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

The subject which will therefore be fully considered in the next book, and which has, doubtless, already presented itself to the mind of every student of Plato, is, that these different grades of the objectification of will which are manifested in innumerable individuals, and exist as their unattained types or as the eternal forms of things, not entering themselves into time and space, which are the medium of individual things, but remaining fixed, subject to no change, always being, never becoming, while the particular things arise and pass away, always become and never are, — that these grades of the (djedification of vnll are, I say, simply Plato's Ideas. I make this passing reference to the matter here m order that I may be able in future to use the word Idea in this sense. In my writings, therefore, the word is always to be understood in its true and original meaning given to it by Plato, and has absolutely no reference tcTItEose abstract productions of dogmatising scholastic reason, which Kant has inaptly and illegitimately used this word to denote, though Plato had already appropriated and used it most fitly. By^Idea, then^ I underftond every definite and fixed grade of the objectificationp. 169 of will, so far as it is thing-in-itself^ and therefore has no multiplicity. These ^ades_Me_related_ to indiyii^ things as their eternal forms or proto^pes^ The shortest sind most concise statement of tEis famous Platonic doctrine is given us by Diogenes Laertes £iii. 12): “o U'Karav ev ttj <f>v<Tei ra? iBea<i earavcu, Kadairep

TrapaBei/y/iara, ra ^aXXa ravraifi eoiKevai, roxrrwv 6p.ouapina KadeaidTa ” — (" Plato ideas in natura velut exemplaria dwit svd>sistere ; cetera his esse similia, ad istarum similittuUnem consistentia”). Of Kant’s misuse of the word I take no further notice ; what it is needful to say about it win be found in the Appendix.

§ 26. The lowest grades of the objectification of will are to be found in those most universal forces of nature which partly appear in all matter without exception, as gravity and impenetrability, and partly have shared the given matter among them, so that certain of them reign in one species of matter and others in another species, constituting its specific difference, as rigidity, fluidity, elasticity, electricity, magnetism, chemical properties and qualities of every kind. They are in themselves immediate manifestations of will, just as much as human action ; and as such they are groundless, like human character. Only their particular manifestations are subordinated to the principle of sufficient reason, like the particular actions of men. They themselves, on the other hand, can never be called either effect or cause, but are the prior and presupposed conditions of all causes and effects through which their real nature unfolds and reveals itself. is therefore senseless to demand a cause of gravity or electricity, for they mre original forces. Tlm|]^expressions, indeed, take place m accordance with the law of cause and effect, so that every'one of their particular manifestations has a cause, ^Tcfi is itself again just a similar particular manifestation which determines that this force must express itself here, must aj^ear in sjpace and time ; but the force itself is by no means the effect of a cause^ nor the caus”e 61 an

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effect. It is therefore a mistake to say “gravity is the cause of a stone falling;” for the cause in this case is rather the nearness of the earth, because it attracts the stone. Take the earth away and the stone will not fall, although gravi^ remains. The force itself lies quite outside the chain of causes ancTeffects, which presupposes time, because it only has meaning in relation to it ; but the force lies outside time. The individual change always has for its cause another change just as individual as itself, and not the force of which it is the expression. For that which always gives its efficiency to a cause, however many times it may appear, is a force of nature. As such, it is groundless, i.e., it lies outside the chain of causes and outside the province of the principle of sufficTent reason in general, and is philosophically known as the immediate objectivity of will, which is the “in-itself ” of the whole of nature ; but in etiology, which in this reference is physics, it is set down as an original force, i.e., a qualitas occulta.