ty of introducing a knowledge of God by
the way of the particular presentations of an individual consciousness.

[Sidenote: Schopenhauer's Attempt to Universalize Subjectivism.
Mysticism.]

Sect. 138. Schopenhauer must be credited with a genuine effort to accept
the metaphysical consequences of his epistemology. His epistemology, as
we have seen, defined knowledge as centripetal. The object of real
knowledge is identical with the subject of knowledge. If I am to know
the universal will, therefore, I must in knowing become that will. And
this Schopenhauer maintains. The innermost heart of the individual into
which he may retreat, even from his private will, is--the universal. But
there is another way of arriving at the same knowledge. In contemplation
I may become absorbed in principles and laws, rather than be diverted by
the particular spacial and temporal objects, until (and this is
peculiarly true of the aesthetic experience) my interest no longer
distinguishes itself, but coincides with truth. In other words, abstract
thinking and pure willing are not opposite extremes, but adjacent points
on the deeper or transcendent circle of experience. One may reach this
part of the circle by moving in either of two directions that at the
start are directly opposite: by turning in upon the subject or by
utterly giving one's self up to the object. Reality obtains no
definition by this means. Philosophy, for Schopenhauer, is rather a
programme for realizing the state in which I will the universal and know
the universal will. The final theory of knowledge, then, is mysticism,
reality directly apprehended in a supreme and incommunicable experience,
direct and vivid, like perception, and at the same time universal, like
thought. But the empiricism with which Schopenhauer began, the appeal to
a familiar experience of self as will, has meanwhile been forgotten. The
idea as object of my perception, and the will as its subject were in the
beginning regarded as common and verifiable items of experience. But
who, save the occasional philosopher, knows a universal will? Nor have
attempts to avoid mysticism, while retaining Schopenhauer's first
principle, been successful. Certain voluntarists and panpsychists have
attempted to do without the universal will, and define the world solely
in terms of the many individual wills. But, as Schopenhauer himself
pointed out, individual wills cannot be distinguished except in terms of
something other