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.
An instinctive character belongs also to the highest functions of human life, as in art and virtue. Wisdom proper, says Schopenhauer, is something intuitive, and not something pertaining to the intellect. It does not consist in principles and thoughts, which are carried about ready in the mind, as the result of research, but it is the whole manner in which the world presents itself intuitively to the mind. In real life the scholar is far surpassed by the man of the world, for the strength of the latter consists in perfect intuitive knowledge. The { 80} true view of life proceeds from the way in which the world is known and understood, not from abstract knowledge. The heart of all knowledge is intuition. Upon this depends the infinite superiority of genius to learning and scholarship. They stand to each other as the text of a classic to its commentary. It was this emphasis, which Schopenhauer laid on the instinctive and impulsive side in man, rather than on the conscious and deliberate, which led him to the view that man is a creature controlled and dominated by his instincts, and therefore a mere puppet in the hands of nature.