The will is the reality behind all life. The intellect is merely a tool in the service of the will. It is {25} impossible to find in reason a complete knowledge of the essence of the world. A merely intellectual philosophy of life is bound to be thin and hollow, and we should aim rather at a clear and direct insight into life. Now the will, into which every form of life can be resolved, is the source of all human misery and unhappiness. The only way in which men can free themselves from the bondage of the will, and throw off its yoke, is by looking upon beauty. It is in art that eternal truth is revealed with a directness and certainty to which science never attains. This theory is connected with the Platonic theory of Ideas. The real inner nature of things, the Ideas in the Platonic sense, are revealed in creative and imaginative art. The faculty of vision, which enables men to divine this reality behind appearances, and to interpret it to others, is the gift of the artistic genius. He "understands the half-uttered speech of nature, and articulates clearly what she only stammered forth." The man of genius produces works of art by intuitive insight. He sees through the outer shell to the inner significance that lies at the heart of things. Genius is the faculty of renouncing entirely one's own personality for the time being, so as to become clear vision of the world, free of subjectivity. The genius must have imagination, above all things, in order to see in things not that which nature has actually made, but that which she endeavoured to make, but could not. Art, however, does not deliver us permanently from life, but only for moments. It is therefore not a path out of life, but only an occasional consolation in life. It is the saint, who through the surrender of all willing, through the intentional mortification of his own desires, attains to true resignation. Happiness {26} and unhappiness become then a matter of indifference, and the spell of the illusion, which held us chained in the bonds of this world, is broken for ever. These were the views which found expression in Schopenhauer's great work, _The World as Will and Idea_, which was finished in 1818. He found a publisher in Brockhaus of Leipsic. While the work was going through the press, he attacked his publisher with such violent rudeness, that Brockhaus wrote declining all further correspondence with one "whose letters in their supreme coarseness and rusticity savour more of the cabman than of the philosopher."