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

In the higher grades of the objectivity of will we see individuality occupy a prominent position, especially in the case of man, where it appears as the great difference of individual characters, i.e., as complete personality, outwardly expressed in strongly marked individual physiognomy, which influences the whole bodily form. None of the brutes have this individuality in anything like so high a degree, though the higher species of them have a trace of it ; but the character of the species completely predominates over it, and therefore they have little individual physiognomy. The farther down we go, the more completely is every trace of the individual character lost in the common character of the species, and the physiognomy of the species alone remains. We know the physiological character of the species, and from that we know exactly what is to be expected from the individual; while, on the contrary, in the human species every individual has to be studied and fathomed for

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himself, which, if we wish to forecast his action with some degree of certainty, is, on account of the possibility of concealment that first appears with reason, a matter of the greatest difficulty.

It is probably connected with this difference of the human species from all otliers, that the folds and convolutions of the brain, which are entirely wanting in birds, and very weakly marked in rodents, are even in the case of the higher animals far more symmetrical on both sides, and more constantly the same in each individual, than in the case of human beings.

It is further to be regarded as a phenomenon of this peculiar individual character which distinguishes men from all the lower animals, that in the case of the brutes the sexual instinct seeks its satisfaction without observable choice of objects, while in the case of man this choice is, in a purely instinctive majiner and independent of all reflection, carried so far that it rises into a powerful passion.

While then every man is to be regarded as a specially determined and characterised phenomenon of will, and indeed to a certain extent as a special Idea, in the case of the brutes this individual character as a ^lole is wanting,^ because only the species has a special significance.

And the farther we go from man, the fainter becomes the trace of this individual character, sc £Hat plants have no individual qualities left, except sucl as may be fully explained from the favourable or unfavourable external influences of soil, climate, and othei accidents. Finally, in the inorganic kingdom of nature all individuality flisappeats.

The crystal alone is to be regarded as to a certain extent indlvidjiaL It is a unitj of the tendency in definite directions, fixed by crytallisation, which makes the trace of this tendency permanent It is at the same time a cumulative repetition of its primitive form, bound into unity by an idea, just as the

^ Wenzel, De Structura Cerebri 9, arts. 4 and 5 ; Vic. d’Azyr, Hist, Hominid et Brutorum, 1812, ch. iii.; de I’Acad. de Sc. de Paris, I783,pp Cuvier, Lemons d’Anat., comp, le^on 470 and 483.

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THE WORLD ^45 WILL.

BK. II.