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

Speech, as an object of outer experience, is obviously nothing more than a very complete telegraph, which communicates arbitrary signs with the greatest rapidity and the finest distinctions of difference. But what do these signs mean ? How are they interpreted ?

When some one speaks, do we at once translate his words into pictures of the fancy, which instantaneously flash upon us, arrange and link themselves together, and assume form and colour according to the words that are poured forth, and their grammatical inflections ? What a tumult there would be in our brains while we listened to a speech, or to the reading of a book ? But what actually happens is not this at all.

The meaning of a speech is, as a rule, injmediately grasped, accurately and distinctly taken in, without the imagination being brought into play. It is reason which speaks to reason, keeping within its own province.

It communicates and receives abstract conceptions, ideas that cannot be presented in perceptions, which are framed once for all, and are relatively few in number, but which yet encompass, contain, and represent all the innumerable objects of the actual world. This itself is sufficient to prove that the lower animals can never learn to speak or comprehend, although they have the organs of speech and ideas of perception in common with us.

But because words represent this perfectly distinct class of ideas, whose subjective correlative is reason, they are without sense and meaning for the brutes.

Thus language, like every other manifestation which we ascribe to reason, and like everything which distinguishes man from the brutes, is to be explained from this as its one simple source — conceptions, abstract ideas which cannot be presented in perception, but are general, and have no individual existence in space and time.

Only in single cases do we pass from the conception to the perception, do we construct images as representatives of concepts in perception, to which, however, they are never adequate. These cases

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are fully discussed in the essay on the principle of sufficient reason, §28, and therefore I shall not repeat my explanation here. It may be compared, however, with what is said by Hume in the twelfth of his “ Philosophical Essays,” p. 244, and by Herder in the “ MetacriGlc,” pt, i. p. 274 (an otherwise” worthless book). The Platonic idea, the possibility of which depends upon the union of imagination and reason, is the principal subject of the third book of tliis work.

Although concepts are fundamentally different from ideas of perception, they stand in a necessary relation to them, without which they would be nothing. This relation therefore constitutes the whole nature and existence of concepts. Eeflection is the necessary copy or repetition of the originally presented world of perception, but it is a special kind of copy in an entirely different material. Thus concepts may quite properly be called ideas of ideas. The principle of sufficient reason has here also a special form. Now we have seen that the form under which the principle of sufficient reason appears in a class of ideas always constitutes and exhausts the whole nature of the class, so far as it consists of ideas, so that time is throughout succession, and nothing more ; space is throughout position, and nothing more ; matter is throughout causation, and nothing more, rh the same way the whole nature of concepts, or the class of abstract ideas, consists simply in the relation which the principle of sufficient reason expresses in them; and as this is the relation to the ground of knowledge, the whole nature of the abstract idea is simply and solely its relation to another idea, which is its ground of knowledge. This, indeed, may, in the first instance, be a concept, an abstract idea, and this again may have only a similar abstract ground of knowledge ; but the chain of grounds of knowledge does not extend ad infinitum; it must end at last in a concept which has its ground in knowledge of perception ; for the whole world of reflecTHE WORLD AS IDEA.

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