We turn to a very different form of speculation, yet one equally favourable to the essential contention of the nature-mystic--that of Schopenhauer, a philosopher whose system is attracting closer and keener attention as the years pass by. Certain of his views have been cursorily mentioned in what has preceded, and will find further mention in what is to follow. But here, the aim is to focus attention on his fundamental doctrine, that the Ground of all existence is Will. His line of argument in arriving at this conclusion is briefly to be stated thus. The nature of things-in-themselves would remain an eternal secret to us, were it not that we are able to approach it, not by knowledge of external phenomena, but by inner experience. Every knowing being is a part of nature, and it is in his own self-consciousness that a door stands open for him through which he can approach nature. That which makes itself most immediately known within himself is will; and in this will is to be found the _Welt-stoff_. Let Schopenhauer speak for himself. "Whoever, I say, has with me gained this conviction . . . will recognise this will of which we are speaking, not only in those phenomenal existences which exactly resemble his own, in men and animals, as their inmost nature, but the course of reflection will lead him to recognise the force which germinates and vegetates in the plant, and indeed the force through which the crystal is formed, that by which the magnet turns to the North Pole, the force whose shock he experiences from the contact of two different kinds of metal, the force which appears in the elective affinities of matter as repulsion and attraction, decomposition and combination, and, lastly, even gravitation, which acts so powerfully throughout matter, draws the stone to the earth and the earth to the sun--all these, I say, he will recognise as different only in their phenomenal existence, but in their inner nature as identical, as that which is directly known to him so intimately and so much better than anything else, and which in its most distinct manifestation is called will." Here again we have standing ground for the creed and the experiences of the nature-mystic. All forms and modes of existence are akin, and differ only in their phenomenal conditions. Whether Schopenhauer has not laid too exclusive an emphasis on will; whether he has not unnecessarily chosen the lowest types of will as primitive--these are questions to be discussed elsewhere. Enough that we have in this theory a definite return to critical animism. He holds the universe to be throughout of the same "stuff," and that stuff is psychic or spiritual. Body and soul, matter and spirit, are but different aspects of the same underlying Reality.