Often their will-to-live is changed into a kind of intoxication. Spring sunshine, trees in flower, passing clouds, fields of waving corn provoke it. A will-to-live which announces itself in many forms in magnificent phenomena all around them, carries their own will-to-live along with it. Full of delight, they want to take part in the mighty symphony which they hear. They find the world beautiful. . . . But the transport passes. Horrid discords allow them once more to hear only noise, where they thought they perceived music. The beauty of nature is darkened for them by the suffering which they discover everywhere within it. Now they see once more that they are drifting like shipwrecked men over a waste of waters, only that their boat is at one moment raised aloft on mountainous waves and the next sinks into the valleys between them, and that now sunbeams, and now heavy clouds, rest upon the heaving billows. Now they would like to persuade themselves that there is land in the direction in which they are drifting. Their will-to-live befools their thinking, so that it makes efforts to see the world as it would like to see it. It compels it also to hand them a chart which confirms their hopes of land. Once more they bend to the oars, till once more their arms drop with fatigue, and their gaze wanders, disappointed, from billow to billow. That is the voyage of the will-to-live which has abjured thought. Is there, then, nothing else that the will-to-live can do but drift along without thought, or sink in pessimistic knowledge? Yes, there is. It must indeed voyage across this boundless sea; but it can hoist sails, and steer a definite course. [pg 216] The world- and life-affirmation of the will-to-live The will-to-live which tries to know the world is a shipwrecked castaway; the will-to-live which gets to know itself is a bold mariner. The will-to-live is not restricted to maintaining its existence on what the ever unsatisfying knowledge of the world offers it; it can feed on the life-forces which it finds in itself. The knowledge which I acquire from my will-to-live is richer than that which I win by observation of the world. There are given in it values and incitements bearing on my relation to the world and to life which find no justification in my reflexion upon the world and existence. Why then tune down one’s will-to-live to the pitch of one’s knowledge of the world, or undertake the meaningless task of tuning up one’s knowledge of the world to the higher pitch of one’s will-to-live. The right and obvious course is to let the ideas which are given in our will-to-live be accepted as the higher and decisive kind of knowledge. My knowledge of the world is a knowledge from outside, and remains for ever incomplete. The knowledge derived from my will-to-live is direct, and takes me back to the mysterious movements of life as it is in itself.