This insistence on the importance of intuitive knowledge is closely connected with Schopenhauer's treatment of instinct. He is supremely interested in instinct, finding in it a positive quality, which plays frequently a more important part than the knowledge of the understanding or the reason. The one kind of knowledge is set constantly against the other in his system. His treatment of the whole subject is of deep significance in his philosophy. The typical case in which instinct is most highly developed is that of animals. They strive definitely towards an end, though this end is unknown to them. In all the instinctive actions of animals, the will is clearly as operative as in their other actions, but it is in blind activity. In inorganic and vegetable nature the will acts as blind impulse, and so with infallible certainty. Animals are exposed already to illusion and deception, but in their case instinct comes to their assistance. Though guided by no motive or knowledge, they yet have the appearance of performing their work from rational motives. They work with the greatest precision and definiteness towards an end which they do not know. In man also the will is in many ways only blindly active. Though a tendency of the will, instinct {79} does not act entirely from within. It waits for some external circumstance for its action. Instinct gives the universal, the rule; intellect gives the particular, the application. Instinct seems always to be in accordance with the conception of an end, and yet is entirely without such an end. Schopenhauer also connects instinct with clairvoyance and dreams. In his own life he attached especial importance to dreams, and on several critical occasions regulated his actions in accordance with them. With his treatment of instinct is bound up also his theory of sexual love. The lover is deluded in thinking that he aims at his own happiness. The will to live is forcing him, for nature's own purposes, to aim at a certain typical beauty, which has its end in the perfection of the offspring. The more perfectly two individuals are adapted to each other, the stronger will be their mutual passion. Nature is striving for a better realisation of the type, and to attain its ends must implant a certain illusion in the individual. That which is good only for the species appears to him as good for himself. He serves the species in imagining that he is serving himself. This illusion is instinct. The individual is but a helpless tool carrying out blindly the designs of nature.