“She means to live,” he answered.
“You will pull her through for us, won’t you?” I said eagerly.
“I tell you she means to live.”
“And you think, doctor, that people live just as long as they really want to and that we do not die save with our own consent?”
“Certainly.”
I walked with him along the gravel path. He stopped for a moment at the gate, his head bowed as if in thought.
“Certainly,” he said again, “but they must really want to and not merely think they want to. Conscious will is an illusion that can deceive none save the vulgar. People who believe they will a thing because they say they will it, are fools. The only genuine act of volition is that in which all the obscure forces of our nature take part. That will is unconscious, it is divine. It moulds the world. By it we exist, and when it fails we cease to be. The world wills, otherwise it would not exist.”
We walked on a few steps farther.
“Look here,” he exclaimed, tapping his stick against the bark of an oak tree that spread out its broad canopy of grey branches above our heads, “if that fellow there had not willed to grow, I should like to know what power could have made him do so.”
But I had ceased to listen.