Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/409

390 but only as fragments of ideas. They exist only as errors take place. I can be in partial error, but only because at this instant I may imperfectly grasp my own whole meaning as I refer to my object. My will, as it is now transiently embodied, can fail in any partial way of realization, but only because I now fail to be wholly aware of my own will. Therefore hypothetical propositions counter to fact are possible only as fragments. But however far I wander in the wildernesses of my temporal experience, the eternal fulfilment of my own life encompasses me. I escape not from the meshes of the net of my own will. I fail at this instant to observe this fact, merely because of the imperfection of my momentary form of human consciousness. I interpret my facts hypothetically and often falsely, in so far as I fail to grasp just now my own whole purpose.

Schopenhauer defines my world as my own will. If by my will he meant the individual embodiment and expression of the whole meaning of my ideas, he would thus be right. But then he would indeed be no pessimist. For the longing and the misery of finitude that in my present form of human consciousness now so frequently bound the horizon of my darkened instants of fragmentary experience — this longing and misery, when they beset me, I say, involve that very search for Another, that very dissatisfaction with the abstractness and dreary generality of my present ideas, which I express in my own way whenever, out of the depths, I cry after Reality. People often object to Schopenhauer’s view of the world as the will, that that doctrine, as Schopenhauer frequently expresses