the beginning of Schopenhauer's fame, about 1850, coincides with a
general rehabilitation of will as the dominant faculty in the soul and
in the world, at the cost of the methodic orderly processes of
understanding; a movement exhibited in the psychological innovations of
Wundt and Münsterberg, in the growth of the doctrine that what a thing
is is determined by what it _can_; that value is in fact the measure,
and even the meaning, of existence; that will can arm impotence, create
faith, and master disease; and in the call of the colossal will-power
which created the German empire and launched her on the career of
industrial greatness. Nietzsche's Superman is, above all, a being of
colossal and masterful will, and Zarathustra, the prophet of
superhumanity, is only an incarnation of the will that for Schopenhauer
moved the world. The moment at which the prestige of will began
definitely to overcome that of reasoning is marked, as Aliotta has
pointed out, by the appearance of James's _Will to Believe_, just when
agnosticism seemed triumphant.

Nietzsche and Bergson thus, with all their obvious and immense
divergences, concurred in this respect, important from our present point
of view, that their influence tended to transfer authority from the
philosophic reason to those 'irrational' elements of mind which reach
their highest intensity in the vision and 'rage' of the poet. James's
vindication of drunken exaltation as a source of religious insight was
not the least symptomatic passage of his great book. And both concurred,
however remote their methods or their speech, in conceiving reality as
creation, creation in which we take part--a conception which again, in
the hands of the constructive religious thinker, led directly to the
type of faith announced in that last--the Jamesian--'Variety' of
religious experience, which represents us as indispensable
fellow-workers and allies of a growing and striving God.