Thou, O Çvetaketu.’”
Here, one sees, is the Hindoo way of getting at the substance. It is also Schopenhauer’s way. Look for the substance within, in your own nature. You will not see it without. It is the life of your own life, the soul of your own soul. When you find it, you will come home from the confusing world of sense-things to the heart and essence of the world, to the reality. That art Thou.
Since for Schopenhauer this soul of your soul is the capricious inner will, there is no reason to speak of it as God or as Spirit; for these words imply rationality and conscious intelligence. And intelligence, whose presence in the world is merely one of the caprices of this will itself, finds itself always in sharp contrast to the will, which it can contemplate, but which it can never explain. However, of contemplation there are various stages, determined in us phenomenal individuals by the various sizes and powers of our purely phenomenal brains. Why any intelligence exists at all, and why it is phenomenally associated with a brain, nobody can explain. The will thus likes to express itself. That is the whole story. However, once given the expression, this intelligence reaches its highest perfection in that power to contemplate the whole world of the will with a certain supreme and lofty calm, which, combined with an accurate insight into the truth of the will, is characteristic of the temperament of the productive artist. Art is, namely, the embodiment of
