Key of Knowledge

SR No.: 006702
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Champat Rai Jain
Publisher: ZZZ Unknown
Publication Year: 1919
Total Pages: 1204
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 25 MB

Page 590

THE HOLY TRINITY.
569 indicates that it cannot be identical with what might be termed blind' force, so that it would be a misuse of language to use it otherwise than with reference to an intelligent being, though the sort of will with which we are familiar, in our experience of mankind, is undoubtedly a product of spirit and matter. Thus, in the one case, will is a necessary aspect of the thing in itself, but in the other, is that very aspect manifesting itself through the limitations imposed on it by matter.
So far as the human will is concerned, it is clearly not a being or thing, but a process --the act of selfassertion. It is a pure abstraction of thought which the word 'will’ signifies when used as a noun, for in the sense of pleasure, determination or choice, it cannot but imply an attitude, condition or modification of the soul. But in this sense, clearly, it can never be regarded as the thing in itself.
Harald Höffding well brings out the difference bet
whatever kind it may be, 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 pre-considered 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.”
Again, at page 145:
“The will as a thing in itself is quite different from its phenomenal appearance, and entirely free from all the forms of the phenomenal into which it first passes when it manifests itself, and which therefore only concern its objectivity, and are foreign to the will itself."