The World as Will and Idea, Vol. I — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp

§ I. '-The world is ray idea:” — this is a which holds good for everything that lives and knows, thoiifH man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has att^xned to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain tcThim that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth ; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, t.e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself. If any truth can be asserted a priori, it is this : for it is the expression of the most general form of all possible and thinkable experience : a form which is more general than time, or space, or causality, for they all presuppose it; and each of these, which we have seen to be just so many modes of the principle of sufficient reason, is valid only for a particular class of ideas ; whereas the antithesis of object and subject is the common form of all these classes, is that form under which alone any idea of whatever kind it may be, abstract or intuitive, pure or empirical, is possible and thinkable. No truth therefore is more certain, nioie independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, that all that exists for knowledge, and therefore this whole worldj is only pbject in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver^ in a word, idea. This is obviously true of the past and the future, as well as of the present, of what is farthest off, as of what is near; for it true of time and space themselves, in which ^one thesj^ ^^istinctiQlls,_ ^1 that in any wayTHE WORLD .45 IDEA. belongs or can belong to the world is inevitably thus conditioned through the subject, and exists only for the subject. The world is idea.

This truth is by no means new. It was implicitly involved in the sceptical reflections from which Descartes started. Berkeley, however, was the first who distinctly enunciated it, and by this he has rendered a permanent service to philosophy, even though the rest of his teaching ^lould not endure. Kant’s primary mistake was the neglect of this principle, as is shown in the appendix.

How early again this truth was recognised by the wise men of India, appearing indeed as the fundamental tenet of the Vedanta philosophy ascribed to Vyasa, is pointed out by Sir William Jones in the last of his essays : “jOn the philosophy of the Asiatics ” (Asiatic Eesearches, vcL iv. p. 1 64), where he says, “ The fundamental tenet of the Vedanta school consisted not in denying the existence of matter, that is, of solidity, impenetrability, and extended figure (to deny which would be lunacy), but in correcting the popular notion of it, and in contending that it has no essence independent of mental perception ; that existence and perceptibility are convertible terms. These words adequately express the compatibility of empirical reality and transcendental ideality.

In this first book, then, we consider the world only from this side, only so far as it is idea. The inward reluctance with which any one accepts the world as merely his idea, warns him that this view of it, however true it may be, is nevertheless one-sided, adopted in consequence of some arbitrary abstraction. And yet it is a conception from which he can never free himself. The defectiveness of this view will be corrected in the next book by means of a truth which is not so immediately certain as that from which we start here ; a truth at which we can arrive only by deeper research and more severe abstraction, by the separation of what is different and the union of what is identical. This

THE WORLD AS IDEA.

truth, which must be very serious and iiiipressiye if not awful to e very ^pn^Ts that a man can also say and must “ the world is my will.”

In this book, however, we must consider separately that aspect of the world from which we start, its aspect as knowable, and therefore, in the meantime, we must, without reserve, regard all presented objects, even our own bodies (as shall presently show more fully), merely as ideas, and call them merely ideas. By so doing we always abstract from will (as we hope to make clear to every one further on), which by itself constitutes the other aspect of the world. For as the world is in one aspect entirely idea, so in another it is entirely will. A reality which is neither of these two, but an object in itself (into which the thing in itself has unfortunately dwindled in the hands of Kant), is the phantom of a dream, and its acceptance is an ignis fatuus in philosophy.