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

! If, however, it should be said : " The perception is itself ;he knowledge of the thing in itself: for it is the effect of that vhich is outside of us, and as this acts, so it is : its action s just its being;" to this we reply: (1.) that the law of ausality, as has been sufficiently proved, is of subjective rigin, as well as the sensation from which the perception rises ; (2.) that at any rate time and space, in which the bject presents itself, are of subjective origin ; (3.) that if le being of the object consists simply in its action, this vol. n. 2 c

+02 SECOND BOOK. CHAPTER XV III.

means that it consists merely in the changes which it brings about in others ; therefore itself and in itself it is nothing at all.

Only of matter is it true, as I have said in the text, and worked out in the essay on the principle of sufficient reason, at the end of § 21, that its being consists in its action, that it is through and through only causality, thus is itself causality objectively regarded ; hence, however, it is also nothing in itself (17 v\r) to a\i]6ivov yfrevSos, materia mendacium verax), but as an ingredient in the perceived object, is a mere abstraction, which for itself alone can be given in no experience.

It will be fully considered later on in a chapter of its own. But the perceived object must be something in itself, and not merely something for otliers. For otherwise it would be altogether merely idea, and we would have an absolute idealism, which would ultimately become theoretical egoism, with which all reality disappears and the world becomes a mere subjective phantasm.

If, however, without further question, we stop altogether at the world as idea, then certainly it is all one whether I explain objects as ideas in my head or as phenomena exhibiting themselves in time and space ; for time and space themselves exist only in my head. In this sense, then, an identity of the ideal and the real might always be affirmed; only, after Kant, this would not be saying anything new.

Besides this, however, the nature of things and of the phenomenal world would clearly not be thereby exhausted; but with it we would always remain still upon the ideal side. The real side must be something toto generc different from the world as idea, it must be that which things are in themselves; and it is this entire diversity between the ideal and the real which Kant has proved in the most thorough manner.

Locke had denied to the senses the knowledge of things as they are in themselves ; but Kant denied this also to the perceiving understanding, under which name I here comprehend what he calls the pure sensibility, and, as itp. 403 is given a priori, the law of causality which brings about the empirical perception. Not only are both right, but we can also see quite directly that a contradiction lies in the assertion that a thing is known as it is in and for itself, i.e., outside of knowledge. For all knowing is, as we have said, essentially a perceiving of ideas ; but my perception of ideas, just because it is mine, can never be identical with the inner nature of the thing outside of me. The being in and for

, itself, of everything,, must necessarily be subjective; in the idea of another, however, it exists just as necessarily as

1 objective — a difference which can never be fully reconciled. For by it the whole nature of its existence is fundamentally changed ; as objective it presupposes a foreign subject, as whose idea it exists, and, moreover, as Kant has shown, has entered forms which are foreign to its own nature, just because they belong to that foreign subject, whose knowledge is only possible by means of them. If I, absorbed in this reflection, perceive, let us say lifeless bodies,

! of easily surveyed magnitude and regular, comprehensible form, and now attempt to conceive this spatial existence,