that _will_ is attributed to processes of nature which hitherto were explained from necessity, or that the same strict necessity is recognised in motivation as in mechanical causality. The two have merely changed places: freedom has been transferred to the _Esse_, and necessity limited to the _Operari_. In short, _Determinism_ stands firm. For fifteen hundred years men have wearied themselves in vain to shake it, influenced by certain crotchets, which are well known, but dare scarcely yet be called by their name. Yet in accordance with it the world becomes a mere puppet‐show, drawn by wires (motives), without it being even possible to understand for whose amusement. If the piece has a plan, then fate is the director; if it has none, then blind necessity. There is no other deliverance from this absurdity than the knowledge that the _being and nature_ of all things is the manifestation of a really _free will_, which knows itself in them; for their _doing and acting_ cannot be delivered from necessity. To save freedom from fate and chance, it had to be transferred from the action to the existence. As now necessity only affects the phenomenon, not the thing in itself, _i.e._, the true nature of the world, so also does _multiplicity_. This is sufficiently explained in § 25 of the first volume. I have only to add here one remark in confirmation and illustration of this truth. Every one knows only _one_ being quite immediately—his own will in self‐ consciousness. Everything else he knows only indirectly, and then judges it by analogy with this; a process which he carries further in proportion to the grade of his reflective powers. Even this ultimately springs from the fact that there really is _only one being_; the illusion of multiplicity (_Maja_), which proceeds from the forms of external, objective comprehension, could not penetrate to inner, simple consciousness; therefore this always finds before it only one being.