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

the principle of sufficient reason, § 50, that here the series of grounds of knowledge really passes over into ground* of becoming or of being.

But one can only desire to make this circumstance hold good, as a proof of an unconditioned according to the law of causality, or even of the mere demand for such an unconditioned, if one has not yet distinguished the forms of the principle of sufficient reason at all, but, holding to the abstract expression, has confounded them all.

Kant, however, seeks to establish that confusion, through a mere play upon words, with Univer* salitas and Uhiversitas, p. 322 ; V. 379. Thus it is fundamentally false that our search for higher grounds of knowledge, more general truths, springs from the presupposition of an object unconditioned in its being, or has anything whatever in common with this.

Moreover how should it be essential to the reason to presuppose something which it must know to be an absurdity as soon as it reflects ? The source of that conception of the unconditioned is rather to be found only in the indolence ol the individual who wishes by means of it to get rid of all further questions, whether his own or of others, thougl entirely without justification.

Now Kant himself denies objective validity to thi pretended principle of reason ; he gives it, however, as j necessary subjective assumption, and thus introduces ai irremediable split into our knowledge, which he sooi allows to appear more clearly. With this purpose h unfolds that principle of reason further, p. 322; V, 37c in accordance with the method of architectonic symmetr of which he is so fond. From the three categories c relation spring three kinds of syllogisms, each of whic gives the clue for the discovery of a special unconditionei of which again there are three: the soul, the world (as a object in itself and absolute totality), and God. Now hei we must at once note a great contradiction, of whic Kant, however, takes no notice, because it would be fS j dangerous to the symmetry. Two of these unconditionecp. 97 are themselves conditioned by the third, the soul and the world by God, who is the cause of their existence. Thus :he two former have by no means the predicate of unconiitionedness in common with the latter, though this is really the point here, but only that of inferred being iccording to the principles of experience, beyond the sphere of the possibility of experience.

Setting this aside, we recognise in the three unconlitioneds, to which, according to Kant, reason, following ts essential laws, must come, the three principal subjects •ound which the whole of philosophy under the influence )f Christianity, from the Scholastics down to Christian vVolf, has turned. Accessible and familiar as these conceptions have become through all these philosophers, and ow also through the philosophers of pure reason, this by o means shows that, without revelation, they would lecessarily have proceeded from the development of all eason as a production peculiar to its very nature. In >rder to prove this it would be necessary to call in the ud of historical criticism, and to examine whether the indent and non-European nations, especially the peoples »f Hindostan and many of the oldest Greek philosophers, eally attained to those conceptions, or whether it is only ve who, by quite falsely translating the Brahma of the iindus and the Tien of the Chinese as "God," goodlaturedly attribute such conceptions to them, just as the xreeks recognised their gods everywhere; whether it is lot rather the case that theism proper is only to be found a the religion of the Jews, and in the two religions which iave proceeded from it, whose followers just on this ccount comprise the adherents of all other religions on arth under the name of heathen, which, by the way, is i most absurd and crude expression, and ought to be tanished at least from the writings of the learned, because fc identifies and jumbles together Brahmanists, Buddhists, Egyptians, Greeks, Eomans, Germans, Gauls, Iroquois, Jatagonians, Caribbeans, Otaheiteans, Australians, and vol II. G

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