VIII. The Factors of Life

Voluntarism turns into Metaphysical Realism when it asserts the existence of will also in those spheres of reality in which will can no longer, as in the individual subject, be immediately experienced. It assumes hypothetically that a principle holds good outside the subject, for the existence of which, nevertheless, subjective experience is the sole criterion of reality. As a form of Metaphysical Realism, Voluntarism is open to the criticism developed in the preceding chapter, a criticism which makes it necessary to overcome the contradictory element in every form of Metaphysical Realism, and to acknowledge that the will is a universal world-process only in so far as it is ideally related to the rest of the world.