Organic attraction and mechanical pull are both to Schopenhauer expressions of the Will-to-live. This Will tries falsely to overcome death by self-reproduction. This is why, says Schopenhauer, the sexual urge is so strong in all beings. It is just another phase of the Will-to-live, the assertion of its immortality, its attempt to live eternally as an individual of the species. The instincts for self-preservation and self-reproduction are not different from each other. The latter is only the process of ensuring the existence of the former in the future, too. Hence there is only one instinct, the turbulent, unquenchable Will-to-live. The intellect has no power over this instinct. Schopenhauer makes the romances of love merely the subtle contrivances of the Will-to-live, the instruments used by it in its dark and wild operations to preserve itself. He concludes that sexual love brings misery to the individual because its aim is not the pleasure or the good of the individual but the continuation of the species, for which nature shrewdly covers the reason of the individual and induces it to lay faith in the illusion that this is for its own pleasure and good. Thus the attempt of the Will to immortalise itself ends in its defeat, for what is here immortalised is not the individual but the species. The individual has been cleverly deceived! Pleasure has no place in the process of the preservation of the species. Here Schopenhauer gives merely a psychological interpretation of the Will-to-live asserting itself as the Will-to-reproduce. Its metaphysical implications are to be discovered in the dialectical process of Hegel and the 'satisfaction' of 'actual entities' in the philosophy of Whitehead. The neutralisation of the thesis and the antithesis in the synthesis, which is the way in which all things create and recreate themselves and which Hegel employed to describe the integrating process of the higher evolution of the individuals towards the realisation of Self-consciousness in the Absolute applies distortedly in relative individuals, ignorant of any such higher purpose, to the reproduction of individualities. In Whitehead the Hegelian dialectic continues in an elaborate manner. The actual entities of Whitehead supply the data which are sought to be unified into the 'satisfaction' of the innate urge to create. An 'actual entity' is said to enjoy the process of creating itself out of its data, feels a 'satisfaction' in its self-emergence. An 'actual entity' becomes a 'superject' when it emerges out of the pre-existing world of actual entities. The implied meaning of all this is that a creative urge is immanent in all things, which in its higher liberating archetypal existence becomes an integrating conscious march to the realisation of the Absolute, and in its lower binding reflected aspect in mortal individuals assumes the form of a blind seeking to perpetuate the species. Here the lower becomes a travesty of the higher. The Greek philosophers had evidently this in their minds when they held the extraordinary view that sexual love represents in the world of sense a shadow of Divine love. The Hindu ethics, too, regards marriage not as a contract of love, but as a sacrament, a devout union of souls for the fulfilment of a purpose higher than the mundane. It was not any element of passion but a dutiful surrender to law that determined the meaning of marriage in ancient Hindu society. It was a spiritual aim that directed the union of the sexes. A note, however, has to be added that all this is true metaphysically and in highly advanced societies, but the ordinary individual in the world of sense gets perpetually blindfolded and stupidly forgetting all spirituality in the nature of things, does not only fail to benefit by these higher implications, but heads towards a fall into the mire of bondage and grief due to its cravings. As a rule it has to be held that there is no possibility of discovering the spiritual in external objects as long as one is locked within the prison-house of a world of ignorance, desire and attachment. Schopenhauer gives the lower empirical side of the picture, and does not rise to these heights which we know the man of today is not endowed with the ability to understand. For Schopenhauer marriage is the disillusionment of love, a trick by which every one is made to fall a victim to the blind Will. The Will can be conquered, says Schopenhauer, by overcoming the Will-to-reproduce. The Will-to-reproduce is considered the greatest evil, for it seeks to perpetuate the misery of individual existence. Schopenhauer says that passions can be subdued by the domination of knowledge over the Will. Most of our troubles would cease to be troubles if only they could be properly understood in relation to their causes. Self-control provides to man the greatest protection against all external compulsion and attack. True greatness is in self-mastery, not in victory over the worlds. The joy of the within is greater than the pleasure of the outside. To live in the self is to live in peace. The evil Will can be overcome by conscious contemplation on the truth of things. Schopenhauer even recommends the company of the wise and intimate relations with them as aids in this contemplation. Knowledge is the great purifier of the self of man. When the world is viewed not by sense but by knowledge, man is liberated from the evil and bondage of the Will. Knowledge takes us to the universal essence. How can this profound insight be consistent with the notion that consciousness, intelligence or knowledge is only a phenomenon, an appearance of the Will? How can knowledge give man freedom from the Will if it is only a creature projected by the Will? Further, when the Will is Reality and also blind and evil, there can be no such thing as freedom, for the ultimate aim of existence is to return to Reality, and so the eternal experience that we have to aspire for ought to be one of unconsciousness, evil. How can Nirvana from the Will or the attainment of happiness and peace be possible, which Schopenhauer so forcibly pleads for, if the Will is Reality and consciousness its effect? How could Schopenhauer give us a chaste philosophy through his intellect if the intellect is an appearance of the evil Will? Will not then his philosophy itself become a product of blind craving and evil? Schopenhauer gives evidence to a confused mind which longs for universal and eternal freedom in perfect knowledge, but which at the same time condemns this longing by denouncing Reality as a blind and evil Will. His resignation to asceticism which, he says, can destroy the Will and enable one to attain freedom shows that the Will is not Reality but a clinging to individual existence, and that Reality is freedom, happiness and peace. A recognition of the limitations and sufferings, cravings and evils in the relative world ought to be no doubt the beginning of any true philosophy. But Schopenhauer commits himself many times to extreme statements which a sober mind will find difficult to appreciate fully. The limit is reached when Reality itself is jibed as evil. Such a theory is the result of an imperfect and one-sided view of life, though at times, side by side with an expression of prejudice and personal sentiment, he gives intimations of profound knowledge and a wisdom that cannot but win the admiration of the thinking world. Schopenhauer is no less a genius than either Kant or Hegel, but his genius often gets marred by certain immature conclusions, a defective metaphysics and an attempt to give the touch of wholeness to what is only one side of the nature of things. There is evil when craving rules our realm, but beyond all this is a goal which is unsurpassable splendour and bliss eternal and which we are bound to achieve. However, it has to be admitted, in the end, that Schopenhauer has done a great service to mankind by drawing its attention to the fact that life is not all roses, that there is a dark and bitter side of existence here, that there is ignorance, deception, suffering and pain, and that no philosophy which ignores this truism can ever hope to be complete.