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.
From all this it follows that the will objectifies itself most immediately in the blood as that which originally makes and forms the organism, perfects it by growth, and afterwards constantly maintains it, both by the regular renewal of all the parts and by the extraordinary restoration of any part that may have been injured. The first productions of the blood are its own vessels, and then the muscles, in the irritability of which the will makes itself known to self-consciousness ; but with this also the heart, which is at once vessel and muscle, and therefore is the true centre and jprimum mobile of the whole life. But for the individual life and subsistence in the external world the will now requires two assistant systems : one to govern and order its inner and outer activity, and another for the constant renewal of the mass of the blood ; thus a controller and a sustainer. It therefore makes for itself the nervous and the intestinal systems ; thus the functioned animates and the functiones naturales associate themselves in a subsidiary manner with the functiones vitales, which are the most original and essential. In the nervous system, accordingly, the will only objectifies itself in an indirect and secondary way ; for this system appears as a mere auxiliary organ, as a contrivance by means of which the will attains to a knowledge of those occasions, internal and external,
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upon which, in conformity with its aims, it must express itself; the internal occasions are received by the plastic nervous system, thus by the sympathetic nerve, this cerer brum dbdominale, as mere stimuli, and the will thereupon reacts on the spot without the brain being conscious ; the outward occasions are received by the brain, as motives, and the will reacts through conscious actions directed outwardly.
Therefore the whole nervous system constitutes, as it were, the antennae of the will, which it stretches towards within and without The nerves of the brain and spinal cord separate at their roots into sensory and motory nerves. The sensory nerves receive the knowledge from without, which now accumulates in the thronging brain, and is there worked up into ideas, which arise primarily as motives.
But the motory nerves bring back, like couriers, the result of the brain function to the muscle, upon which it acts as a stimulus, and the irritability of which is the immediate manifestation of the will. Presumably the plastic nerves also divide into sensory and motory, although on a subordinate scale. The part which the ganglia play in the organism we must think of as that of a diminutive brain, and thus the one throws light upon the other.
The ganglia lie wherever the organic functions of the vegetative system require care. It is as if there the will was not able by its direct and simple action to carry out its aims, but required guidance, and consequently control ; just as when in some business a man's own memory is not sufficient, and he must constantly take notes of what he does.
For this end mere knots of nerves are sufficient for the interior of the organism, because everything goes on within its own compass. For the exterior, on the other hand, a very complicated contrivance of the same kind is required. This is the brain with its feelers, which it stretches into the outer world, the nerves of sense.
But even in the organs which are in communication with this great nerve centre, in very simple cases the matter does not need to be brought before the highest authority, but a subordinate one is sufficient to determine what is needed • such is the spinal cord, in the reflex actions discovered byMarshall Hall, such as sneezing, yawning, vomiting the second half of swallowing, &c. &c.
The will itself is present in the whole organism, since this is merely its visible form; the nervous system exists everywhere merely for the purpose of making the direction of an action possible by a control of it, as it were to serve the will as a mirror, so that it may see what it does, just as we use a mirror to shave by.
Hence small sensoria arise within us for special, and consequently simple, functions, the ganglia ; but the chief sensorium, the brain, is the great and skilfully contrived apparatus for the complicated and multifarious functions which have to do with the ceaselessly and irregularly changing external world.
Wherever in the organism the nerve threads run together in a ganglion, there, to a certain extent, an animal exists for itself and shut off, which by means of the ganglion has a kind of weak knowledge, the sphere of which is, however, limited to the part from which these nerves directly come. But what actuates these parts to such quasi knowledge is clearly the will ; indeed we are utterly unable to conceive it otherwise.
Upon this depends the vita propria of each part, and also in the case of insects, which, instead of a spinal cord, have a double string of nerves, with ganglia at regular intervals, the capacity of each part to continue alive for days after being severed from the head and the rest of the trunk ; and finally also the actions which in the last instance do not receive their motives from the brain, i.e., instinct and natural mechanical skill Marshall Hall, whose discovery of the reflex movements I have mentioned above, has given us in this the theory of involuntary movements.
Some of these are normal or physiological ; such are the closing of the places of ingress to and egress from the body, thus of the sphincteres vesicae et ani (proceeding from the nerves of the spinal cord) ; the closing of the eyelids in sleep (from the fifth pair of
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