As regards Schopenhauer, there is no need to endeavour to show that the will, which he posits as the essence of things, proceeds from consciousness.  And it is only necessary to read his book on the Will in Nature to see how he attributed a certain spirit and even a certain personality to the plants themselves.  And this doctrine of his carried him logically to pessimism, for the true property and most inward function of the will is to suffer.  The will is a force which feels itself—­that is, which suffers.  And, someone will add, which enjoys.  But the capacity to enjoy is impossible without the capacity to suffer; and the faculty of enjoyment is one with that of pain.  Whosoever does not suffer does not enjoy, just as whosoever is insensible to cold is insensible to heat.

And it is also quite logical that Schopenhauer, who deduced pessimism from the voluntarist doctrine or doctrine of universal personalization, should have deduced from both of these that the foundation of morals is compassion.  Only his lack of the social and historical sense, his inability to feel that humanity also is a person, although a collective one, his egoism, in short, prevented him from feeling God, prevented him from individualizing and personalizing the total and collective Will—­the Will of the Universe.

On the other hand, it is easy to understand his aversion from purely empirical, evolutionist, or transformist doctrines, such as those set forth in the works of Lamarck and Darwin which came to his notice.  Judging Darwin’s theory solely by an extensive extract in The Times, he described it, in a letter to Adam Louis von Doss (March 1, 1860), as “downright empiricism” (platter Empirismus).  In fact, for a voluntarist like Schopenhauer, a theory so sanely and cautiously empirical and rational as that of Darwin left out of account the inward force, the essential motive, of evolution.  For what is, in effect, the hidden force, the ultimate agent, which impels organisms to perpetuate themselves and to fight for their persistence and propagation?  Selection, adaptation, heredity, these are only external conditions.  This inner, essential force has been called will on the supposition that there exists also in other beings that which we feel in ourselves as a feeling of will, the impulse to be everything, to be others as well as ourselves yet without ceasing to be what we are.  And it may be said that this force is the divine in us, that it is God Himself who works in us because He suffers in us.

And sympathy teaches us to discover this force, this aspiration towards consciousness, in all things.  It moves and activates the most minute living creatures; it moves and activates, perhaps, the very cells of our own bodily organism, which is a confederation, more or less solidary, of living beings; it moves the very globules of our blood.  Our life is composed of lives, our vital aspiration of aspirations existing perhaps in the limbo of subconsciousness.  Not