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

§ 3. The chief distinction among our ideas is that between ideas_ of perception anc^ .^stmet ideas. The latter form just one class of ideas, namely conQepU,3nd these are the possession of man alone of all creatures upon earth. Idie capacity for these, which distinguishes Bliiii froni all the lower animals, has always been called reason.^ We shall consider these abstract ideas by themselVes later, but, in the first place, we shall speak exclusively of the ideas of perception. Td^^conjprehend the whole yisible world, pr the sum total of experience, with the conations of its possibility. We have already observed that it is a highly important discovery of Kant’s, that these very conditions, these forms of the visible world, i.e.y the absolutely universal element in its perception, the common property of all its phenomena, space and time, even when taken by themselves and apart from their content, can, not only be thought in the abstract, but also be directly perceived ; and that this perception or intuition is not some kind of phantasm arising from constant recurrence in experience, but is so entirely independent of experience that we must rather regard the latter as dependent on it, inasmuch as the qualities of space and timej[ as they are known in a priori perception or intuh tion, are valid for all possible experience, as rules to which it must invariably conform. Accordingly, in my

^ Kant is the only writer who I my “ Grundprobleme der Ethik ” ; has confused this idea of reason, \ Grundl. dd. Moral. § 6, pp. 148-154, and in this connection I refer the Ifirst and second editions, reader to the Appendix, and also to

THE WORLD AS IDEA.

essay on tlie principle of sufficient reason, I hav^ treated space and time, because they are perceived as pure and empty of content, as a special and independent class of ideas.

This quality of the universal forms of intuition, which was discovered by Kant, that they may be perceived in themselves and apart from experience, and tliat they may be known as exhibiting those laws on which is founded the infallible science of mathematics, is certainly very important.

Not less worthy of remark, however, is this other quality of time and space, that the principle of sufficient reason, which conditions experience as the law of causation and of motive, and thought as the law of the basis of judgment, appears here in quite a special form, to which I have given the name of the ground of being.

In time, this is the succession of its moments, and in space the position of its parts, which reciprocally determine each other ad infinitum.

Any one who has fully understood from the introductory essay the complete identity of the content of the principle of sufficient reason in all its different forms, must also be convinced of the importance of the knowledge of the simplest of these forms, tis affording him insight into his own inmost nature. This simplest form of the principle we have found to be time. In it each instant is, only in so far as it has effaced the preceding one, its generator, to be itself in turn as quickly effaced. The past and the future (considered apart from the consequences of their content) are empty as a dream, and the present is only the indivisible and unenduring boundary between them. And in all the other forms of the principle of sufficient reason, we ^hall find the same emptiness, and shall see that not time only but also space, and the whole content of both of them, i.e., all that proceeds from causes and motives, has a merely relative existence, is only through and for another like to itself, i.e., not more enduring. The substance of this doctrine is old ; it appears in Heraclitus wE^ Tie laments the eternal

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