Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/248

 really to connect themselves and to harmonize with it. Moreover this is not brought about by twisting and straining the empirical sciences in order to adapt them to Metaphysic, nor by Metaphysic having been secretly abstracted from them beforehand and then, à la Schelling, finding a priori what it had learnt a posteriori. On the contrary, both meet at the same point of their own accord, yet with out collusion. My system therefore, far from soaring above all reality and all experience, descends to the firm ground of actuality, where its lessons are continued by the Physical Sciences.

Now the extraneous and empirical corroborations I am about to bring forward, all concern the kernel and chief point of my doctrine, its Metaphysic proper. They concern, that is, the paradoxical fundamental truth,

that what Kant opposed as thing in itself to mere phenomenon—called more decidedly by me representation—and what he held to be absolutely unknowable, that this thing in itself, this substratum of all phenomena, and therefore of the whole of Nature, is nothing but what we know directly and intimately and find within ourselves as the will;

that accordingly, this will, far from being inseparable from, and even a mere result of, knowledge, differs radically and entirely from, and is quite independent of, knowledge, which is secondary and of later origin; and can consequently subsist and manifest itself without knowledge: a thing which actually takes place throughout the whole of Nature, from the animal kingdom downwards;

that this will, being the one and only thing in itself, the