“If life must come to an end,” says Fritz Strich, “it is not in itself necessary; it is not bound to live. Out of the depths of this dolorous recognition and experience there arises that which alone makes the spirit to be spirit, and man, man: the will to something that is necessary in itself, that necessarily must perdure and never can terminate.”

“The will to something necessary”: echoes of the Schopenhauerian world as will and imagination? An eminently “Western” will; a will to action, to movement. A will to change, then? And yet a will to something unchangeable, necessary in itself, solidly static!

“Unquiet is the human heart, until it rests in Thee, O God,” confessed St. Augustine. He did not, in the first place, “will” God: before willing Him, He recognized that He was already, and that He is necessary in Himself—not only so, but that He is the only thing that is necessary in itself. Knowing God, he willed to rest in Him and thus to transcend the world of change and death, of becoming and ending, the world of samsâra, as Indian thought would express itself.