The World as Will and Idea, Vol. I — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp
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The translator’s English as printed (R. B. Haldane & J. Kemp). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
phy takes them up and treats them after its own method, whicli is quite distinct from the method of science. In my essay on the principle of sufficient reason, § 51,1 have shown how in the different sciences the chief guiding clue is one or other form of that principle ; and, in fact, perhaps the most appropriate classification of the sciences might be based upon this circumstance.
Every explanation arrived at by the help of this clue is, as we have said, merely relative; it explains things in relation to each other, but something which indeed is presupposed is al^ys left unexplained, In mathematics, for example, this m space and time ; in inechahics, physics, and chemistry it is matter, qualities, original forces and laws of nature; in botany and zoology it is the difference of species, and life itself; in history it is the human race with all its properties of tliought and will : in all it is that form of the principle of sufficient reason which is respectively applicable.
It is peculiar to philosophy that it presupposes nothing as known, but treats eveiything as equally external and a problem ; not merely the relations of phenomena, but also the phenomena themselves, and even the principle of sufficient reason to which the other sciences are content to refer everything.
In philosophy nothing would be gained by such a reference, as one member of the series is just as external to it as another; and, moreover, that kind of connection is just as much a problem for philosophy as what is joined together by it, and the latter again is just as much a problem after its combination has been explained as before it.
For, as we have said, just what ^_sciences presuppose and lay down as th^Trasis"'an3 the limits of their explanation, is precisely and peeulTafly' the prbl)lem of philosophy, which may therefore be said to begin where science micis! If cannot be founcTeJ” upon deinon"stfa£ioir^~for lead from known principles to unknown, but everything is equally unknown and external to philosophy. There can be no principle in consequence of whicli the world with all its phenomena firs^ came into existence, and therefore it is jiot possible to c(mstruct, as Spinoza a philosophy which demonstrates ex firmis Philosophy is the most general rational knowledge, the first principles of which cannot therefore be derived from ahothef principle still more general. The principle of contradiction establishes merely the agreement of concepts, but does not itself produce concepts.
The principle of sufficient reason explains the connections of phenomepa^ but not the phenomena themselyes ; therefore philosophy cannot proceed upon these principles to seek a„m%sa e^ciem or a. cavm jinalis of the whole world. My philosophy, at least, does imt_ by any means seek to know v^Tice^^vher^ore the world exists, but merely what the world is.
But the why is here subordinated to the what, for it already belongs to the world, as it arises and has meaning and validity only through the form of its phenomena, the principle of sufficient reason.
We might indeed say that every one knows what the world is without help, for he is himself that subject of knowledge of which the world is the idea; and so far this would be trua But that knowledge is empirical, is in the concrete ; the task of philosophy is to reproduce this in the abstract to raise to permanent rational knowledge the successive changing perceptions, and in general, all that is contained under the wide concept of feeling and merely negatively defined as not abstract, distinct, rational knowledge.
It must therefore consist of a statement in the abstract, of the nature of the whole world, of the whole, and of all the parts. In order then that it may not lose itself in the endless multitude of particular judgments, it must make use of abstraction and think everything individual in the universal, and its differences also in the universal.
It must therefore partly separate and partly unite, in order to present to rational knowledge the whole manifold of the world generally, according to its nature, comprehended in a few abstract concepts.
THE WORLD ^5 IDEA.
p. 109
Through these concepts, in which it fixes the nature of the world, the whole individual must be known as well as the universal, the knowledge of both therefore must be bound together to the minutest point. Therefore tlm capacity for philosophy consists just in that in which Plato placed it, tlm knowledge of the one in the many, and the many in the one Philosopliy~will thm-efore be a sum-total of general judgments, whose ground of knowledge is immediately the world itself in its entirety, without excepting anything ; thus all that is to be found in human consciousness ; it will be a complete recapitidation, as it were, a reflection, of the world in abstrcwt concepts, which is only possible by the union of the essentially identical in one concept and the relegation of the different to another. This task was already prescribed to philosophy by Bacon of Verulam when he said : ea demum vera est philosophia, quae mundi ipsius voces fidelissime reddit, et veluti dictante mundo conscripta est, et nihil alivd est, quam ejusdom simulacrum et reflectio, neque addit quidquam de proprio, sed tantum iterat et resoncd (De Augm. Scient., L. 2, c. 1 3). But we take this in a wider sense than Bacon could then conceive.
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