I break silence after seventeen years,[187] in order to point out to the few who, in advance of the age, may have given their attention to my philosophy, sundry corroborations which have been contributed to it by unbiassed empiricists, unacquainted with my writings, who, in pursuing their own road in search of merely empirical knowledge, discovered at its extreme end what my doctrine has propounded as the Metaphysical (das Metaphysische), from which the explanation of experience as a whole must come. This circumstance is the more encouraging, as it confers upon my system a distinction over all hitherto existing ones; for all the other systems, even the latest—that of Kant—still leave a wide gap between their results and experience, and are far from coming down directly to, and into contact with, experience. By this my Metaphysic proves itself to be the only one having an extreme point in common with the physical sciences: a point up to which these sciences come to meet it by their own paths, so as really to connect themselves and to harmonize with it. Moreover this is not brought about by twisting and straining the empirical sciences in order to adapt them to Metaphysic, nor by Metaphysic having been secretly abstracted from them beforehand and then, à la Schelling, finding à priori what it had learnt à posteriori. On the contrary, both meet at the same point of their own accord, yet without collusion. My system therefore, far from soaring above all reality and all experience, descends to the firm ground of actuality, where its lessons are continued by the Physical Sciences.
Now the extraneous and empirical corroborations I am about to bring forward, all concern the kernel and chief point of my doctrine, its Metaphysic proper. They concern, that is, the paradoxical fundamental truth,
that what Kant opposed as thing in itself to mere phenomenon—called more decidedly by me representation—and what he held to be absolutely unknowable, that this thing in itself, this substratum of all phenomena, and therefore of the whole of Nature, is nothing but what we know directly and intimately and find within ourselves as the will;[188]
that accordingly, this will, far from being inseparable from, and even a mere result of, knowledge, differs radically and entirely from, and is quite independent of, knowledge, which is secondary and of later origin; and can consequently subsist and manifest itself without knowledge: a thing which actually takes place throughout the whole of Nature, from the animal kingdom downwards;
that this will, being the one and only thing in itself, the sole truly real, primary, metaphysical thing in a world in which everything else is only phenomenon—i.e. mere representation—gives all things, whatever they may be, the power to exist and to act;
that accordingly, not only the voluntary actions of animals, but the organic mechanism, nay even the shape and quality of their living body, the vegetation of plants and finally, even in inorganic Nature, crystallization, and in general every primary force which manifests itself in physical and chemical phenomena, not excepting Gravity,—that all this, I say, in itself, i.e. independently of phenomenon (which only means, independently of our brain and its representations), is absolutely identical with the will we find within us and know as intimately as we can know anything;
that further, the individual manifestations of the will are set in motion by motives in beings gifted with an intellect, but no less by stimuli in the organic life of animals and of plants, and finally in all inorganic Nature, by causes in the narrowest sense of the word—these distinctions applying exclusively to phenomena;
that, on the other hand, knowledge with its substratum, the intellect, is a merely secondary phenomenon, differing completely from the will, only accompanying its higher degrees of objectification and not essential to it; which, as it depends upon the manifestations of the will in the animal organism, is therefore physical, and not, like the will, metaphysical;
that we are never able therefore to infer absence of will from absence of knowledge; for the will may be pointed out even in all phenomena of unconscious Nature, whether in plants or in inorganic bodies; in short,
that the will is not conditioned by knowledge, as has hitherto been universally assumed, although knowledge is conditioned by the will.