LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 1 07 



Accordingly, he proposed to remedy both defects of 

 the Kantian theory at once, by the doctrine that 

 reason is only theoretical and the will not phenome- 

 nal but noumenal. In short, he comes to the dogma 

 that the Absolute is simply Will, or what might 

 more fitly be called Desire — a darkling, dumb out- 

 striving, in itself unconscious, whose impulsions, 

 under a perpetual thwarting from some mysterious 

 Check,^ give rise to what we call consciousness. 



The whole of being was thus reduced to terms of 

 inner or subjective life. There was the dark under- 

 tow of the ever-heaving Desire, and woven over it 

 the shining image-world of Perception : the universe 

 was summed up as Will and Representation, Of 

 this Will we knew nothing, save that it was insatia- 

 ble ; the forms of consciousness were not its expres- 

 sion, but its repression — its negation. Ever the 

 higher these rose in the ascending evolution of 

 Nature, in reaction against its wilder and wilder 

 throbbings, ever the more bitterly must their neces- 

 sary finitude thwart the infinity of its blind desire. 

 Universal life was thus, from its own conditions 

 and essence, foredoomed to misery. Its core was 



^ Schopenhauer nowhere expressly achnits the existence of this; 

 rather, he continually evades it, putting forward the essential insatiability 

 of the Will as the explanation of pain, and so of consciousness. But 

 the implication seems tacitly and unavoidably present everywhere. So 

 also, as Ilartmann has rightly noted, is the implicit assumption that the 

 Will is intrinsically conscious, after all. 



