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

Time is primarily the form of inner sense. Anticipating the following book, I remark that the only object of inner sense is the individual will of the knowing subject. Time is therefore the form by means of which self-consciousness becomes possible for the individual will, which originally and in itself is without knowledge. In it thep. 206 nature of the will, which in itself is simple and identical, appears drawn out into a course of life. But just on account of this original simplicity and identity of what thus exhibits itself, its character remains always precisely the same, and hence also the course of life itself retains throughout the same key-note, indeed its multifarious events and scenes are at bottom just like variations of one and the same theme.

The a priori nature of the law of causality has, by Englishmen and Frenchmen, sometimes not been seen at all, sometimes not rightly conceived of ; and therefore some of them still prosecute the earlier attempts to find for it an empirical origin. Maine de Biran places this in the experience that the act of will as cause is followed by the movement of the body as effect. But this fact itself is untrue. We certainly do not recognise the really immediate act of will as something different from the action of the body, and the two as connected by the bond of causality; but both are one and indivisible. Between them there is no succession ; they are simultaneous. They are one and the same thing, apprehended in a double manner. That which makes itself known to inner apprehension (self-consciousness) as the real act of will exhibits itself at once in external perception, in which the body exists objectively as an action of the body. That physiologically the action of the nerve precedes that of the muscle is here immaterial, for it does not come within self-consciousness ; and we are not speaking here of the relation between muscle and nerve, but of that between the act of will and the action of the body. Now this does not present itself as a causal relation. If these two presented themselves to us as cause and effect their connection would not be so incomprehensible to us as it actually is ; for what we understand from its cause we understand as far as there is an understanding of things generally. On the other hand, the movement of our limbs by means of mere acts of will is indeed a miracle of such common occurrence that we

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no longer observe it ; but if we once turn our attention to it we become keenly conscious of the incomprehensibility of the matter, just because in this we have something before us which we do not understand as the effect of a cause.

This apprehension, then, could never lead us to the idea of causality, for that never appears in it at alL Maine de Biran himself recognises the perfect simultaneousness of the act of will and the movement (Nouvtlles Considerations des Rapports du Physique au Moral, p. 377, 378). In England Thomas Eeid (On the First Principles of Contingent Truths, Essay IV. c.

5) already asserted that the knowledge of the causal relation has its ground in the nature of the faculty of knowledge itself. Quite recently Thomas Brown, in his very tediously composed book, " Inquiry into the Eelation of Cause and Effect," 4th edit, 1835, says much the same thing, that that knowledge springs from an innate, intuitive, and instinctive conviction; thus he is at bottom upon the right path.

Quite unpardonable, however, is the crass ignorance on account of which in this book of 476 pages, of which 130 are devoted to the refutation of Hume, absolutely no mention is made of Kant, who cleared up the question more than seventy years ago. If Latin had remained the exclusive language of science such a thing would not have occurred.

In spite of Brown's exposition, which in the main is correct, a modification of the doctrine set up by Maine de Biran, of the empirical origin of the fundamental knowledge of the causal relation, has yet found acceptance in England; for it is not without a certain degree of plausibility. It is this, that we abstract the law of causality from the perceived effect of our own body upon other bodies. This was already refuted by Hume.

I, however, have shown that it is untenable in my work, " Ueber den Willen in der Natur" (p. 75 of the second edition, p. 82 of the third), from the fact that since we apprehend both our own and other bodies objectively in spatial perception, the knowledge of causality must