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.
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to law) and the apparently intentional effects of nature one and the same ultimate principle, which might serve as the more general ground of explanation of them both. Such a principle I hope I have given by establishing the will as the real thing in itself; and in accordance with it generally in the second book and the supplements to it, but. especially in my work " On the Will in Nature," the insight into the inner nature of the apparent design and of the harmony and agreement of the whole of nature has perhaps become clearer and deeper. Therefore I have nothing more to say about it here.
The reader whom this criticism of the Kantian philosophy interests should not neglect to read the supplement to it which is given in the second essay of the first volume of my "Parerga and Paralipomena," under the title " Noch einige Erlauterungen zur Kantischen Philosâphie " (Some Further Explanations of the Kantian Philosophy). For it must be borne in mind that my writings, few as they are, were not composed all at once, but successively, in the course of a long life, and with long intervals between them. Accordingly, it must not be expected that all I have said upon one subject should stand together in one place.
Supplements to tfje JFtrst SSooft.
*• ' Warum willst du dich von uns Allen Und unsrer Meinung entfernen ? ' Ich schreibe nicht euch zu gefallen, Ihr sollt was lernen."
— Goethk.
VOL. n.
SUPPLEMENTS TO THE FIRST BOOK.
tftrst &alt
THE DOCTRINE OF THE IDEA OF PERCEPTION. (To § 1-7 of the First Volume.)
CHAPTER I. THE STANDPOINT OF IDEALISM.
In boundless space countless shining spheres, about each of which, and illuminated by its light, there revolve a dozen or so of smaller ones, hot at the core and covered with a hard, cold crust, upon whose surface there have been generated from a mouldy film beings which live and know — this is what presents itself to us in experience as the truth, the real, the world. Yet for a thinking being it is a precarious position to stand upon one of those numberless spheres moving freely in boundless space without knowing whence or whither, and to be only one
Df innumerable similar beings who throng and press and
X)il, ceaselessly and quickly arising and passing away in
;ime, which has no beginning and no end ; moreover, lothing permanent but matter alone and the recurrence
)f the same varied organised forms, by means of certain vays and channels which are there once for all. All that impirical science can teach is only the more exact nature nd law of these events. But now at last modern philoophv especially through Berkeley and Kant, has calledp. 164 to mind that all this is first of all merely a phenomenon of the brain, and is affected with such great, so many, and such different subjective conditions that its supposed absolute reality vanishes away, and leaves room for an entirely different scheme of the world, which consists of what lies at the foundation of that phenomenon, i.e., what is related to it as the thing in itself is related to its mere manifestation.
" The world is my idea " is, like the axioms of Euclid, a proposition which every one must recognise as true as soon as he understands it ; although it is not a proposition which every one understands as soon as he hears it. To have brought this proposition to clear consciousness, and in it the problem of the relation of the ideal and the real, i.e., of the world in the head to the world outside the head, together with the problem of moral freedom, is the distinctive feature of modern philosophy. For it was only after men had spent their labour for thousands of years upon a mere philosophy of the object that they discovered that among the many things that make the world so obscure and doubtful the first and chiefest is this, that however immeasurable and massive it may be, its existence yet hangs by a single thread ; and this is the actual consciousness in which it exists. This condition, to which the existence of the world is irrevocably subject, marks it, in spite of all empirical reality, with the stamp of ideality, and therefore of mere phenomenal appearance. Thus on one side at least the world must be recognised as akin to dreams, and indeed to be classified along with them. For the same function of the brain which, during sleep, conjures up before us a completely objective, perceptible, and even palpable world must have just as large a share in the presentation of the objective world of waking life. Both worlds, although different as regards their matter, are yet clearly moulded in the one form. This form is the intellect, the function of the brain. Descartes was probably the first who attained to the
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