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

ever airs ^ may give itselfj regards time just as if Kant had never lived, as a quality of the thing-in-itself, and tiius stops at that which Kant calls the phenomenon in opposition to the thing-in-itself ; which Plato calls the becoming and never feeing, in opposition to the being and never becoming ; an3~''w1ucKrnSairyr is called in the Indian philosophy t£e web of ‘‘llây a.

Ii~ir~iSbthelmowiedge which belongs to th^ principle of sufficient reason, with which no one can penetrate to the Thher nature of thing^but endlessly pursues phenomena, moving without end or aim, like a' squTrrer ih~it3 ' whe^^^ till, tired out at last, he stops ait some- point or other arbitranly chosen, and now desires Jto_ extort resgeot^il jt frona others also.

Ilie genuine philosophical consideration of the world, i.e., the consideration that affords us a knowledge of its inner nature, and so leads us beyond the phenomenon, is precisely that method which 3oea not concern itself with the whence, the whither, and the why of the world, but always and everywhere demands only the what ; the method which considers things not according^ |o^ jiny relation, not as becoming and passing away, in shnrt, not a,ccording^ to„ onn, of the four forms of the principle of sufficient re^on; but, on ffie contrary, just that which remains when all that belongs to the form of knowledge proper to that principle has been abstracted, the inner nature of the world, which always appears unchanged in all the relations, but is itself never subject to them, and has the Ideas of the world as its object or material.

From such knowledge as this proceeds philosophy, like art^ and also^ as we shaTTsee in this book, that disposition of mind which alone leads ^to~true holiness and to deliyerMicp„frpm t^ world.

§ 54. The first three books will, it is hoped, have conveyed the distinct and certain knowledge that the wodd, JS-ideft.. j^the^,omplRte minBr..jaOhe,_wilh_ip which it knows itself in ascending grades of diatinetneiM

VOL. I.

3S4

THE WORLD AS WILL.

BK. IV.

and completeness, the highest of which is man,’ whose naUire, however, receives ite complete expression only through the whole connected series of his actions. The self-conscious connection ortE^e~aclIbnins~ made possible by reason, which enables a man constantly to survey the whole in the abstract.

The will, which, considered purely in itself, is without knowledge, and is merely a blind incessant impulse, as we see it appear in unorganised and vegetable nature and their laws, and also in the vegetative part of our own life, receives through the addition of the world as idea, which is developed in subjection to it, the knowledge of its own willing and of what it is that it wills. And this is nothing else than the world as idea, life, precisely as it exists. Therefore we called the phenomenal world the mirror of the will, its objectivity.

And since what the will wills is always life, just because life 13 nothing but the representation of that willing ioT the idea, Tt Ts liir one and „a mere_ pleonism if^ instead of simply saying “ the will,” we say “ the will to iiye.3^

Will is the thing - in - itself, the inner content, the essence of the world Life7 the visible woild, the phenomenon, is only the mirror of the will Therefore life accompanies the will as inseparably as the shadow accompanies the body ; and if will exists, so wUl life, the world, exist Life is,_therefore, assureJ~to the will_^ to live ; and so long as we are filled with the wHl to live we need |tove no fear fo^our existence, even in £Ee presence aTTLeath.. It is true yye see the , individual 'c^ being and pass away ; but the individual is only phenomenal, exists only for the knowledge which is bound to the principle of sufficient reason, to the principio individvMtwtm. Certainly, for thjs kind of knowledge, the individual receives his life as a gift,^ rises out of nothing. Qien su^rT^tlie loss of this gift throng death, and returns again to nothing. But we desire to„p. 355 philosophically, i.e.^ according to its Ideaa^ and in this sphere we shall fiad that neither the will, the thingin- itself in all phenomena, nor the subject of knowing, that which perceives i^l phenomena, is affected at all by hMh~ of ^Taianr" Birth and