His principal work, The World as Will and Idea, was published at the end of 1818. He believed it
to be of great importance, and went so far as to say that some paragraphs in it had been dictated by
the Holy Ghost. To his great mortification, it fell completely flat. In 1844 he persuaded the
publisher to bring out a second edition; but it was not till some years later that he began to receive
some of the recognition for which he longed.
Schopenhauer's system is an adaptation of Kant's, but one that emphasizes quite different aspects
of the Critique from those emphasized by Fichte or Hegel. They got rid of the thing-in-itself, and
thus made knowledge metaphysically fundamental. Schopenhauer retained the thing-in-itself, but
identified it with will. He held that what appears to perception as my body is really my will. There
was more to be said for this view as a development of Kant than most Kantians were willing to
recognize. Kant had maintained that a study of the moral law can take us behind phenomena, and
give us knowledge which sense-perception cannot give; he also maintained that the moral law is
essentially concerned with the will. The difference between a good man and a bad man is, for
Kant, a difference in the world of thingsin-themselves, and is also a difference as to volitions. It
follows that, for Kant, volitions must belong to the real world, not to the world of phenomena.
The phenomenon corresponding to a volition is a bodily movement; that is why, according to
Schopenhauer, the body is the appearance of which will is the reality.
But the will which is behind phenomena cannot consist of a number of different volitions. Both
time and space, according to Kant--and in this Schopenhauer agrees with him--belong only to
phenomena; the thing-in-itself is not in space or time. My will, therefore, in the sense in which it
is real, cannot be dated, nor can it be composed of separate acts of will, because it is space and
time that are the source of plurality--the "principle of individuation," to use the scholastic phrase
which Schopenhauer prefers. My will, therefore, is one and timeless. Nay, more, it is to be
identified with the will of the whole universe; my separateness is an illusion, resulting from my
subjective apparatus of spatio-temporal perception. What is real is one vast will, appearing in the
whole course of nature, animate and inanimate alike.
So far, we might expect Schopenhauer to identify his cosmic will with God, and teach a
pantheistic doctrine not unlike Spinoza's, in