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

In order to prevent all misunderstandings about this important point, especially such as proceed from physiology pursued in a purely empirical manner, I shall explain the whole process somewhat more thoroughly. My doctrine asserts that the whole body is the will itself, exhibiting itself in the perception of the brain; consequently, having entered into its forms of knowledge. From this itp. 475 follows that the will is everywhere equally present in the whole body, as is also demonstrably the case, for the organic functions are its work no less than the animal. But how, then, can we reconcile it with this, that the voluntary actions, those most undeniable expressions of the will, clearly originate in the brain, and thus only through the spinal cord reach the nerve fibres, which finally set the limbs in motion, and the paralysis or severing of which therefore prevents the possibility of voluntary movement ? This would lead one to think that the will, like the intellect, has its seat only in the brain, and, like it, is a mere function of the brain.

Yet this is not the case: but the whole body is and remains the exhibition of the will in perception, thus the will itself objectively perceived by means of the functions of the brain. That process, however, in the case of the acts of will, depends upon the fact that the will, which, according to my doctrine, expresses itself in every phenomenon of nature, even in vegetable and inorganic phenomena, appears in the bodies of men and animals as a conscious will. A consciousness, however, is essentially a unity, and therefore always requires a central point of unity. The necessity of consciousness is, as I have often explained, occasioned by the fact that in consequence of the increased complication, and thereby more multifarious wants, of an organism, the acts of its will must be guided by motives, no longer, as in the lower grades, by mere stimuli. For this purpose it had at this stage to appear provided with a knowing consciousness, thus with an intellect, as the medium and place of the motives. This intellect, if itself objectively perceived, exhibits itself as the brain, together with its appendages, spinal cord, and nerves. It is the brain now in which, on the occasion of external impressions, the ideas arise which become motives for the will. But in the rational intellect they undergo besides this a still further working up, through reflection and deliberatioa Thus such an intellect must first of all

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unite in one point all impressions, together with the working up of them by its functions, whether to mere perception or to conceptions, a point which will be, as it were, the focus of all its rays, in order that that unity of consciousness may arise which is the tlieoretical ego, the supporter of the whole consciousness, in which it presents itself as identical with the willing ego, whose mere function of knowledge it is.

That point of unity of consciousness, or the theoretical ego, is just Kant's synthetic unity of apperception, upon which all ideas string themselves as on a string of pearls, and on account of which the " I think," as the thread of the string of pearls, " must be capable of accompanying all our ideas."1 This assemblingplace of the motives, then, where their entrance into the single focus of consciousness takes place, is the brain.

Here, in the non-rational consciousness, they are merely perceived ; in the rational consciousness they are elucidated by conceptions, thus are first thought in the abstract and compared; upon which the will chooses, in accordance with its individual and immutable character, and so the purpose results which now, by means of the cerebellum, the spinal cord, and the nerves, sets the outward limbs in motion.

For although the will is quite directly present in these, inasmuch as they are merely its manifestation, yet when it has to move according to motives, or indeed according to reflection, it requires such an apparatus for the apprehension and working up of ideas into such motives, in conformity with which its acts here appear as resolves : just as the nourishment of the blood with chyle requires a stomach and intestines, in which this is prepared, and then as such is poured into the blood through the ductus thoraciais, which here plays the part which the spinal cord plays in the former case.

The matter may be most simply and generally comprehended thus : the will is immediately present as irritability in all the muscular fibres of the whole body, as a continual striving after 1 Cf. Ch. 2X