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

ing to its organisation. If we rob the subject of all special characteristics and forms of its knowledge, all the properties of the object vanish also, and nothing remains but matter without form and quality, which can just as little occur in experience as a subject without the forms of its knowledge, but which remains opposed to the naked subject as such, as its reflex, which can only disappear along with it.

Although materialism pretends to postulate nothing more than this matter — for instance, atoms — yet it unconsciously adds to it not only the subject, but also space, time, and causality, which depend upon special properties of the subject.

The world as idea, the objective world, has thus, as it were, two poles ; the simple knowing subject without the forms of its knowledge, and crude matter without form and quality. Both are completely unknowable; the subject because it is that which knows, matter because without form and quality it cannot be perceived. Yet both are fundamental conditions of all empirical perception. Thus the knowing subject, merely as such, which is a presupposition of all experience, stands opposed as its pure counterpart to the crude, formless, and utterly dead (i.e., will-less) matter, which is given in no experience, but which all experience presupposes. This subject is not in time, for time is only the more definite form of all its ideas. The matter which stands over against it is, like it, eternal and imperishable, endures through all time, but is, properly speaking, not extended, for extension gives form, thus it has no spatial properties. Everything else is involved in a constant process of coming into being and passing away, while these two represent the unmoved poles of the world as idea. The permanence of matter may therefore be regarded as the reflex of the timelessness of the pure subject, which is simply assumed as the condition of all objects. Both belong to phenomena, not to the thing in itself, but they are the framework of the phenomenon. Both are arrivedp. 180 at only by abstraction, and are not given immediately, pure and for themselves.

The fundamental error of all systems is the failure to understand this truth. Intelligence and matter are correlates, i.e.t the one exists only for the other, both stand and fall together, the one is only the reflex of the other. Indeed they are really one and the same thing regarded from two opposite points of view ; and this one thing, I am here anticipating, is the manifestation of the will, or the tl in itself.

Consequently both are secondary, and therefoi the origin of the world is not to be sought in either of the two. But because of their failure to understand this, systems (with the exception perhaps of that of Spinoza) sought the origin of all things in one of these two.

Some of them, on the one hand, suppose an intelligence, vovs, as the absolutely First and 8i)(Juovpyo<;, and accordingly in this allow an idea of things and of the world to precede their actual existence; consequently they distinguish the real world from the world of idea ; which is false. Therefore matter now appears as that through which the two are distinguished, as the thing in itself.

Hence arises the difficulty of procuring this matter, the v\n, so that when added to the mere idea of the world it may impart reality to it.

That original intelligence must now either find it ready to hand, in which case it is just as much an absolute First as that intelligence itself, and we have then two absolute Firsts, the Sn/itoupyo? and the v\ij ; or the absolute intelligence must create this matter out of nothing, an assumption which our understanding refuses to make, for it is only capable of comprehending changes in matter, and not that matter itself should come into being or pass away.

This rests ultimately upon the fact that matter is essential, the correlate of the understanding. On the other hand, the systems opposed to these, which make the other of the two correlates, that is, matter, the absolute First, suppose a matter which would exist without being perceived j and it has been made sufficiently clear by all that