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

If, however, we surrender ourselves to its teaching, we soon become convinced that etiology cannot afford us the information we chiefly desire, any more than morphology. The latter presents to us innumerable and infinitely varied forms, which are yet related by an unmistakable family likeness. These are for us ideas, and when only treated in this way, they remain always strange to us.

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THE WORLD AS WILL.

HR. II.

and stand before us like hieroglyphics which we do not understand.

Etiology, on the other hand, teaches us that, according to the law of cause and eirect, this particular condition of matter brings about that other particular condition, and thus it has explained it and performed its part However, it really does nothing more than indicate the orderly arrangement according to which the states of matter appear in space and time, and teach in all cases what phenomenon must necessarily appear at a particular time in a particular place.

It thus determines the position of phenomena in time and space, according to a law whose special content is derived from experience, but whose universal form and necessity is yet known to us independently of experience.

But it affords us absolutely no information about the inner nature of any one of these phenomena : this is called a force of nature, and it lies outside the province of causal explanation, which calls the constant uniformity with which manifestations of such a force appear whenever their known conditions are present, a law of nature.

But this law of nature, these conditions, and this appearance in a particular place at a particular time, are all that it knows or ever can know. The force itself wliich manifests itself, the inner nature of the phenomena wliich appear in accordance with these laws, remains always a secret to it, something entirely strange and unknown in the case of the simplest as well as of the most complex phenomena.

For although as yet etiology has most completely achieved its aim in mechanics, and least completely in jihysiology, still the force on account of wliich a stone falls to the ground or one body repels another is, in its inner nature, not less strange and mysterious than that which produces the movements and the growth of an animal.

The science of mechanics presupposes matter, weight, impenetrability, the possibility of communicating motion by impact, inertia and so forth as ultimate facts, calls them forces of nature, and their necessary and

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orderly appearance under certain conditions a law of nature. Only after this does its explanation begin, and it consists in indicating truly and with mathematical exactness, how, where and when each force manifests itself, and in referring every phenomenon which presents itself to the operation of one of these forces. Physics, chemistry, and physiology proceed in the same way in their province, only they presuppose more and accomplish less. Consequently the most complete etiological explanation of the whole of nature can never be more than an enumeration of forces which cannot be explained, and a reliable statement of the rule according to which phenomena appear in time and space, succeed, and make way for each other. But the inner nature of the forces which thus appear remains unexplained l)y such an explanation, which must coniine itself to phenomena and their arrangement, because the law which it follows does not extend further. In this re-spect it may be compared to a section of a piece of marble which shows many vems beside each other, but does not allow ns to trace the course of the veins from the interior of the marble to its surface. Or, if I may use an absurd but more striking comparison, the philosophical investigator must always have the same feeling towards the complete etiology of the whole of nature, as a man who, without knowing how, has been brought into a company quite unknown to him, each member of which in turn presents another to him as his friend and cousin, and therefore as quite well known, and yet the man himself, while at each introduction he expresses himself gratified, has always the question on his lips : “ But how the deuce do I stand to the whole company ?”