Consider the agitated strife of men for food, mates, or children; can this be the work of reflection? Certainly not; the cause is the half conscious will to live, and to live fully. “Men are only apparently drawn from in front; in reality they are pushed from behind”;35 they think they are led on by what they see, when in truth they are driven on by what they feel,—by instincts of whose operation they are half the time unconscious. Intellect is merely the minister of foreign affairs; “nature has produced it for the service of the individual will. Therefore it is only designed to know things so far as they afford motives for the will, but not to fathom them or to comprehend their true being.”36 “The will is the only permanent and unchangeable element in the mind; . . . it is the will which,” through continuity of purpose, “gives unity to consciousness and holds together all its ideas and thoughts, accompanying them like a continuous harmony.”37 It is the organ-point of thought.
Character lies in the will, and not in the intellect; character too is continuity of purpose and attitude: and these are will. Popular language is correct when it prefers the “heart” to the “head”; it knows (because it has not reasoned about it) that a “good will” is profounder and more reliable than a clear mind; and when it calls a man “shrewd,” “knowing,” or “cunning” it implies its suspicion and dislike. “Brilliant qualities of mind win admiration, but never affection”; and “all religions promise a reward . . . for excellences of the will or heart, but none for excellences of the head or understanding.”38
Even the body is the product of the will. The blood, pushed on by that will which we vaguely call life, builds its own vessels by wearing grooves in the body of the embryo; the grooves deepen and close up, and become arteries and veins.39 The will to know builds the brain just as the will to grasp forms the hand, or as the will to eat develops the digestive tract.40 Indeed, these pairs—these forms of will and these forms of flesh—are but two sides of one process and reality. The relation is best seen in emotion, where the feeling and the internal bodily changes form one complex unit.41
The act of will and the movement of the body are not two different things objectively known, which the bond of causality unites; they do not stand in the relation of cause and effect; they are one and the same, but they are given in entirely different ways,—immediately, and again in perception . . . . The action of the body is nothing but the act of the will objectified. This is true of every movement of the body; . . . the whole body is nothing but objectified will . . . . The parts of the body must therefore completely correspond to the principal desires through which the will manifests itself; they must be the visible expression of these desires. Teeth, throat and bowels are objectified hunger; the organs of generation are objectified sexual desire . . . . The whole nervous system constitutes the antennae of the will, which it stretches within and without . . . . As the human body generally corresponds to the human will generally, so the individual bodily structure corresponds to the individually modified will, the character of the individual.42
The intellect tires, the will never; the intellect needs sleep, but the will works even in sleep. Fatigue, like pain, has its seat in the brain; muscles not connected with the cerebrum (like the heart) never tire.43 In sleep the brain feeds; but the will requires no food. Hence the need for sleep is greatest in brain-workers. (This fact, however, “must not mislead us into extending sleep unduly; for then it loses in intensity . . . and becomes mere loss of time.”)44 In sleep the life of man sinks to the vegetative level, and then “the will works according to its original and essential nature, undisturbed from without, with no diminution of its power through the activity of the brain and the exertion of knowing, which is the heaviest organic function; . . . therefore in sleep the whole power of the will is directed to the maintenance and improvement of the organism. Hence all healing, all favorable crises, take place in sleep.”45 Burdach was right when he declared sleep to be the original state. The embryo sleeps almost continuously, and the infant most of the time. Life is “a struggle against sleep: at first we win ground from it, which in the end it recovers. Sleep is a morsel of death borrowed to keep up and renew that part of life which has been exhausted by the day.”46 “It is our eternal foe; even when we are awake it possesses us partly. After all, what is to be expected of heads even the wisest of which is every night the scene of the strangest and the most senseless dreams, and which has to take up its meditations again on awakening from them?”47
Will, then, is the essence of man. Now what if it is also the essence of life in all its forms, and even of “inanimate” matter? What if will is the long-sought-for, the long-despaired-of, “thing-in-itself,”—the ultimate inner reality and secret essence of all things?
Let us try, then, to interpret the external world in terms of will. And let us go at once to the bottom; where others have said that will is a form of force let us say that force is a form of will.48 To Hume’s question—What is causality?—we shall answer, Will. As will is the universal cause in ourselves, so is it in things; and unless we so understand cause as will, causality will remain only a magic and mystic formula, really meaningless. Without this secret we are driven to mere occult qualities like “force,” or “gravity,” or “affinity”; we do not know what these forces are, but we know—at least a little more clearly—what will is; let us say, then, that repulsion and attraction, combination and decomposition, magnetism and electricity, gravity and crystallization, are Will.49 Goethe expressed this idea in the title of one of his novels, when he called the irresistible attraction of lovers die Wahlverwandschaften—“elective affinities.” The force which draws the lover, and the force which draws the planet, are one.