Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer sought to understand and describe the world and the things of the world. Building off of the ideas of Plato, Descartes, and Kant, however doing away with the aspect of dualism in their theories, he developed the concept of Will and Representation. The world as Will according to Schopenhauer is all that exists for knowledge, only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver, in a word, idea. Everything in the world is …

…must be acted upon by some cause before it could take definite form, where does this cause come from? The will is the all; there is nothing outside of it to determine its action in any direction. I agree with Adamson in saying the will has in itself no power of development to any definite result, and the Ideas or stages are nothing but the scholastic substantial forms, abstracted from individuals and given an identity.