The body is the most real thing for everyone. If we analyse the reality of this body, we find nothing but the will. With this its reality is exhausted. The word {40} will, like a magic spell, he says, reveals the inmost being of all nature. Spinoza says, that if a stone, which has been projected through the air, had consciousness, it would believe that it was moving of its own will. Schopenhauer adds that the stone would be right. The impulse given it, is for the stone what the motive is for us. All blindly impelling force, all forces which act in nature in accordance with universal laws, are equally in their inner nature to be recognised as will. It is everywhere one and the same, "just as the first dim light of dawn must share the name of sunlight with the rays of the full midday." Now the will expresses itself necessarily as a struggle. Everywhere in nature we see strife, conflict, and alternation of victory. Every grade of will fights for the matter, the space, and the time of the others. For each desires to express its own inmost nature. Nature exists only through such struggle. This universal conflict is most distinctly visible in the animal kingdom. For animals have the whole of the vegetable kingdom for their food, and even within the animal kingdom every beast is the prey and the food of another. Each animal can maintain its existence only by the constant destruction of some other life. This is the "will to live" which everywhere preys upon itself, until finally the human race regards nature as a manufactory for its own use. This strife manifests itself just as characteristically in the lower grades of will, _e.g._ the ivy which encircles the oak until the tree withers as if choked, the parasite which fastens itself on the animal and kills it. Even crude matter has its existence only in the strife of conflicting forces. Man has need of the beasts for his support, the beasts in their turn have need of each other as well as plants, {41} which in their turn require the ground, water, and chemical elements and their combinations. Thus in nature everything preys on some other form of life. For the will must live on itself; there exists nothing beside it, and it is a hungry will.