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

often degenerated into word-juggling. Nay even the " Topi " of Aristotle — very abstract principles, conceived with absolute generality, which one could apply to the most different kinds of subjects, and always bring into the field in arguing either pro or contra — have also their origin in this misuse of general conceptions.

We find innumerable examples of the way the Schoolmen worked with such abstractions in their writings, especially in those of Thomas Aquinas. But philosophy really pursued the path which was entered on by the Schoolmen down to the time of Locke and Kant, who at last bethought themselves as to the origin of conceptions.

Indeed we find Kant himself, in his earlier years, still upon that path, in his " Proof of the Existence of God" (p. 191 of the first volume of Kosenkranz's edition), where the conceptions substance, ground, reality, are used in such a way as would never have been possible if he had gone back to the source of these conceptions and to their true content which is determined thereby.

For then he would have found as the source and content of substance simply matter, of ground (if things of the real world are in question) simply cause, that is, the prior change which brings about the latei change, &c. It is true that in this case such an investigation would not have led to the intended result.

But everywhere, as here, such unduly wide conceptions, undei which, therefore, more was subsumed than their true content would have justified, there have arisen false principles and from these false systems. Spinoza's whole method of demonstration rests upon such uninvestigated and toe widely comprehended conceptions.

Now here lies th( great merit of Locke, who, in order to counteract all tha1 dogmatic unreality, insisted upon the investigation of th< origin of the conceptions, and thus led back to perception and experience. Bacon had worked in a similar frame 0 mind, yet more with reference to Physics than to Meta physics. Kant followed the path entered upon by Lock* but in a higher sense and much further, as has already bee 2mentioned above. To the men of mere show who succeeded in diverting the attention of the public from Kant to themselves the results obtained by Locke and Kant were inconvenient. But in such a case they know how to ignore both the dead and the living.

Thus without hesitation they forsook the only right path which had at last been found by those wise men, and philosophised at random with all kinds of indiscriminately collected conceptions, unconcerned as to their origin and content, till at last the substance of the Hegelian philosophy, wise beyond measure, was that the conceptions had no origin at all, but were rather themselves the origin and source of things.

But Kant has erred in this respect. He has too much neglected empirical perception for the sake of pure perception — a point which I have fully discussed in my criticism of his philosophy. With me perception is throughout the source of all knowledge.

I early recognised the misleading and insidious nature of abstractions, and in 18 1 3, in my essay on the principle of sufficient reason, I pointed out the difference of the relations which are thought under this conception. General conceptions must indeed be the material in which philosophy deposits and stores up its knowledge, but not the source from which it draws it; the terminus ad quern, not a quo.

It is not, as Kant defines it, a science drawn from conceptions, but a science in conceptions. Thus the conception of causality also, with which we are here concerned, has always been taken far too widely by philosophers for the furtherance of their dogmatic ends, and much was imported into it which does not belong to it at all.

Hence arose propositions such as the following : " All that is has its cause " — " the effect cannot contain more than the cause, thus nothing that was not also in the cause " — " causa est nobilior suo effectu" and many others just as unwarranted. The following subtilty of that insipid gossip Proclus affords an elaborate and specially lucid example of this. It occurs in his " Institutio Theologica" $j6: " Tlav to airo aKCvrjrov yiyvo214 FIRST BOOK. CHAPTER IV.