The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 3 of 3)

Indeed empirical traces of this may be found in several states which are related to death by the abolition of the concentration of consciousness in the brain, among which the magnetic sleep is the most prominent; for in it, if it reaches a high degree, our existence shows itself through various symptoms, beyond our persons and [pg 419] in other beings, most strikingly by direct participation in the thoughts of another individual, and ultimately even by the power of knowing the absent, the distant, and even the future, thus by a kind of omnipresence.

Upon this metaphysical identity of the will, as the thing in itself, in the infinite multiplicity of its phenomena, three principal phenomena depend, which may be included under the common name of sympathies: (1) sympathy proper, which, as I have shown, is the basis of justice and benevolence, caritas; (2) sexual love, with capricious selection, amor, which is the life of the species, that asserts its precedence over that of the individual; (3) magic, to which animal magnetism and sympathetic cures also belong. Accordingly sympathy may be defined as the empirical appearance of the metaphysical identity of the will, through the physical multiplicity of its phenomena, whereby a connection shows itself which is entirely different from that brought about by means of the forms of the phenomenon which we comprehend under the principle of sufficient reason.