He pursued this quest readily with the philosopher Schopenhauer and passed almost imperceptibly into metaphysics: _I will never believe that even the simplest chemical combination will ever admit of mechanical explanation; much less the properties of light, heat, and electricity. These will always require a dynamical explanation._ _If we can ferret out the ultimate nature of our own minds we shall perhaps have the key to the external world._ _Let us say, then, that repulsion and attraction, combination and decomposition, magnetism and electricity, gravity and crystallization, are Will._ _Will, then, is the essence of man. Now what if it is also the essence of life in all its forms, and even of "inanimate" matter? What if Will is the long-sought-for, the long-despaired-of, "the thing-in-itself"--the ultimate inner reality and secret essence of all things?_ Buckmaster perceived that these men were catching glimpses of something which they called Will, Order, Thing, Absolute, and other names but which were all very probably the same thing--and also that which he sought. Eagerly he read on. His next clue came from Bergson: _Thought may begin with its object, and at last, in consistency, be driven, by the apparent necessities of logic, to conceive all things as forms and creatures of mind_. Quickly he passed on to Spinoza where he found a wealth of food for thought. _Is the body merely an idea?_ _Is all the mentality that is scattered over space and time, a diffused consciousness that animates the world?_ _There is but one entity, seen now inwardly as mind, now outwardly as matter, but in reality an inextricable mixture and unity of both._ _Eternal order ... that betokens the very structure of existence, underlying all events and things, and constituting the essence of the world._ _Substance is insubstantial, that it is form and not matter, that it had nothing to do with that mongrel and neuter composite of matter._ Bruno said: _All reality is one in substance, one in cause, one in origin; mind and matter are one._ Descartes' conception of a homogeneous "substance" underlying all forms of matter intrigued him for a time, and he wrestled mentally with the classic quotation, _I think, therefore I am_. Berkeley wrote: _A "thing" is merely a bundle of perceptions--i. e., classified and interpreted sensations_. Hegel: _The Absolute, transcending the individual limitations and purposes, and catching, underneath the universal strife, the hidden harmony of all things. Reason is the substance of the universe._ Leibniz: _Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream, and the visible world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it_. * * * * *