The highest knowledge, then, is the knowing that I must be true to the will-to-live. It is this knowledge that hands me the compass for the voyage I have to make in the night without the aid of a chart. To live out one’s life in the direction of its course, to raise it to a higher power, and to ennoble it, is natural. Every depreciation of the will-to-live is an act of unveracity towards myself, or a symptom of unhealthiness. The essential nature of the will-to-live is determination to live itself to the full. It carries within it the impulse to realise itself in the highest possible perfection. In the flowering tree, in the strange forms of the medusa, in the blade of grass, in the crystal; everywhere it strives to reach the perfection with which it is endowed. In everything [pg 217] that exists there is at work an imaginative force, which is determined by ideals. In us, beings who can move about freely and are capable of pre-considered, purposive working, the impulse to perfection is given in such a way that we aim at raising to their highest material and spiritual value both ourselves and every existing thing which is open to our influence. How this striving originated within us, and how it has developed, we do not know, but it is given with our existence. We must act upon it, if we would not be unfaithful to the mysterious will-to-live which is within us. When the will-to-live arrives at the critical point where its early unsophisticated world- and life-affirmation has to be changed into a reflective one, it is the part of thought to assist it by holding it to the thinking out of all the ideas which are given within it and to the surrender of itself to them. That the will-to-live within us becomes true to itself and remains so; that it experiences no degeneration but develops itself to complete vitality, that is what decides the fate of our existence. When it comes to clearness about itself, the will-to-live knows that it is dependent on itself alone. It is meant to attain to freedom from the world. Its knowledge of the world can prove to it that its striving to raise to their highest value its own life and every living thing which can be influenced by it remains in the course of the world-whole, something problematic. In this it has not been misled. Its world- and life-affirmation carries its meaning in itself. It follows from an inward necessity, and is sufficient for itself. By its means my existence joins in pursuing the aims of the mysterious universal will of which I am a manifestation. In my deepened world- and life-affirmation, I manifest reverence for life. With consciousness and with volition I devote myself to Being. I become of service to the ideals which it thinks out in me; I become imaginative force like that which works enigmatically in nature, and thus I give my existence a meaning from within outwards. [pg 218]