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

bility of knowledge in general, the universal how of all phenomena, and from this knowledge proceed mathematics and pure natural science. But this other kind of knowledge a priori, which makes it possible to express the beautiful, concerns, not the form but the content of phenomena, not the how but the what of the phenomenon.

That we all recognise human beauty when we see it, but that in the true artist this takes place with such clearness that he shows it as he has never seen it, and surpasses nature in his representation; this is only possible because we ourselves are the will whose adequate objectification at its highest grade is here to be judged and discovered.

Thus alone have we in fact an anticipation of that which nature (which is just the will that constitutes our own being) strives to express. And in the true genius this anticipation is accompanied by so great a degree of intelligence that he recognises the Idea in the particular thing, and thus, as it were, understavds the half-uttered speech of nature, and articulates clearly what she only stammered forth.

He expresses in the hard marble that beauty of form which in a thousand attempts she failed to produce, he presents it to nature, saying, as it were, to her, “ That is what you wanted to say ! And whoever is able to judge replies, “ Yes, that is it.

Only in this way was it possible for the genius of the Greeks to find the type of human beauty and establish it as a canon for the school of sculpture ; and only by virtue of such an anticipation is it possible for all of us to recognise beauty, when it has actually been achieved by nature in the particular case.

This anticipation is the Ideal, It is the Idea so far as it is known a priori, at least half, and it becomes practical for art, because it corresponds to and completes what is given a posteriori through nature. The possibility of such an anticipation of the beautiful a priori in the artist, and of its recognition a posteriori by the critic, lies in the fact that the artist and the critic are themselves the “ in- itself ” of nature, the

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THE WORLD AS IDEA,

BK. III.

will which objectifies itself. For, as Empedocles said^ like can only be kjLQWiiJby,-likfi,: only nature can understand itself : only nature can fathom itself : but only spirit also can understand spirit.^

The opinion, which is absurd, although expressed by the Socrates of Xenophon (Stobaei Floril, vol. ii. p. 384) that the Greeks discovered the established ideal of human beauty empirically, by collecting particular beautiful parts, uncovering and noting here a knee, there an arm, has an exact parallel in the art of poetry. The view is entertained, that Shakespeare, for example, observed, and then gave forth from his own experience of life, the innumerable variety of the characters in his dramas, so true, so sustained, so profoundly worked out. The impossibility and absurdity of such an assumption need not be dwelt upon. It is obvious that the man of genius produces the works of poetic art by means of an anticipation of what is characteristic, just as he produces the works of plastic and pictorial art by means of a prophetic anticipation of the beautiful; yet both require experience as a pattern or model, for thus alone can that which is dimly known a priori be called into clear consciousness, and an intelligent representation of it becomes possible.

Human beauty was explained above as the fullest objectification of will at the highest grade at which it is knowabla It expresses itself through the form ; and this lies in space alone, and has no necessary connection with time, as, for example, motion has. Thus far then we may say : the adequate objectification of will through a merely spatial phenomenon is beauty, in the objective sense. A plant is nothing but such a merely spatial

^ The last sentence is the German fluence of the Hegelian sophistry, of the U rCy a que V esprit qui senle that some might quite likely say that V esprit f of Helvetius. In the first an antithesis was intended here beedition there was no occasion to tween “spirit and nature.** I am point this out, but since then the therefore obliged to guard myself in age has become so degraded and express terms against the suspicion ignorant through the stupefying in- of such vulgar sophisms.

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