METAPHYSICS which comes in many different grades, only the higher of which are accompanied by knowledge and self-determination Why, we may wonder, should we say that natural forces are lower grades of will, rather than saying that the human will is the highest grade of force? Schopenhauer’s reply to this is that our concept of force is an abstraction from the phenomenal world of cause and effect, whereas will is something of which we have immediate consciousness To explain will in terms of force would be to explain the better known by the less known, and to renounce the only immediate knowledge we have of the world’s inner nature Will is groundless: it is outside the realm of cause and effect It is wrong, therefore, to ask for the cause of original forces such as gravity or electricity To be sure, the expressions of these forces take place in accordance with the laws of cause and effect; but it is not gravity that causes a stone to fall, but rather the proximity of the earth The force of gravity itself is no part of the causal chain, because it lies outside time So all other forces Through thousands of years chemical forces slumber in matter till the contact with the reagents sets them free; then they appear; but time exists only for the phenomena, not for the forces themselves For thousands of years galvanism slumbered in copper and zinc, and they lay quietly beside silver, which will inevitably be consumed in flame as soon as all three are brought together under the required conditions (WWI 136) This account of the operation of causality in the world has some features in common with the occasionalism of Malebranche, and Schopenhauer draws attention to the resemblance.2 ‘Malebranche is right: every natural cause is only an occasional cause.’ But whereas for Malebranche God was the true cause of every natural effect, for Schopenhauer the true cause is the universal will A natural cause, he tells us, only gives opportunity or occasion for the manifestation of the one indivisible will which is the ‘in-itself’ of all things, and whose graduated objectification is the whole visible world Only the appearance, the becoming visible in this place, at this time, is brought about by the cause and is so far dependent on it, but not the whole of the phenomenon, nor its inner nature (WWI 138) See vol III, p 59 172