The Will Versus Idea

Whoever has gained from abstract nature of knowledge has clear and certain knowledge of feeling.

This is a knowledge that his will is the real inner nature of his phenomenal being which manifests itself to him as idea, both in his actions and in his body.

He knows that his will is that which is most immediate in his consciousness.

This will has not as such completely passed into the form of idea as to create distinct subject and object.

Instead, it makes itself known to him directly in a way where he does not clearly distinguish subject and object.

Yet he knows this will only in its particular acts.

The knowledge of this will gives a person the key to the knowledge of the inmost being of the whole of nature.

For he now transfers it to all those phenomena which are not given to him, like his own phenomenal existence, both in direct and indirect knowledge, but only in the latter, thus merely one-sidedly as idea alone.

He will recognise this will in men and animals as their inmost nature.

Reflection will lead him to recognise the force which germinates and vegetates in the plant, and indeed the force through which the crystal is formed, that by which the magnet turns to the north pole, the force whose shock he experiences from the contact of two different kinds of metals, the force which appears in the elective affinities of matter as repulsion and attraction, decomposition and combination, and, lastly, even gravitation, which acts so powerfully throughout matter, draws the stone to the earth and the earth to the sun,—all these, I say, he will recognise as different only in their phenomenal existence, but in their inner nature as identical, as that which is directly known to him so intimately and so much better than anything else, and which in its most distinct manifestation is called will.

It is this application of reflection alone that prevents us from remaining any longer at the phenomenon, and leads us to the thing in itself. Phenomenal existence is idea and nothing more.

All idea, all object, is phenomenal existence.

But the will alone is a thing in itself. As such, it is throughout not idea, but toto genere different from it; it is that of which all idea, all object, is the phenomenal appearance, the visibility, the objectification.

It is the inmost nature, the kernel, of every particular thing, and also of the whole. It appears in every blind force of nature and also in the preconsidered action of man; and the great difference between these two is merely in the degree of the manifestation, not in the nature of what manifests itself.