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

the subject and the forms of knowledge, which are presupposed, just as much in the case of the crudest matter, from which it desires to start, as in that of the organism, at which it desires to arrive. For, “ no object without a subject,” is the principle which renders all materialism for ever impossible.

Suns and planets wiAout an eye that sees them, and" an understanding tliat knows them, may indeed be spoken of in words, but for the idea, these words are absolutely meaningless.

On the other hand, the law of causality and the treatment and investigation of nature which is based upon it, lead us necessarily to the conclusion that,in time, each more highly organised state of matter has succeeded a cruder state : so that the lower animals existed before men, fishes before land animals, plants before fishes, and the unorganised before all that is organised ; that, consequently, the jori- ^nai mass had to pass through a long series of changes before the first eye could be opened, ./^d yet, the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect.

For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. T^e world is entirely idea, and as such demands the kno\ying subject as the supporter of its existence.

This long course of time itself, filled with innumerable changes, through which matter rose from form to form till at last the first percipient creature appeared, — ;4hi3 whole time itself is only thinkable in the identity of a consciousness whose succession of ideas, whose form of knowing it is, and apart from which, it loses all meaning and is nothing at all Thus we see, on the one hantl, the ex_istence__pf , the , whole world necessarily dependent *upo"h tiie first conscious being, however undeveloped it may be; on tlie other hand, this conscious being just as necessarily "entfrel^dependent upon a long chain of causes and 3Fecta which have preceded it, and in which it itself

J&. These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with the same necessity, we might again call an antinomy in our faculty of knowledge, and set it up as the counterpart of that which we found in the first extreme of natural science. The fourfold antinomy of Kant will be shown, in the criticism of his philosophy appended to this volume, to be a groundless delusion.

But the necessary contradiction which at last presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use Kant’s phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form ; which in my language means this : The objective w’orld, the world as idea, is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has an entirely different side — the side of its inmost nature — its kernel — the thingin-ilselT.

' This we shall consider in the second book, calling it after the most immediate of its objective manifestations— will. But the world as idea, with which alone we are here concerned, only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowle’dge,” there was also no before, no time.

Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time. Since, however, it is the most universal form of the knowable, in which all phenomena are united together through causality, time, with its infinity of past and future, is present in the beginning of knowledge.

The phenomenon which fills the first present must at once be known as causally bound up with and dependent upon a sequence of phenomena which stretches infinitely into the past, and this past itself is just as truly conditioned by this first present, as conversely the present is by the past. Accordingly the past out of which the first present arises, is, like it, dependent upon the knowing subject, without which it is nothing. It necessarily happens, however, that this first

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THE WORLD AS IDEA.

present does not manifest itself as the 5rst, that is, as having no past for its parent, but as being the beginning of time. It manifests itself rather as the consequence of the past, according to the principle of existence in time. In the same way, the phenomena which fill this first present appear as the effects of earlier phenomena which filled the past, in accordance with the law of causality. Those who like mythological interpretations may take the birth of Kronos {')(povo<s), the youngest of the Titans, as a symbol of the moment here referred to at which time appears, though, indeed it has no beginning ; for with him, since he ate his father, the crude productions of heaven and earth cease, and the races of gods and men appear upon the scene.

This explanation at which we have arrived by following the most consistent of the philosophical systems which start from the object, jnaterialism, has brought out clearly the inseparable and reciprocal dependence of subject and object, and at the same time the inevitable antithesis between them. And this knowledge leads ua to seek for the inner nature of the world, the thing-initself, not in either of the two elements of the idea, but in something quite distinct from it, and which is not encumbered with such a fundamental and insoluble antithesis.