What Hegel has called the 'impotence of nature,' Schopenhauer has styled the irrational Will, and it is from that end, so to speak, that Schopenhauer's philosophy begins. Nature--the basis of all things--the fundamental prius--is an irresistible and irregular appetite or craving to be, to do, to live,--but an _appetitus_ or _nisus_ which ascends from grade to grade--from mere mechanical forces acting in movement up to the highest form of animal activity. But as this 'Will' or blind lust of being and instinct of life gets above the inorganic world, and manifests itself in the animal organism, there emerges a new order of existence--the intellect, or the ideal world. Seen from the underside, indeed, all that has appeared now in the animal is a brain and a nerve-system--a new species of matter. But there is another side to the Mind which has thus awakened out of the sleep of natural forces. This intellect is unaware and can never be made aware that it is a child of nature: it acknowledges no superior, and no beginning or end in time. Its natal day is infinitely beyond the age when the cosmic process began its race; before stars gathered their masses of luminosity, and the earth received the first germs of life. As the genius of Art, it arrests the toiling struggle of existence to produce new forms and destroy old ones; it sets free in typical forms of eternal beauty the great ideas that nature vainly seeks to embody, and as moral and religious life its aim is to annihilate the craving and the lust for more and ever more being and to enter in passionless and calm union with the One-and-All.