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

merely empty perceptions of certain impressions made in the brain. They do not give the soul mere ideas of things, but actually place before it objects which exist outside it, although we cannot conceive how this really happens. This opinion is explained by the following facts.

Although, as I have fully proved, perception is brought about by application of the law of causality, of which we are conscious a priori, yet in sight the act of the understanding, by means of which we pass from the effect to the cause, by no means appears distinctly in consciousness ; and therefore the sensation does not separate itself clearly from the idea which is constructed out of it, as the raw material, by the understanding.

Still less can a distinction between object and idea, which in general does not exist, appear in consciousness ; but we feel the things themselves quite directly, and indeed as lying outside us, although it is certain that what is immediate can only be the sensation, and this is confined to the sphero of the body enclosed by our skin. This can be explained from the fact that outside us is exclusively a spatial determination.

But space itself is a form of our faculty of perception, i.e., a function of our brain. Therefore that externality to us to which we refer objects, on the occasion of sensations of sight, is itself really within our heads ; for that is its whole sphere of activity. Much as in the theatre we see the mountains, the woods, and the sea, but yet everything is inside the house.

From this it becomes intelligible that we perceive things in the relation of externality, and yet in every respect immediately, but have not within us an idea of the things which lie outside us, different from these things. For things are in space, and consequently also external to us only in so far as we perceive them.

Therefore those things which to this extent we perceive directly, and not mere images of them, are themselves only our ideas, and as such exist only in our heads. Therefore we do not, as Euler says, directly perceive the things themselves which are external to us, but rather the things

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which are perceived by us as external to us are only our ideas, and consequently are apprehended by us immediately. Th^ whole observation given above in Euler's words, and which is quite correct, affords a fresh proof of Kant's Transcendental iEsthetic, and of my theory of perception which is founded upon it, as also of idealism in general. The directness and unconsciousness referred to above, with which in perception we make the transition from the sensation to its cause, may be illustrated by an analogous procedure in the use of abstract ideas or thinking. When we read or hear we receive mere words, but we pass from these so immediately to the conceptions denoted by them, that it is as if we received the conceptions directly ; for we are absolutely unconscious of the transition from the words to the conceptions. Therefore it sometimes happens that we do not know in what language it was that we read something yesterday which we now remember. Yet that such a transition always takes place becomes apparent if it is once omitted, that is, if in a fit of abstraction we read without thinking, and then become aware that we certainly have taken in all the words but no conceptions. Only when we pass from abstract conceptions to pictures of the imagination do we become conscious of the transposition we have made.

Further, it is really only in perception in the narrowest sense, that is, in sight, that in empirical apprehension the transition from the sensation to its cause takes place quite unconsciously. In every other kind of sense perception, on the contrary, the transition takes place with more or less distinct consciousness ; therefore, in the case of apprehension through the four coarser senses, its reality ia capable of being established as an immediate fact. Thus in the dark we feel a thing for a long time on all sides until from the different effects upon our hands we are able to construct its definite form as their causa Further, if something feels smooth we sometimes reflect whether we may not have fat or oil upon our hands; and

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