What is the meaning, then, of the world-process? Simply that countless individualities which are rooted in the universal will-to-live are continually seeking satisfaction in aims which they set before themselves, in obedience to an inward impulse, and finding none. Again and again they experience the disappointment that pleasure longed for, not pleasure attained, is real pleasure; they have continually to fight against hindrances; their own will-to-live continually comes into conflict with other wills-to-live. The world is meaningless, and all existence is suffering. The knowledge of this is attained to by the will-to-live in the highest living creatures, who are gifted with the power of remaining always conscious that the totality of what is around them, outside themselves, is merely a world of appearances. Surveying in this way the totality of existence, the will is then in a position to reach clarity of thought about itself and about existence. That it must effect something in the world that is worth while is the obsession with which the will-to-live has befooled itself in European philosophy. When it has attained to knowledge of itself, it knows that optimistic world-affirmation is of no benefit to it. It can only hurry it on from unrest to unrest, from disappointment to disappointment. What it must try to do is to step out from the terrible game in which, bedazzled, it is taking part, and settle itself to rest in world- and life-denial. For Spinoza the meaning of the world-process is that supreme individualities arise, who find their experience within the Absolute; for Fichte that the urge to activity of the Absolute comprehends itself in supreme individualities as ethical; for Hegel that the Absolute comes in supreme [pg 168] individualities to adequate consciousness of itself; for Schopenhauer that in individualities the Absolute attains to knowledge of itself, and finds deliverance from the blind urge to life-affirmation which is within it. The meaning of the world-process, therefore, is always found in this: that the Finite and the Infinite blend their experiences of one another. Spinoza, Fichte, and Hegel—and this is the weakness of their world-view—cannot make it properly intelligible how far this experience in the Finite can be said to have really a meaning for the Absolute. In Schopenhauer, however, it has such a meaning. In man the universal will-to-live begins to turn from the path of unrest and suffering into that of peace. The transition from Being to nothingness is introduced. This nothingness is nothingness, it is true, only to the will-to-live, which is still filled with urge to life-affirmation and with its conception of the world. What it is in itself, this Nirvana of the Buddhists, cannot be defined with our conceptions, which come to us through our senses.