The World as Will and Idea, Vol. II — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp
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The translator’s English as printed (R. B. Haldane & J. Kemp). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
With reference to the brain itself, I account to myself for the necessity of sleep more fully through an hypothesis which appears to have been first set up in Neumann's book, " Von den Krankheiten des Menschen" 1834, voL 4, § 216.
It is this, that the nutrition of the brain, thus the renewal of its substance from the blood, cannot go on while we are awake, because the very eminent organic function of knowing and thinking would be disturbed or put an end to by the low and material function of nutrition. This explains the fact that sleep is not a purely negative condition, a mere pausing of the activity of the brain, but also shows a positive character.
This makes itself known through the circumstance that between sleep and waking there is no mere difference of degree, but a fixed boundary, which, as soon as sleep intervenes, declares itself in dreams which are completely different from our immediately preceding thoughts.
A further proof of this is that when we have dreams which frighten us we try in vain to cry out, or to ward off attacks, or to shake off sleep ; so that it is as if the connecting-link between the brain and the motor nerves, or between the cerebrum and the cerebellum (as the regulator of movements) were abolished ; for the brain remains in its isolation and sleep holds us fast as with brazen claws.
Finally, the positive character of sleep can be seen in the fact that a certain degree of strength is required for sleeping. Therefore too great fatigue or natural weakness prevent us from seizing it, capere somnum. This may be explained from the fact that the process of nutrition must be introduced if sleep is to ensue : the brain must, as it were, begin to feed.
Moreover, the increased flow of blood into the brain during sleep is explicable from the nutritive process ; and also the position of the arms laid together above the head, which is insiinctively assumed because it furthers this process : also why children, so long as their brain is still growing, require a great deal of sleep, while in old age, on the other hand, when a certain atrophy of the brain, as of all the parts, takes place, sleep is short ; and finally why excessive sleep produces a certain dullness of consciousness, the consequence of a certain hypertrophy of the brain, which in the case of habitual excess of sleep may become permanent and produce imbecility : avir) /cat 7ro\v? virvo? (noxce est etiam multus somnus), Od. 15, 394.
The need of sleep is therefore directly proportionate to the intensity of the brain-life, thus to the clearness of the consciousness. Those animals whose brain-life is weak and dull sleep little and lightly ; for example, reptiles and fishes: and here I must remind the reader that the winter sleep is sleep almost only in name, for it is not an inaction of the brain alone, but of the whole organism, thus a kind of apparent death.
Animals of considerable intelligence sleep deeply and long. Men also require more sleep the more developed, both as regards quantity and quality, and the more active their brain is. Montaigne relates of himself that he had always been a long sleeper, that he had passed a large part of his life in sleeping, and at an advanced age still slept from eight to nine hours at a time (Liv. iii., chap. 13).
Descartes also is reported to have slept a great deal (Baillet, Vie de Descartes, 1693, p. 288). Kant allowed himself seven hours for sleep, but it was so hard for him to do with this that he ordered his servant to force him against his will, and without listening to his remonstrances, to get up at the set time (Jachmann, Immanuel Kant, p. 162).
For the more completely awake a man is, ie., the i clearer and more lively his consciousness, the greater for I him is the necessity of sleep, thus the deeper and longer he sleeps. Accordingly much thinking or hard brain-work increases the need of sleep.
That sustained muscular i exertion also makes us sleepy is to be explained from ie fact that in this the brain continuously, by means of ie medulla oblongata, the spinal marrow, and the motor lerves, imparts the stimulus to the muscles which affects leir irritability, and in this way it exhausts its strength. vol. 11. 2 G
The fatigue which we observe in the arms and legs has accordingly its real seat in the brain ; just as the pain which these parts feel is really experienced in the brain ; for it is connected with the motor nerves, as with the nerves of sense. The muscles which are not actuated from the brain — for example, those of the heart — accordingly never tire.
The same grounds explain the fact that both during and after great muscular exertion we cannot think acutely. That one has far less energy of mind in summer than in winter is partly explicable from the fact that in summer one sleeps less ; for the deeper one has slept, the more completely awake, the more lively, is one afterwards.
This, however, must not mislead us into extending sleep unduly, for then it loses in intension, i.e., in deepness and soundness, what it gains in extension ; whereby it becomes mere loss of time. This is what Goethe means when he says (in the second part of " Faust ") of morning slumber : " Sleep is husk : throw it off.
Thus in general the phenomenon of sleep most specially confirms the assertion that consciousness, apprehension, knowing, thinking, is nothing original in us, but a conditioned and secondary state. It is a luxury of nature, and indeed its highest, which it can therefore the less afford to pursue without interruption the higher the pitch to which it has been brought.
It is the product, the efflorescence of the cerebral nerve-system, which is itself nourished like a parasite by the rest of the organism. This also agrees with what is shown in our third book, that knowing is so much the purer and more perfect the more it has freed and severed itself from the will, whereby the purely objective, the aesthetic comprehension appears.
Just as an extract is so much the purer the more it has been separated from that out of which it is extracted and been cleared of all sediment. The opposite is shown by the wiU, whose most immediate manifestation is the whole organic life, and primarily the untiring heart
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