§ 138. Schopenhauer must be credited with a genuine effort to accept the metaphysical consequences of his epistemology. His epistemology, as we have seen, defined knowledge as centripetal. The object of real knowledge is identical with the subject of knowledge. If I am to know the universal will, therefore, I must in knowing become that will. And this Schopenhauer maintains. The innermost heart of the individual into which he may retreat, even from his private will, is--the universal. But there is another way of arriving at the same knowledge. In contemplation I may become absorbed in principles and laws, rather than be diverted by the particular spacial and temporal objects, until (and this is peculiarly true of the æsthetic experience) my interest no longer distinguishes itself, but coincides with truth. In other words, abstract thinking and pure willing are not opposite extremes, but adjacent points on the deeper or transcendent circle of experience. One may reach this part of the circle by moving in either of two directions that at the start are directly opposite: by turning in upon the subject or by utterly giving one's self up to the object. Reality obtains no definition by this means. Philosophy, for Schopenhauer, is rather a programme for realizing the state in which I will the universal and know the universal will. The final theory of knowledge, then, is mysticism, reality directly apprehended in a supreme and incommunicable experience, direct and vivid, like perception, and at the same time universal, like thought. But the empiricism with which Schopenhauer began, the appeal to a familiar experience of self as will, has meanwhile been forgotten. The idea as object of my perception, and the will as its subject were in the beginning regarded as common and verifiable items of experience. But who, save the occasional philosopher, knows a universal will? Nor have attempts to avoid mysticism, while retaining Schopenhauer's first principle, been successful. Certain voluntarists and panpsychists have attempted to do without the universal will, and define the world solely in terms of the many individual wills. But, as Schopenhauer himself pointed out, individual wills cannot be distinguished except in terms of something other than will, such as space and time. The same is true if for will there be substituted inner feeling or consciousness. Within this category individuals can be distinguished only as points of view, which to be comparable at all must contain common objects, or be defined in terms of a system of relations like that of the physical world or that of an ethical community. The conception of pure will or pure feeling inevitably attaches to itself that of an undivided unity, if for no other reason because there is no ground for distinction. And such a unity, a will or consciousness that is no particular act or idea, can be known only in the unique experience which mysticism provides. [Sidenote: Objective Spiritualism.]