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

With naturalism, then, or the purely physical way of looking at things, we shall never attain our end ; it is like a sum that never comes out.

Causal series without beginning or end, fundamental forces which are inscrutable, endless space, beginningless time, infinite divisibility of matter, and all this further conditioned by a knowing brain, in which alone it exists just like a dream, and without which it vanishes — constitute the labyrinth in which naturalism leads us ceaselessly round.

The height to which in our time the natural sciences have risen in this respect entirely throws into the shade all previous centuries, and is a summit which mankind reaches for the first time. But however great are the advances which physics (understood in the wide sense of the ancients) may make, not the smallest step towards metaphysics is thereby taken, just as a plane can never obtain cubical content by being indefinitely extended.

For all such advances will only perfect our knowledge of the phenomenon; while metaphysics strives to pass beyond the phenomenal appearance itself, to that which so appears. And if indeed it had the assistance of an entire and complete experience, it would, as regards the main point, be in no way advantaged by it. Nay, even if one wandered through all the planets and fixed stars, one would thereby have made no step in metaphysics.

It is rather the case that the greatest advances of physics will make the need of metaphysics ever more felt ; for it is just the corrected, extended, and more thorough knowledge of nature which, on the one hand, always undermines and ultimately overthrows the metaphysical assumptions which till then have prevailed, but, on the other hand, presents the problem of metaphysics itself more distinctly, more correctly, and more fully, and separates it more clearly from all that is merely physical; moreover, the more perfectly and 2accurately known nature of the particular thing more pressingly demands the explanation of the whole and the general, which, the more correctly, thoroughly, and completely it is known empirically, only presents itself as the more mysterious.

Certainly the individual, simple investigator of nature, in a special branch of physics, does not at once become clearly conscious of all this ; he rather sleeps contentedly by the side of his chosen maid, in the house of Odysseus, banishing all thoughts of Penelope (cf. ch. 12 at the end).

Hence we see at the present day the husk of nature investigated in its minutest details, the intestines of intestinal worms and the vermin of vermin known to a nicety. But if some one comes, as, for example, I do, and speaks of the kernel of nature, they will not listen ; they even think it has nothing to do with the matter, and go on sifting their husks.

One finds oneself tempted to call that over-microscopical and micrological investigator of nature the cotquean of nature. But those persons who believe that crucibles and retorts are the true and only source of all wisdom are in their own way just as perverse as were formerly their antipodes the Scholastics.

As the latter, absolutely confined to their abstract conceptions, used these as their weapons, neither knowing nor investigating anything outside them, so the Mrmer, absolutely confined to their empiricism, allow nothing to be true except what their eyes behold, and believe they can thus arrive at the ultimate ground of things, not discerning that between the phenomenon and that which manifests itself in it, the thing in itself, there is a deep gulf, a radical difference, which can only be cleared up by the knowledge and accurate delimitation of the subjective element of the phenomenon, and the insight that the ultimate and most important conclusions concerning the nature of things can only be drawn from self-consciousness ; yet without all this one cannot advance a step beyond what is directly given to the senses, thus can get no further than to the problem. Yet, on the other hand,