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

p. 94

reason, both a parte ante and a parte post. The validity of the principle of sufficient reason is so involved in the form of consciousness that we absolutely cannot imagine anything objective of which no why could further be demanded ; thus we cannot imagine an absolute absolute, like a blind wall in front of us. That his convenience should lead this or that person to stop at some point, and assume such an absolute at pleasure, is of no avail against that incontestable certainty a priori, even if he should put on an air of great importance in doing so. In fact, the whole talk about the absolute, almost the sole theme of philosophies since Kant, is nothing but the cosmological proof incognito. This proof, in consequence of the case brought against it by Kant, deprived of all right and declared outlawed, dare no longer show itself in its true form, and therefore appears in all kinds of disguises — now in distinguished form, concealed under intellectual intuition or pure thought ; now as a suspicious vagabond, half begging, half demanding what it wants in more unpretending philosophemes. If an absolute must absolutely be had, then I will give one which is far better fitted to meet all the demands which are made on such a thing than these visionary phantoms ; it is matter. It has no beginning, and it is imperishable ; thus it is really independent, and quod per se est et per se concipitur ; from its womb all proceeds, and to it all returns j what more can be desired of an absolute ? But to those with whom no critique of reason has succeeded, we should rather say —

" Are not ye like unto women, who ever Return to the point from which they set out, Though reason should have been talked by the hour ? "

That the return to an unconditioned cause, to a first beginning, by no means lies in the nature of reason, is. moreover, practically proved by the fact that the primitive religions of our race, which even yet have thf greatest number of followers upon earth, Brahmanism anc

p. 95

Buddhaism, neither know nor admit such assumptions, but carry the series of phenomena conditioning each other into infinity. Upon this point, I refer to the note appended to the criticism of the first antinomy, which occurs further on ; and the reader may also see Upham's "Doctrine of Buddhaism" (p. 9), and in general all genuine accounts of the religions of Asia. Judaism and reason ought not to be identified.

Kant, who by no means desires to maintain his pretended principle of reason as objectively valid, but merely as subjectively necessary, deduces it even as such only by means of a shallow sophism, p. 307 ; V. 364. He says that because we seek to subsume every truth known to us under a more general truth, as far as this process can be carried, this is nothing else than the pursuit of the unconditioned, which we already presuppose. But, in truth, in this endeavour we do nothing more than apply reason, and intentionally make use of it to simplify our knowledge by enabling us to survey it — reason, which is that faculty of abstract, general knowledge that distinguishes the reflective, thinking man, endowed with speech, from the brute, which is the slave of the present. For the use of reason just consists in this, that we know the particular through the universal, the case through the rule, the rule through the more general rule ; thus that we seek the most general points of view. Through such survey or general view our knowledge is so facilitated and perfected that from it arises the great difference between the life of the brutes and that of men, and again between the life of educated and that of uneducated men. Now, certainly the series of grounds of knowledge, which exist only in the sphere of the abstract, thus of reason, always finds an end in what is indemonstrable, i.e., in an idea which is not further conditioned according to this form of the principle of sufficient reason, thus in the a priori or a 'posteriori directly perceptible ground of the first proposition of the train of reasoning. I have already shown in the essay on g6 CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY.