Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/263

Rh is the common and single World-Will, which, expressed in all of us equally, forces us to see alike, but does so simply because this is the particular caprice that it happens to have, so that it embodies itself for us and in us as just this show-world, rather than any other, because such is its fashion of willing.

The obvious value of such a theory is that it is at once idealistic in its analysis of the presuppositions of life, just to the direct and irresistible reality of the facts of experience, and disposed, after all, to go deeper than experience in its search for the ultimate truth of the world. Final it certainly is not in this form. But it has an obvious advantage over the sort of caprice that, as we saw, was characteristic of the philosophy of the romantic school. Their caprice was the fickleness of private and individual choice. For them you can change, as it were, at any moment of time, your show-world. For them the man of genius makes whatever world he chooses. But for this theory of Schopenhauer’s there is but one caprice, and that is the caprice of the World-Will itself, which once for all has hit upon this particular world of facts in time and in space. For us, in our individual capacity, there is no further caprice. We are in presence of this world now, because we ourselves are embodiments of the world-will. We cannot help the fact any longer. Experience is experience; fact is fact; the show is going on for us all alike; the world-will has chosen; but it has not chosen at any point in time. Hence in the world, as it is in time, there is no further caprice, only fact. Time itself is indeed not any ultimate reality. Time belongs to the show-world, and is there like any other fact or form of things, because the world-will fancies such a form for the things of sense. But just for this very reason, we, as individuals, are just where we are, and the realities of sense and of science, although susceptible of so deep and mysterious an interpretation as this, are as inevitable and as objective for us