METAPHYSICS The universal will is objectified at many different levels The principal difference between the higher and lower grades of will lies in the role of individuality In the higher grades individuality is prominent: no two humans are alike, and there are marked differences between individual animals of higher species But the further down we go, the more completely individual character is lost in the common character of the species Plants have hardly any individual qualities, and in the inorganic world all individuality disappears A force like electricity must show itself in precisely the same way in all its million phenomena This is the reason why it is easier to predict the phenomena the further down we go in the hierarchy of will Throughout the world of nature will is expressed in conflict There is conflict between different grades of will, as when a magnet lifts a piece of iron, which is the victory of a higher form of will (electricity) over a lower (gravitation) When a person raises an arm, that is a triumph of human will over gravity, and in every healthy animal we see the conscious organism winning a victory over the physical and chemical laws that operate on the constituents of the body It is this perpetual conflict that makes physical life burdensome and brings the necessity of sleep and eventually of death ‘At last these subdued forces of nature, assisted by circumstances, win back from the organism, wearied even by the constant victory, the matter it took from them, and attain to an unimpeded expression of their being’ (WWI 146) At the bottom end of the scale, similarly, we see the universal essential conflict that manifests will The earth’s revolution around the sun is kept going by the constant tension between centrifugal and centripetal force Matter itself is kept in being by attractive and repulsive forces, gravitation and impenetrability This constant pressure and resistance is the objectivity of will in its very lowest grade, and even there, as a mere blind urge, it expresses its character as will The will, in Schopenhauer’s system, occupies the same position as the thing-in-itself in Kant’s Considered apart from its phenomenal activities, it is outside time and space Since time and space are the necessary conditions for multiplicity, the will must be single; it remains indivisible, in spite of the plurality of things in space and time The will is objectified in a higher way in a human than in a stone; but this does not mean that there is a larger part of will in the human and a smaller part in the stone, because the relation of part and whole belongs only to space So too does plurality: ‘the will reveals itself just as completely in one oak as in millions’ (WWI 128) 173