t it is an
idea, except the will. With this double discovery reality is exhausted.

We can ascribe no other kind of reality to the material world. If we
maintain that it is something more than merely our idea, we must say
that in its inmost nature it is that which we discover in ourselves as
_will_. But the acts of will have always a ground or reason outside
themselves in motives, which, however, never determine more than how we
shall act at any given time or place under any given conditions or
circumstances. The will must have some manifestation, and the body is
that manifestation. By the movements of the body the will becomes
visible, and thus the body may be said to be the _objectification of the
will_. The perfect adaptation of the human and animal body to the human
and animal will resembles, though it far exceeds, the correspondence
between an instrument and its maker.

_III.--The World as Idea. Second Aspect_

We have looked at the world as idea, object for a subject, and next at
the world as will. All students of Plato know that the different grades
of objectification of will which are manifested in countless
individuals, and exist as their unrealized types or as the eternal forms
of things, are the Platonic Ideas. Thus these various grades are related
to individual things as their eternal forms or prototypes.

Thus the world in which we live is in its whole nature through and
through _will_, and at the same time through and through _idea_. This
idea always pre-supposes a form, object and subject. If we take away
this form and ask what then remains, the answer must be that this can be
nothing but _will_, which, properly speaking, is the _thing in itself_.
Every human being discovers that he himself is this will, and that the
world exists only for him does so in relation to his consciousness. Thus
each human being is himself in a double aspect the whole world, the
microcosm. And that which he realizes as his own real being exhausts the
being of the whole world, the macrocosm. So, like man, the world is
through and through _will_, and through and through _idea_.

Plato would say that an animal has no true being, but merely an apparent
being, a constant becoming. The only true being is the Idea which
embodies itself in that animal. That is to say, the Idea of the animal
alone has true being, and is the object of real knowledge. Kant, with
his theory of "the thing-in-itself" as the only reality, would say that