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We admit, therefore, to the full the actuality and objectivity of the sensible presentation. We only deny that it is the real thing-in-itself. The latter is not discovered by sense. My energetic organism is like a well-fitting garment; I do not feel it at all. I feel only changes or transmutations taking place in it. Be not alarmed, therefore, for your common-sense world.
The impossibility and the absurdity of it, empirically, are only due to the forms which phenomena assume, in accordance with the principle of individuation. For the thing-in-itself, the will to live, exists whole and undivided in every being, even in the smallest, as completely as in the sum-total of all things that ever were or are or will be.
Of these two ways in which a man may come to know what he is, the first grasps the phenomenon alone, the mere product of the principle of individuation; whereas the second makes a man immediately conscious that he is the thing-in-itself. This is a doctrine in which, as regards the first way, I have Kant, and as regards both, I have the Vedas, to support me.
As has been well said, we never suppose that the leading carriage of the train draws those behind it, although their relation of sequence is quite as close to it as to the engine. True, it is and must be from and by phenomena only that I infer and measure the transmutations of Energy, but the transmutations measured are operations of the real thing-in-itself postulated by Science.
The humanist is, of course, confronted with the eternal question of origins, of the thing-in-itself, the question whose insistence makes the continuing worth of the absolutist speculations. He begs the question by answering it with an assertion, not an explanation. He meets it by an exaltation of human genius.
That it is only Ideas which exist, and the shadow-like nature of the thing corresponding to them, is the basis of Plato's teachings. That we are nothing but phenomena as opposed to the thing-in-itself is confirmed, exemplified, and made clear by the fact that the conditio sine qua non of our existence is a continual flowing off and flowing to of matter which, as nourishment, is a constant need.
In another sense music and architecture are allied. They alone of all the arts are purely creative, since in them is presented, not a likeness of some known idea, but a thing-in-itself brought to a distinct and complete expression of its nature.
Physical Reality thus conceived is consistently thinkable as co-existent with the thing-in-itself be it ultimately Intelligence or Volition of which our cognitive and conative existence is a manifestation.
It is precisely this inner nature that lies at the foundation of our own consciousness as its kernel, and therefore is more direct than our consciousness itself, and as thing-in-itself exempt from the principium individuationis is in reality identical and the same in all individuals, whether they exist at the same or at different times.
And Schopenhauer based his fascinating but gloomy philosophy and metaphysics upon the underlying principle of an active form of energy which he called the Will-to-Live, which he considered to be the Thing-in-Itself, or the Absolute. Balzac, the novelist, considered a something akin to Will, to be the moving force of the Universe.
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