The World as Will and Idea, Vol. I — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp
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The translator’s English as printed (R. B. Haldane & J. Kemp). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
influence of outward circumstances upon the life that is determined in essential matters by the character, if we desire to understand how the will, in the original act of its objectification, determines the various Ideas in which it objectifies itself, that is, the different forms of natural existence of every kind, among which it distributes its objectification, and which must therefore necessarily have a relation to each other in the manifestation.
We must assume that between all these manifestations of the one will there existed a universal and reciprocal adaptation and accommodation of themselves to each other, by which, however, as we shall soon see more clearly, all timedetermination is to be excluded, for the Idea lies outside time.
In accordance with this, every manifestation must have adapted itself to the surroundings into which it entered, and these again must have adapted themselves to it, although it occupied a much later position in time ; and we see this consensus naturce everywhere.
Evmy plant is therefore adapted to its soil and climate, every animal to its dement and the prey that will be its food, and is also in i^ejwaxprotected, to a certain extent, against its natural enemy ; Uie eye is adapted to the light and its refrangibil^, the lungs and the blood to the air, the air-bladder of fish to water, the eye of the seal to the change of the mechmn in which it must see, the water-pouch in the stomach of the camel to the drought of the African deserts, the sail of the nautilus to the wind that is to drive its little bark, and so on down to the most special and astonishing outward adaptations.^ We must abstract however here from all temporal relations, for these can only concern the manifestation of the Idea, not the Idea itself.
Accordingly this kind of explanation must also be used retrospectively, and we must not merely admit that every species accommodated itself to the given environment, but also that this environment itself, which preceded it in time, had just as much regard for the being that would some time come into it.
For it k one and the same will that (^j^ctifies ..itself jn .the '^hole_world ; it knows no time, for this form of the principle of sufficIent~reason does not belong to it, nor to its original objectivity, the Ideas, but only to the way in which these are known by the individuals who themselves are transitory, i.e., to the manifestation of the Ideas, Thus, time has no significance for our present examination of the manner in which the objectification of the will distributes itself among the Ideas, and the Ideas whose mamfestations entered into the course of time earlier, according to the law of causality, to which as phenomena they are subject, have no advantage over those whose manifestation entered later ; nay rather, these last are the completest objectifications of the will, to which the earlier manifestations must adapt themselves just as much as they must adapt themselves to the earlier.
Thus the course of the planets, the tendency to the ellipse, the rotation of the earth, the division of land and sea, the atmosphere, light, warmth, and all such phenomena, which are in nature what bass is in harmony, adapted themselves in anticipation of the coming species of living creatures of which they were to become the supporter and sustainer.
In the same way the ground adapted itself to the nutrition of plants, plants adapted themselves to the nutrition of animals, animals to that of other animals, and conversely they all adapted themselves to the nutrition of the ground.
All the parts of nature correspond to each other, for it is one will that appears in them all, but the course of time is quite foreign to its original and only adequate dbjettificatim (this expression will be explained in the following book), the Ideas.
Even now, when the species have only to sustain themselves, no longer to come into existence, we see here and there some such forethought of nature extending to the future, and abstracting as it were from the process of time, a self-adaptation of what is to what VOL. L 0
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is yet to come. Th^ bird builds tbe nest for the_young wbicb it does not yet know; the beaver constructs a dam Xbe object of which is unknown to it ; jints, marines,~andTees lay in provision for the winter thi^ Have never experienced } the spider and the ant-lion make snares, as if with deliberate cunning, for future unknown prey ; insects deposit their eggs where tlie coming brood finds future nourishment In the spring-time the female flower of tiie dioecian valisneria unwinds the spirals of its stalk, by which till now it was held at the bottom of the water, and thus rises to the surface. Just then the male flower, which grows on a short stalk from the bottom, breaks away, and so, at the sacrifice of its life, reaches the surface, where it swims about in search of the femala The latter is fructified, and then draws itself down again to the bottom by contracting its spirals, and there the fruit grows.^ I must again refer here to the larva of the male stag-beetle, which makes the hole in the wood for its metamorphosis as big again as the female does, in order to have room for its future horns. The instinct of animals in general gives us the best illustration of what remains of teleology in nature. For as instinct is an action, like that which is guided by the conception of an end, and yet is entirely without this ; so all construction of nature resembles that which is guided by the conception of an end, and yet is entirely without it. For in the outer as in the inner teleology of nature, what we are obliged to think as means and end is, in every case, ifie manlfestaiion of the unity of the one ivUl so thoroughly freeing with itself, which has assumed multiplicity in space and time for our manner of knowing.
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