Arthur Schopenhauer

“ 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. ”

“ But whoever even names this Fichte seriously along with Kant shows that he has not even a dim notion of what Kant is. On the other hand, materialism also has its warrant. It is just as true that the knower is a product of matter as that matter is merely the idea of the knower ; but it is also just as one-sided. For materialism is the philosophy of the subject that forgets to take account of itself. And, accordingly, as against the assertion that I am a mere modification of matter, this must be insisted upon, that all matter exists merely in my idea ”

“ Since Scholasticism, indeed properly since Plato and Aristotle, philosophy has been for the most part a systematic misuse of general conceptions. Such, for example, are sub stance, ground, cause, the good, perfection, necessity, and very many others. A tendency of the mind to work with such abstract and too widely comprehended conceptions has shown itself almost at all times. It may ultimately rest upon a certain indolence of the intellect, which finds it too difficult a task to be constantly controlling thought by perception. ”

“ Thus the law of causality has full application, without any exception, to all things in the world, of course in respect of their form, to the variation of these forms, and thus to their changes. It is valid for the actions of men as for the impact of a stone, yet, as we have said always, merely with regard to events, to changes. But if we abstract from its origin in the understanding and try to look at it as purely objective, it will be found in ultimate analysis to depend upon the fact that every thing that acts does so by virtue of its original, and therefore eternal or timeless, power ”

“ Thus on one side at least the world must be recognised as akin to dreams, and indeed to be classified along with them. For the same function of the brain which, during sleep, conjures up before us a completely objective, perceptible, and even palpable world must have just as large a share in the presentation of the objective world of waking life. Both worlds, although different as regards their matter, are yet clearly moulded in the one form. This form is the intellect, the function of the brain. ”

“ For time, space, and causality, upon which all those real and objective events rest, are them selves nothing more than functions of the brain ; so that thus the unchangeable order of things which affords the criterion and clue to their empirical reality itself proceeds only from the brain, and has its credentials from this alone. All this Kant has expounded fully and thoroughly ; only he does not speak of the brain, but calls it " the faculty of knowledge." ”

“ For even by me myself it is always known only indirectly, never immediately ; because all existence as idea is indirect. As object, i.e., as extended, occupying space and acting, I know my body only in the perception of my brain. This takes place by means of the senses, upon data supplied by which the percipient understanding- performs its function of passing from effect to cause, and thereby, in that the eye sees the body or the hands touch it, it constructs that extended figure which presents itself in space as my body. ”

“ Therefore the question as to the cause of a thing always concerns merely its form, i.e., its state or quality, and not its matter, and indeed only the former so far as we have grounds for assuming that it has not always existed, but has come into being by means of a change. The union of form and matter, or of essentia and existentia, gives the concrete, which is always particular ; thus, the thing. And it is the forms whose union with matter, i.e., whose appearance in matter by means of a change, are subject to the law of causality. ”

“ The senses are merely the channels through which the brain receives from without (in the form of sensations) the materials which it works up into ideas of perception. Those sensations which principally serve for the objective comprehension of the external world must in themselves be neither agreeable nor disagreeable. This really means that they must leave the will entirely unaffected. Other wise the sensation itself would attract our attention, and we would remain at the effect instead of passing to the cause, which is what is aimed at here. ”

“ Does matter, as such, exist only in our idea, or does it also exist independently of it ? In the latter case it would be the thing in itself ; and who ever assumes a self-existent matter must also, consistently, be a materialist, i.e., he must make matter the principle of explanation of all things. Whoever, on the contrary, denies its existence as a thing in itself is eo ipso an idealist. Among the moderns only Locke has definitely and without ambiguity asserted the reality of matter ; and therefore his teaching led, in the hands of Condillac, to the sensualism and materialism of the French. ”

“ Yet for a thinking being it is a precarious position to stand upon one of those numberless spheres moving freely in boundless space without knowing whence or whither, and to be only one of innumerable similar beings who throng and press and toil, ceaselessly and quickly arising and passing away in time, which has no beginning and no end ; moreover, nothing permanent but matter alone and the recurrence of the same varied organised forms, by means of certain ways and channels which are there once for all. ”

“ Just as we have recognised in sight the sense of the understanding, and in hearing the sense of the reason, so we might call smell the sense of the memory, because it recalls to us more directly than any other the specific impression of an event or a scene even from the most distant past. ”

“ The matter which stands over against it is, like it, eternal and imperishable, endures through all time, but is, properly speaking, not extended, for exten sion gives form, thus it has no spatial properties. Every thing else is involved in a constant process of coming into being and passing away, while these two repre sent the unmoved poles of the world as idea. The per manence 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. ”

“ In fact, it is a phenomenon of brain, just as much whether the brain in which it exhibits itself is my own or belongs to another person. In the first case one s own person divides itself into the knowing and the known, into object and subject, which here as everywhere stand opposed to each other, inseparable and irreconcilable. If, then, my own person, in order to exist as such, always requires a knowing subject, this will at least as much hold good of the other objects for which it was the aim of the above objection to vindicate an existence independent of know ledge and its subject. ”

“ It is not a matter of custom. On the other hand, the truly stoical indifference to noise of ordinary minds is astonishing. No noise disturbs them in their thinking, reading, writing, or other occupations, while the finer mind is rendered quite incapable by it. But just that which makes them so insensible to noise of every kind makes them also insensible to the beautiful in plastic art, and to deep thought or fine expression in literary art ”

“ That transition from the sensation to its cause which, as I have repeatedly pointed out, lies at the foundation of all sense-perception is certainly suf ficient to give us the empirical presence in space and time of an empirical object, and is therefore quite enough for the practical purposes of life ; but it is by no means sufficient to afford us any conclusion as to the existence and real nature, or rather as to the intelligible substratum, of the phenomena which in this way arise for us. ”

“ So long as nothing changes there can be no question of a cause. For there is no a priori ground for inferring from the existence of given things, i.e., states of matter, their previous non-existence, and from this again their coming into being, that is to say, there is no a priori ground for inferring a change. Therefore the mere exist ence of a thing does not justify us in inferring that it has a cause. ”

“ An unbroken chain of causes and effects fills the whole of time. (For if this chain were broken the world would stand still, or in order to set it in motion again an effect without a cause would have to appear.) Now if every effect were simul taneous with its cause, then every effect would be moved up into the time of its cause, and a chain of causes and effects containing as many links as before would fill no time at all, still less an infinite time, but would be all together in one moment. ”

“ Sight is an active, hearing a passive sense. Therefore sounds affect our mind in a disturbing and hostile manner, and indeed they do so the more in proportion as the mind is active and developed ; they distract all thoughts and instantly destroy the power of thinking. On the other hand, there is no analogous disturbance through the eye, no direct effect of what is seen, as such, upon the activity of thought (for naturally we are not speaking here of the influence which the objects looked at have upon the will) ”

“ The essence of matter is acting, it is acting itself, in the abstract, thus acting in general apart from all difference of the kind of action : it is through and through causality. On this account it is itself, as regards its existence, not subject to the law of causality, and thus has neither come into being nor passes away, for otherwise the law of causality would be applied to itself. ”

“ Although time, like space, is the form of knowledge of the subject, yet, just like space, it presents itself as inde pendent of the subject and completely objective. Against our will, or without our knowledge, it goes fast or slow. We ask what o clock it is ; we investigate time, as if it were something quite objective. And what is this objec tive existence ? Not the progress of the stars, or of the clocks, which merely serve to measure the course of time itself, but it is something different from all things, and yet, like them, independent of our will and knowledge. ”

“ It follows from the proved intellectual nature of perception that the sight of beautiful objects for example, of a beautiful view is also a phenomenon of the brain. Its purity and completeness, therefore, depends not merely on the object, but also upon the quality of the brain, its form and size, the fineness of its texture, and the stimulation of its activity by the strength of the pulse of the arteries which supply it. ”

“ But so long as we are concerned, as in this first book, with objective comprehension, that is, with know ledge, the world is, and remains for us, a mere idea, for here there is no possible path by which we can cross over to it.
But, besides this, a firm grasp of the point of view of idealism is a necessary counterpoise to that of materialism. The controversy concerning the real and the ideal may also be regarded as a controversy concerning the existence of matter. ”

“ For it would bring with it that marked superiority, as regards our consideration, which the will always has over the mere idea, to which we only turn when the will is silent. Therefore colours and sounds are in themselves, and so long as their impression does not pass the normal degree, neither painful nor pleasurable sensations, but appear with the indifference that fits them to be the material of pure objective perception. ”

“ 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 sub ject, thus to assume matter as something absolute and possessed of real being in itself. ”

“ On the other hand, every being that exists in this way may yet have an existence for itself, for which it requires no subject. Yet this existence for itself cannot be extension and activity (together space-occupation) , but is necessarily a being of another kind, that of a thing in itself, which, as such, can never be an object. This, then, would be the answer to the leading objection set forth above, which accordingly does not overthrow the fundamental truth that the objectively given world can only exist in the idea, thus only for a subject. ”

“ The sensation always remains a mere datum for the understanding, which alone is capable of apprehending it as the effect of a cause different from itself, which the understanding now perceives as external, i.e., as something occupying and filling space, which is also a form inherent in the intellect prior to all experi ence. Without this intellectual operation, for which the forms must lie ready in us, the perception of an objective, external world could never arise from a mere sensation within our skin. ”

“ No man ever perceived this succession of events ; but because we know which is the cause of the others, we thereby also know which must precede the others in time, and consequently also that during the course of the whole series a certain time must elapse, although it is so short that it escapes our empirical apprehension ; for no one will assert that the projection of the bullet is actually simultaneous with the falling of the flint. Thus not only the law of causality, but also its relation to time, and the necessity of the succession of cause and effect, is known to us a priori. ”

“ For matter is only the vehicle of these forces, just as the law of causality is only the arranger of their manifestations. Therefore such an explanation of the world would always remain merely relative and conditioned, properly the work of a physical science, which at every step longed for a metapliysic. ”