Arthur Schopenhauer

“ On the other hand, I am the first who has asserted that a will must be attributed to all that is lifeless and inorganic. For, with me, the will is not, as has hitherto been assumed, an accident of cognition and therefore of life; but life itself is manifestation of will. Knowledge, on the contrary, is really an accident of life, and life of Matter. But Matter itself is only the perceptibility of the phenomena of the will. ”

“ At every resolution that we take ourselves, or that we see others take, we deem ourselves justified in asking, why? That is, we assume that something must have previously occurred, from which this resolution has resulted, and we call this something its reason, or, more correctly, the motive of the action which now follows. Without such a reason or motive, the action is just as inconceivable for us, as the movement of a lifeless body without being pushed or pulled. ”

“ Theology there must and shall be, no matter whence it come; Moses and the Prophets must be made out to be in the right: this is the highest principle in philosophy; and there must be Rational Psychology to boot, as is proper. Now there is nothing of the sort to be found either in Kant's philosophy or in mine. For, as we all know, the most cogent theological argumentation shivers to atoms like a glass thrown at a wall, when it is brought into contact with Kant's Critique of all Speculative Theology, and under his hands not a shred remains entire of the whole tissue of Rational Psychology! ”

“ Time has therefore neither beginning nor end. On the other hand, the series of reasons of knowledge—that is, a series of judgments, each of which gives logical truth to the other—always ends somewhere, i.e., either in an empirical, a transcendental, or a metalogical truth. If the reason of the major to which we have been led is an empirical truth, and we still continue asking why, it is no longer a reason of knowledge that is asked for, but a cause—in other words, the series of reasons of knowing passes over into the series of reasons of becoming. ”

“ The power of such a will is so great, that it always achieves its end. It is no naked will deprived of its clothing, or power; on the contrary, it brings with it an irresistible omnipotence, which enables it to uproot, to plant, to put to death and to bring to life, to bind and to loose, to heal and to injure, which power will be collected and concentrated in its entirety in the royal, free-born will. ”

“ Our thirst after knowledge augments with our incapacity for belief. There comes a boiling-point in the scale of all intellectual development, at which all faith, all revelation, and all authority evaporate, and Man claims the right to judge for himself; the right, not only to be taught, but to be convinced. The leading-strings of his infancy have fallen off, and henceforth he demands leave to walk alone. Yet his craving for Metaphysics can no more be extinguished than any physical want. ”

“ Now, from this point of view, a system which places the reality of all existence and the root of the whole of Nature in the Will, and in this will places the root of the world, must undeniably carry with it, to say the least, a strong prejudice in its favour. For, by a direct and simple way, it reaches, nay, already holds in its hand before coming to Ethics, what other systems try to reach by roundabout, ever dubious by-paths. ”

“ Man's intellect is double : for not only has he intuitive, but abstract, knowledge, which last is not limited to what is present. Man possesses Reason ; he therefore has a power of elective decision with clear consciousness : that is, he is able to weigh against one another motives which exclude each other, as such ; in other terms, he can let them try their strength on his will. The most powerful motive then decides him, and his actions ensue with just the same necessity as the rolling of a ball after it has been struck. ”

“ For how great is the difference between a mere sensation in my hand and the representations of causality, materiality, and mobility in Space by means of Time! The sensation in my hand, even if its position and its points of contact are altered, is a thing far too uniform and far too poor in data, to enable me to construct out of it the representation of Space, with its three dimensions, and of the influences of bodies one upon another, together with the properties of expansion, impenetrability, cohesion, shape, hardness, softness, rest, and motion: the basis, in short, of the objective world. ”

“ I should however be heartily glad, were plagiarism the worst kind of dishonesty that denied German literature; there are others far more mischievous, which penetrate more deeply, and to which plagiarism bears the same proportion as picking pockets in a mild way to capital crime. I allude to that mean, despicable spirit, whose lodestar is personal interest, when it ought to be truth, and in which the voice of intention makes itself heard beneath the mask of insight. Double-dealing and time-serving are the order of the day. ”

“ Complete liberation and separation of the intellect from the will and its bondage is the prerogative of genius, as I have fully shown in the aesthetic part of my chief work. Genius is objectivity. The pure objectivity and distinctness with which things present themselves in [intuitive] perception, that fundamental and most substantial source of knowledge, actually stands every moment in inverse proportion to the interest which the will has in those things; and knowing without willing is the condition, not to say the essence, of all gifts of aesthetic intelligence. ”

“ Thus it follows, that it is easy to preach, but difficult to found, morality. It is just because that point is determined by our conscience, that it becomes the touchstone of all systems; since we demand, and rightly demand, that Metaphysic should give support to Ethics: and now arises the difficult problem to show that, contrary to all experience, the physical order of things depends upon a moral one, and to find out a connection between the force which, by acting according to eternal laws of Nature, gives the world stability, and the morality which has its seat in the human breast. ”

“ The two primarily different sources of our knowledge, that is to say the inward and the outward source, have to be connected together at this point by reflection. It is quite exclusively out of this connection that our comprehension of Nature, and of our own selves arises; but then the inner side of Nature is disclosed to our intellect, which by itself alone can never reach further than to the mere outside; and the mystery which philosophy has so long tried to solve, lies open before us. ”

“ Above all the thought of making the will he found within him rule over Nature, was so bold, that people would have been alarmed by it: therefore it was made to rule over fictitious beings, supposed by the prevailing superstition to have command over Nature, in order through them to obtain at least indirect mastery over Nature. Every sort of god or demon more over, is always a hypostasis, by which believers of all sects and colours bring to their own comprehension the Metaphysical, that which lies behind Nature, that which gives her existence and consistence and consequently rules over her. ”

“ Every animal form is a longing of the will to live which is roused by circumstances; for instance, the will is seized with a longing to live on trees, to hang on their branches, to devour their leaves, without contention with other animals and without ever touching the ground: this longing presents itself throughout endless time in the form (or Platonic Idea) of the sloth. It can hardly walk at all, being only adapted for climbing; helpless on the ground, it is agile on trees and looks itself like a moss-clad bough in order to escape the notice of its pursuers. ”

“ All animals, even down to the very lowest, must have Understanding that is, knowledge of the causal law, although they have it in very different degrees of delicacy and of clearness ; at any rate they must have as much of it as is required for perception by their senses ; for sensation without Understanding would be not only a useless, but a cruel gift of Nature. No one, who has himself any intelligence, can doubt the existence of it in the higher animals. ”

“ No; for here we have to do with no change, consequently with no effect which must have a cause.—Is it merely a logical reason? No; for the equality of the angle is not only a proof of the equality of the sides, it is not only the foundation of a judgment: mere conceptions alone would never suffice to explain why the sides must be equal, because the angles are so; for the conception of the equality of the sides is not contained in that of the equality of the angles. Here therefore we have no connection between conceptions and judgments, but between sides and angles. ”

“ For the Principle of Sufficient Reason is the principle of all explanation: to explain a thing means, to reduce its given existence or connection to some form or other of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, in accordance with which form that existence or connection necessarily is that which it is. The Principle of Sufficient Reason itself, i.e., the connection expressed by it in any of its forms, cannot therefore be further explained; because there exists no principle by which to explain the source of all explanation: just as the eye is unable to see itself, though it sees everything else. ”

“ Above all, my truth-seeking young friends, beware of letting our professors tell you what is contained in the Critique of Pure Reason. Read it yourselves and you will find in it something very different from what they deem it advisable for you to know.—In our time a great deal too much study is generally devoted to the History of Philosophy; for this study, being adapted by its very nature to substitute knowledge for reflection, is just now cultivated downright with a view to making philosophy consist in its own history. ”

“ Plants have no self-consciousness because they have no power of locomotion; for of what use would self-consciousness be to them unless it enabled them to seek what was salutary and flee what was noxious to them ? And conversely, of what use could power of locomotion be to them, as they have no self-consciousness with which to guide it. The inseparable duality of Sensibility and Irritability does not yet appear therefore in the plant; they continue slumbering in the reproductive force which is their fundament, and in which alone the will here objectifies itself. ”

“ When we read Dietrich Tiedemann's History of Magic, 2 we are astonished at the persistency with which mankind have clung to the thought of Magic in all places and at all times, notwithstanding frequent failure; and we come to the conclusion, that this thought must, to say the least, be deeply rooted in human nature, if not in things in general, and cannot be a mere arbitrary creation of the fancy. Although Magic is differently defined by the various authors who have treated of it, the fundamental thought which predominates in all its definitions is nevertheless unmistakable. ”

“ In all times some such thing occupies the contemporary public more or less noisily; then it dies off so completely, vanishes so entirely, without leaving a trace behind, that the next generation no longer knows what it was. Truth can bide its time, for it has a long life before it. Whatever is genuine and seriously meant, is always slow to make its way and certainly attains its end almost miraculously ”

“ The other circumstance which calls for a real progress in philosophy, is the steady growth of unbelief in the face of all the hypocritical dissembling and the outward conformity to the Church. This unbelief necessarily and unavoidably goes hand in hand with the growing expansion of empirical and historical knowledge. It threatens to destroy not only the form, but even the spirit of Christianity (a spirit which has a much wider reach than Christianity itself) , and to deliver up mankind to moral materialism—a thing even more dangerous than the chemical materialism already mentioned. ”

“ The same reason indeed accounts for the peculiar inclination of all men of genius for solitude, to which they are driven by their difference from the rest, and for which their own inner wealth qualifies them. For, with humanity it is as with diamonds, the extraordinarily great ones alone are fitted to be solitaires, while those of ordinary size have to be set in clusters to produce any effect. ”

“ Now others among our German "philosophical trade" again try to get rid of the obnoxious Kant in a different way: instead of attacking his philosophy point-blank, they rather seek to undermine the foundations on which it is built. These people however are so utterly forsaken by all the gods and by all power of judgment, that they attack à priori truths: that is to say, truths as old as the human understanding, nay, which constitute that understanding itself, and which it is therefore impossible to contradict without declaring war against that understanding also. ”

“ The first weeks of their existence are rather passed in a kind of stupor, from which they awaken by degrees when their Understanding begins to apply its function to the data supplied by the senses, especially those of touch and of sight, whereby they gradually gain consciousness of the objective world. This newly-arising consciousness may be clearly recognised by the look of growing intelligence in their eyes and a degree of intention in their movements, especially in the smile with which they show for the first time recognition of those who take care of them. ”

“ Now as, according to the above, the existence of God belongs to revelation, by which it is firmly established, it has no need whatever of human authentication. Philosophy, however, is properly speaking only an idle, superfluous attempt to let Reason — that is, the human power of thinking, reflecting, deliberating — once in a while, try its own powers unassisted, as a child is now and then allowed to run alone on a lawn and try its strength without leading-strings, just to see what will come of it. ”