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

knowledge of the pure understanding is brought under this concept, and when we say of all knowledge and all truth, of which we are first conscious only intuitively, and have not yet formulated in abstract concepts, we feel it. I should like, for the sake of illustration, to give some examples of this taken from recent books, as they are striking proofs of my theory.

I remember reading in the introduction to a German translation of Euclid, that we ought to make beginners in geometry draw the figures before proceeding to demonstrate, for in this way they would already feel geometrical truth before the demonstration brought them complete knowledge.

In the same way Schleiermacher speaks in his Critique of Ethics of logical and mathematical feeling (p. 339), and also of the feeling of the sameness or difference of two formulas (p. 342). Again Tennemanii in his History of Philosophy’’ (vol. L, p.“”361}' says, “One felt that the fallacies were not right, but could not point out the mistakes.

Now, so long as we do not regard this concept feeling ” from the right point of view, and do not recognise that one negative characteristic which alone is essential to it, it must constantly give occasion for misunderstanding and controversy, on account of the excessive wideness of its sphere, and its entirely negative and very limited content which is determined in a purely one-sided manner.

Since then we have in German the nearly synonymous word emjijindung (sensation), it would be convenient to make use of it for bodily feeling, as a sub-species. This concept ‘‘ feeling,” which is quite out of proportion to all others, doubtless originated in the following manner. All concepts, and concepts alone, are denoted by words; they exist only for the reason, and proceed from it.

With concepts, therefore, we are already at a one-sided point of view ; but from such a point of view what is near appears distinct and is set down as positive, what is farther off becomes mixed up and is soon regarded as merely

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negative. Tims each nation calls all others foreign : to the Greek all others are barbarians ; to the Englishman all that is not England or English is continent or continental ; to the believer all others are lieretics, or heathens ; to the noble all others are roturicvs ; to the student all others are Philistines, and so forth. Now, reason itself, strange as it may seem, is guilty of the same one-sidedness, indeed one might say of the same crude ignorance arising from vanity, for it classes under the one concept, feeling'* every modification of consciousness which does not immediately belong to its own mode of apprehension, that is to say, which is not an abstract concept It has had to pay the penalty of this hitherto in misunderstanding and confusion in its own province, because its own procedure had not become clear to it through thorough self-knowledge, for a special faculty of feeling has been set up, and new theories of it are constructed.

§ 12. Rational knowledge (wissen^ is then all abstract knowledge, — that is, the knowledge which is peculiar to the reason as distinguished from the understanding. Its contradictory opposite has just been explained to be the concept “ feeling.'^ Now, as reason only reproduces, for knowledge, what has been received in another way, it does not actually extend our knowledge, but only gives it another form. It enables us to know in the abstract and generally, what first became known in sense-perception, in the concrete. But this is much more important than it appears at first sight when so expressed. For it depends entirely upon the fact ^that knowledge has become rational or abstract knowledge (wissen), that it can be safely preserved, that it is communicable and susceptible of certain and wide-reaching application to practice. Knowledge in the form of sense-perception is valid only of the particular case, extends only to what is nearest, and ends with it, for sensibility and understanding can only comprenend one object at a time. Every

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