inence to the fact that the reason is not a creative faculty like the
understanding, but only a receptive power, that it clarifies and transforms
the content furnished by intuition without increasing it by new
representations.

Objective cognition is confined within the circle of our representations;
all that is knowable is phenomenon. Space, time, and causality spread out
like a triple veil between us and the _per se_ of things, and prevent a
vision of the true nature of the world. There is one point, however, at
which we know more than mere phenomena, where of these three disturbing
media only one, time-form, separates us from the thing in itself. This
point is the consciousness of ourselves.

On the one hand, I appear to myself as body. My body is a temporal,
spatial, material object, an object like all others, and with them subject
to the laws of objectivity. But besides this objective cognition, I have,
further, an immediate consciousness of myself, through which I apprehend
my true being--I know myself as willing. My will is more than a mere
representation, it is the original element in me, the truly real which
appears to me as body. The will is related to the intellect as the primary
to the secondary, as substance to accident; it is related to the body
as the inner to the outer, as reality to phenomenon. The act of will is
followed at once and inevitably by the movement of the body willed, nay,
the two are one and the same, only given in different ways: will is the
body seen from within, body the will seen from without, the will become
visible, objectified. After the analogy of ourselves, again, who appear to
ourselves as material objects but in truth are will, all existence is to
be judged. The universe is the _mac-anthropos_; the knowledge of our own
essence, the key to the knowledge of the essence of the world. Like our
body, the whole world is the visibility of will. The human will is the
highest stage in the development of the same principle which manifests its
activity in the various forces of nature, and which properly takes its name
from the highest species. To penetrate further into the inner nature of
things than this is impossible. What that which presents itself as will
and which still remains after the negation of the latter (see below) is in
itself, is for us absolutely unknowable.

The world is _per se_ will. None of the predicates are to be attributed to
the primal will which we ascribe to things