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

degree of reflection which this fundamental truth demands, and consequently he made it the starting-point of his philosophy, though provisionally only in the form of a sceptical doubt. When he took his cogito ergo sum as alone certain, and provisionally regarded the existence of the world as problematical, he really discovered the essential and only right starting-point of all philosophy, and at the same time its true foundation.

This foundation is essentially and inevitably the subjective, the individual consciousness. For this alone is and remains immediate ; everything else, whatever it may be, is mediated and conditioned through it, and is therefore dependent upon it. Therefore modern philosophy is rightly regarded as starting with Descartes, who was the father of it.

Not long afterwards Berkeley followed the same path further, and attained to idealism proper, i.e., to the knowledge that the world which is extended in space, thus the objective, material world in general, exists as such simply and solely in our idea, and that it is false, and indeed absurd, to attribute to it, as such, an existence apart from all idea and independent of the knowing subject, thus to assume matter as something absolute and possessed of real being in itself.

But his correct and profound insight into this truth really constitutes Berkeley's whole philosophy ; in it he had exhausted himself. Thus true philosophy must always be idealistic ; indeed, mst be so in order to be merely honest.

For nothing lore certain than that no man ever came out of himself in order to identify himself directly with thing3 -vhich are different from him; but everything of which le has certain, and therefore immediate, knowledge lies vithin his own consciousness.

Beyond this consciousness, herefore, there can be no immediate certainty ; but the irst principles of a science must have such certainty. ror the empirical standpoint of the other sciences it is uite right to assume the objective world as something solutely given ; but not so for the standpoint of philo166 FIRST BOOK. CHAPTER I.

sophy, which has to go back to what is first and original Only consciousness is immediately given; therefore the basis of philosophy is limited to facts of consciousness, i.e^ it is essentially idealistic.

Eealism which commends itself to the crude understanding, by the appearance which it assumes of being matter-of-fact, really starts from an arbitrary assumption, and is therefore an empty castle in the air, for it ignores or denies the first of all facts, that all that we know lies within consciousness.

For that the objective existence of things is conditioned through a subject whose ideas they are, and consequently that the objective world exists only as idea, is no hypothesis, and still less a dogma, or even a paradox set up for the sake of discussion ; but it is the most certain and the simplest x.

I truth ; and the knowledge of it is only made difficult by the fact that it is indeed so simple, and that it is not every one who has sufficient power of reflection to go back to the first elements of his consciousness of things.

There can never be an absolute and independent objective existence ; indeed such an existence is quite unintelligible For the objective, as such, always and essentially has its existence in the consciousness of a subject, is thus the idea of this subject, and consequently is conditioned by it, and also by its forms, the forms of the idea, which depend upon the subject and not on the object.

That the objective world would exist even if there existed no conscious being certainly seems at the first blush to be unquestionable, because it can be thought in the abstract, without bringing to light the contradiction which it carries within it. But if we desire to realise this abstract thought, that is, to reduce it to ideas of perception, from which alone (like everything abstract) it can have con-

/tent and truth, and if accordingly we try to imagine an objective world without a knowing subject, we become aware that what we then imagine is in truth the opposite of what we intended, is in fact nothing else than the process in the intellect of a knowing subject who perceives an

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objective world, is thus exactly what we desired to exclude. For this perceptible and real world is clearly a phenomenon of the brain; therefore there lies a contradiction in the assumption that as such it ought also to exist independently of all brains.