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THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
whose conception of will as the thing in itself is formed regardless of the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious, as is evident from the following from “The World as Will and Idea" (Vol. I. pp. 141-142):--
" Whoever has...gained......the knowledge that his will is the real inner nature of his phenomenal being, which manifests itself to him as idea.... will find that of itself it affords him the Key to the Knowledge of the being of the whole nature; for he now transfers it to all those phenomena which are not given to him, like his own phenomenal existence, both in direct and indirect knowledge, but only in the latter, thus merely one-sidedly as idea alone. He will recognize this will of which we are speaking not only in those phenomenal existences which exactly resemble his own, in men and animals as their inmost nature, but the course of reflection will lead him to recognize the force which germinates and vegetates in the plant, and indeed the force through which the crystal is formed, that by which the magnet turns to the north pole, the force whose shock he experiences from the contact of two different kinds of metals, the force which appears in the elective affinities of matter as repulsion and attraction, decomposition and combination, and, lastly, even gravitation, which acts so powerfully throughout matter, draws the stone to the earth and the earth to the sun,-all these, I say, he will recognize as different only in their phenomenal existence, but in their inner nature as identical, as that which is directly known to him so intimately and so much better than anything else, and which in its most distinct manifestation is called will."
But this surreptitious levelling of differences is possible only in the region of abstractism pure and simple ; so far as concrete nature is concerned, she does not lend 'circumstances'; in other words, freedom is the essential attribute, henco the nature, of him alone of all beings, who is self-sufficient. The cmancipated soul alone is free in this sense, thereforo. The unredeemed ego, when looked at as will, is subject to the dominion of his ideas and motives, that is, desires, and cannot be said to be free. We thus como back, in this round-about fashion, to the old Indian doctrine of bondage, which can be overthrown only by sacrificing desires, as the Scriptures teach.
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