 Schopenhauer’s position on whether the thing-in-itself is Will consequently presents some interpretive difficulties. In On the Will in Nature (1836/1854), he almost always speaks as if the two are identical. In the second volume of The World as Will and Representation (1844), he addresses the above complication, and qualifies his claim that the thing-in-itself is Will. He states in the 1844 work (reciting manuscript notes from 1821 almost verbatim, so this is not an “1844” or “later” view) that it is only “to us” that the thing-in-itself appears as Will and that it remains possible that the thing-in-itself has other modes of being that are incomprehensible in ordinary terms, but that might be accessible to mystical consciousness (WWR, II, Chapter XVIII, “On the Possibility of Knowing the Thing-in-Itself”). He concludes that mystical experience is only a relative nothingness, that is, when it is considered from the standpoint of the daily world, but that it is not an absolute nothingness, as would be the case if the thing-in-itself were Will in an unconditional sense, and not merely Will to us. 