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

he had it printed according to the first edition of 1781, by which he has rendered an inestimable service to philosophy ; indeed, he has perhaps saved from destruction the most important work of German literature ; and this should always be remembered to his credit. But let no one imagine that he knows the " Critique of Pure Reason " and has a distinct conception of Kant's teaching if he has only read the second or one of the later editions.

That is altogether impossible, for he has only read a mutilated, spoilt, and to a certain extent ungenuine text. It is my duty to say this here decidedly and for every one's warning.

Yet the way in which Kant introduces the thing in itself stands in undeniable contradiction with the distinctly idealistic point of view so clearly expressed in the first edition of the " Critique of Pure Reason," and without doubt this is the chief reason why, in the second edition, he suppressed the principal idealistic passage we have referred to, and directly declared himself opposed to the Berkeleian idealism, though by doing so he only introduced inconsistencies into his work, without being able to remedy its principal defect.

This defect, as is known, is the introduction of the thing in itself in the way chosen by him, the inadmissibleness of which was exposed at length by G-. E. Schulze in " uEnesidemus" and was soon recognised as the untenable point of his system. The matter may be made clear in a very few words.

Kaut based the' assumption of the thing in itself, though concealed under various modes of expression, upon an inference from the law of causality — an inference that the empirical perception, or more accurately the sensation, in our organs of sense, from which it proceeds, must have an external cause.

But according to his own account, which is correct, the law of causality is known to us a priori, consequently is a function of our intellect, and is thus of subjective origin ; further, sensation itself, to which we here apply the law of causality, is undeniably subjective ; and finally, even space, in which, by means of this application,

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we place the cause of this sensation as object, is a form of our intellect given a priori, and is consequently subjective. Therefore the whole empirical perception remains always upon a subjective foundation, as a mere process in us, and nothing entirely different from it and independent of it can be brought in as a thing in itself, or shown to be a necessary assumption. The empirical perception actually is and remains merely our idea : it is the world as idea. An inner nature of this we can only arrive at on the entirely different path followed by me, by means of calling in the aid of self-consciousness, which proclaims the will as the inner nature of our own phenomenon ; but then the thing in itself will be one which is toto genere different from the idea and its elements, as I have explained.

The great defect of the Kantian system in this point, which, as has been said, was soon pointed out, is an illustration of the truth of the beautiful Indian proverb : " No lotus without a stem." The erroneous deduction of the thing in itself is here the stem ; yet only the method of the deduction, not the recognition of a thing in itself belonging to the given phenomenon. But this last was Fichte's misunderstanding of it, which could only happen because he was not concerned with truth, but with making a sensation for the furtherance of his individual ends. Accordingly he was bold and thoughtless enough to deny the thing in itself altogether, and to set up a system in which, not, as with Kant, the mere form of the idea, but also the matter, its whole content, was professedly deduced a priori from the subject. In doing this, he counted with perfect correctness upon the want of judgment and the stupidity of the public, which accepted miserable sophisms, mere hocus-pocus and senseless babble, for proofs ; so that he succeeded in turning its attention from Kant to himself, and gave the direction to German philosophy in which it was afterwards carried further by Schelling, and ultimately reached its goal in the mad sophistry of Hegel.

I now return to the great mistake of Kant, already

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