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

4io SECOND BOOK. CHAPTER XVIII.

path to the truth. That conception must therefore appear no more in philosophy, but may be left to German doctors and physiologists, who, after they have laid aside scalpel and spattle, amuse themselves by philosophising with the conceptions they received when they were confirmed. They might certainly try their luck in England. The French physiologists and zootomists have (till lately) kept themselves free from that reproach.

The first consequence of their common fundamental error, which is very inconvenient to all these philosophers, is this : since in death the knowing consciousness obviously perishes, they must either allow death to be the annihilation of the man, to which our inner being is opposed, or they must have recourse to the assumption of a continued existence of the knowing consciousness, which requires a strong faith, for his own experience has sufficiently proved to every one the thorough and complete dependence of the knowing consciousness upon the brain, and one can just as easily believe in digestion without a stomach as in a knowing consciousness without a brain. My philosophy alone leads out of this dilemma, for it for the first time places the true being of man not in the consciousness but in the will, which is not essentially bound up with consciousness, but is related to consciousness, ie., to knowledge, as substance to accident, as something illuminated to the light, as the string to the resounding-board, and which enters consciousness from within as the corporeal world does from without. Now we can comprehend the indestructibleness of this our real kernel and true being, in spite of the evident ceasing of consciousness in death, and the corresponding non-existence of it before birth. For the intellect is as perishable as the brain, whose product or rather whose action it is. But the brain, like the whole organism, is the product or phenomenon, in short, the subordinate of the will, which alone is imperishable.

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CHAPTER XTX.i

ON THE PRIMACY OF THE WILL IN SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS.

The will, as the thing in itself, constitutes the inner, true, and indestructible nature of man ; in itself, however, it is unconscious. For consciousness is conditioned by the intellect, and the intellect is a mere accident of our being ; for it is a function of the brain, which, together with the nerves and spinal cord connected with it, is a mere fruit, a product, nay, so far, a parasite of the rest of the organism ; for it does not directly enter into its inner constitution, but merely serves the end of self-preservation by regulating the relations of the organism to the external world. The organism itself, on the other hand, is the visibility, the objectivity, of the individual will, the image of it as it presents itself in that very brain (which in the first book we learned to recognise as the condition of the objective world in general), therefore also brought about by its forms of knowledge, space, time, and causality, and consequently presenting itself as extended, successively acting, and material, i.e., as something operative or efficient. The members are both directly felt and also perceived by means of the senses only in the brain. According to this one may say : The intellect is the secondary phenomenon ; the organism the primary phenomenon, that is, the immediate manifestation of the will ; the will is metaphysical, the intellect physical ; — the intellect, like its objects, is merely phenomenal appearance ; the will alone is the thing in itself. Then, in a more and more figurative sense,

1 This chapter is connected with § 19 of the first volume.

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