ich 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 more absurd than so many other
dreams which pass as valid theories is the belief that our cells, our
globules, may possess something akin to a rudimentary cellular, globular
consciousness or basis of consciousness. Or that they may arrive at
possessing such consciousness. And since we have given a loose rein to
the fancy, we may fancy that these cells may communicate with one
another, and that some of them may express their belief that they form
part of a superior organism endowed with a collective personal
consciousness. And more than once in the history of human feeling this
fancy has been expressed in the surmisal of some philosopher or poet
that we men are a kind of globules in the blood of a Supreme Being, who
possesses his own personal collective consciousness, the consciousness
of the Universe.

Perhaps the immense Milky Way which on clear nights we behold stretching
across the heavens, this vast encircling ring in which our planetary
system is itse