very great between man and man, it is even greater between one species of
animal and another. In all species of animals, even those which are
nearest to plants, there is at least as much understanding as suffices for
the inference from the effect on the immediate object, to the indirectly
known object as its cause, _i.e._, sufficient for perception, for the
apprehension of an object. For it is this that constitutes them animals,
as it gives them the power of movement following on motives, and thereby
the power of seeking for food, or at least of seizing it; whereas plants
have only movement following on stimuli, whose direct influence they must
await, or else decay, for they cannot seek after them nor appropriate
them. We marvel at the great sagacity of the most developed species of
animals, such as the dog, the elephant, the monkey or the fox, whose
cleverness has been so admirably sketched by Buffon. From these most
sagacious animals, we can pretty accurately determine how far
understanding can go without reason, _i.e._, abstract knowledge embodied
in concepts. We could not find this out from ourselves, for in us
understanding and reason always reciprocally support each other. We find
that the manifestation of understanding in animals is sometimes above our
expectation, and sometimes below it. On the one hand, we are surprised at
the sagacity of the elephant, who, after crossing many bridges during his
journey in Europe, once refused to go upon one, because he thought it was
not strong enough to bear his weight, though he saw the rest of the party,
consisting of men and horses, go upon it as usual. On the other hand, we
wonder that the intelligent Orang-outangs, who warm themselves at a fire
they have found, do not keep it alight by throwing wood on it; a proof
that this requires a deliberation which is not possible without abstract
concepts. It is clear that the knowledge of cause and effect, as the
universal form of understanding, belongs to all animals _a priori_,
because to them as to us it is the prior condition of all perception of
the outer world. If any one desires additional proof of this, let him
observe, for example, how a young dog is afraid to jump down from a table,
however much he may wish to do so, because he foresees the effect of the
weight of his body, though he has not been taught this by experience. In
judging of the understanding of animals, we must guard against ascribing
to it the manifestations of instinct, a faculty which is quite distinct
both from understanding and reason, but the action of which is often very
analogous to the combined action of the two. We cannot, however, discuss
this here; it will find its proper place in the second book, when we
consider the harmony or so-called teleology of nature: and the 27th
chapter of the supplementary volume is expressly devoted to it.
Deficiency of _understanding_ we call _stupidity_: deficiency in the
application of _reason_ to practice we shall recognise later as
_foolishness_: deficiency of judgment as _silliness_, and lastly, partial
or entire deficiency of _memory_ as _madness_. But each of these will be
considered in its own place. That which is correctly known by _reason_ is
_truth_, that is, an abstract judgment on sufficient grounds (Essay on the
Principle of Sufficient Reason, § 29 and following paragraphs); that which
is correctly known by _understanding_ is _reality_, that is correct
inference from effect on the immediate object to its cause. _Error_ is
opposed to _truth_, as deception of the _reason_: _illusion_ is opposed to
_reality_, as deception of the _understanding_. The full discussion of all
this will be found in the first chapter of my essay on Light and Colour.
Illusion takes place when the same effect may be attributed to two causes,
of which one occurs very frequently, the other very seldom; the
understanding having no data to decide which of these two causes operates
in any particular case,—for their effects are exactly alike,—always
assumes the presence of the commoner cause, and as the activity of the
understanding is not reflective and discursive, but direct and immediate,
this false cause appears before us as a perceived object, whereas it is
merely illusion. I have explained in the essay referred to, how in this
way double sight and double feeling take place if the organs of sense are
brought into an unusual position; and have thus given an incontrovertible
proof that perception exists only through and for the understanding. As
additional examples of such illusions or deceptions of the understanding,
we may mention the broken appearance of a stick dipped in water; the
reflections in spherical mirrors, which, when the surface is convex appear
somewhat behind it, and when the surface is concave appear a long way in
front of it. To this class also belongs the apparently greater extension
of the moon at the horizon than at the zenith. This appearance is not
optical, for as the micrometre proves, the eye receives the image of the
moon at the zenith, at an even greater angle of vision than at the
horizon. The mistake is due to the understanding, which assumes that the
cause of the feebler light of the moon and of all stars at the horizon is
that they are further off, thus treating them as earthly objects,
according to the laws of atmospheric perspective, and therefore it takes
the moon to be much larger at the horizon than at the zenith, and also
regards the vault of heaven as more extended or flattened out at the
horizon. The same false application of the laws of atmospheric perspective
leads us to suppose that very high mountains, whose summits alone are
visible in pure transparent air, are much nearer than they really are, and
therefore not so high as they are; for example, Mont Blanc seen from
Salenche. All such illusions are immediately present to us as perceptions,
and cannot be dispelled by any arguments of the reason. Reason can only
prevent error, that is, a judgment on insufficient grounds, by opposing to
it a truth; as for example, the abstract knowledge that the cause of the
weaker light of the moon and the stars at the horizon is not greater
distance, but the denser atmosphere; but in all the cases we have referred
to, the illusion remains in spite of every abstract explanation. For the
understanding is in itself, even in the case of man, irrational, and is
completely and sharply distinguished from the reason, which is a faculty
of knowledge that belongs to man alone. The reason can only _know_;
perception remains free from its influence and belongs to the
understanding alone.
§ 7. With reference to our exposition up to this point, it must be
observed that we did not start either from the object or the subject, but
from the idea, which contains and presupposes them both; for the
antithesis of object and subject is its primary, universal and essential
form. We have therefore first considered this form as such; then (though
in this respect reference has for the most part been made to the
introductory essay) the subordinate forms of time, space and causality.
The latter belong exclusively to the _object_, and yet, as they are
essential to the object _as such_, and as the object again is essential to
the subject _as such_, they may be discovered from the subject, _i.e._,
they may be known _a priori_, and so far they are to be regarded as the
common limits of both. But all these forms may be referred to one general
expression, the principle of sufficient reason, as we have explained in
the introductory essay.
This procedure distinguishes our philosophical method from that of all
former systems. For they all start either from the object or from the
subject, and therefore seek to explain the one from the other, and this
according to the principle of sufficient reason. We, on the contrary, deny
the validity of this principle with reference to the relation of subject
and object, and confine it to the object. It may be thought that the
philosophy of identity, which has appeared and become generally known in
our own day, does not come under either of the alternatives we have named,
for it does not start either from the subject or from the object, but from
the absolute, known through “intellectual intuition,” which is neither
object nor subject, but the identity of the two. I will not venture to
speak of this revered identity, and this absolute, for I find myself
entirely devoid of all “intellectual intuition.” But as I take my stand
merely on those manifestoes of the “intellectual intuiter” which are open
to all, even to profane persons like myself, I must yet observe that this
philosophy is not to be excepted from the alternative errors mentioned
above. For it does not escape these two opposite errors in spite of its
identity of subject and object, which is not thinkable, but only
“intellectually intuitable,” or to be experienced by a losing of oneself
in it. On the contrary, it combines them both in itself; for it is divided
into two parts, firstly, transcendental idealism, which is just Fichte’s
doctrine of the _ego_, and therefore teaches that the object is produced
by the subject, or evolved out of it in accordance with the principle of
sufficient reason; secondly, the philosophy of nature, which teaches that
the subject is produced little by little from the object, by means of a
method called construction, about which I understand very little, yet
enough to know that it is a process according to various forms of the
principle of sufficient reason. The deep wisdom itself which that
construction contains, I renounce; for as I entirely lack “intellectual
intuition,” all those expositions which presuppose it must for me remain
as a book sealed with seven seals. This is so truly the case that, strange
to say, I have always been unable to find anything at all in this doctrine
of profound wisdom but atrocious and wearisome bombast.
The systems starting from the object had always the whole world of
perception and its constitution as their problem; yet the object which
they take as their starting-point is not always this whole world of
perception, nor its fundamental element, matter. On the contrary, a
division of these systems may be made, based on the four classes of
possible objects set forth in the introductory essay. Thus Thales and the
Ionic school, Democritus, Epicurus, Giordano Bruno, and the French
materialists, may be said to have started from the first class of objects,
the real world: Spinoza (on account of his conception of substance, which
is purely abstract, and exists only in his definition) and, earlier, the
Eleatics, from the second class, the abstract conception: the Pythagoreans
and Chinese philosophy in Y-King, from the third class, time, and
consequently number: and, lastly, the schoolmen, who teach a creation out
of nothing by the act of will of an extra-mundane personal being, started
from the fourth class of objects, the act of will directed by knowledge.
Of all systems of philosophy which start from the object, the most
consistent, and that which may be carried furthest, is simple materialism.
It regards matter, and with it time and space, as existing absolutely, and
ignores the relation to the subject in which alone all this really exists.
It then lays hold of the law of causality as a guiding principle or clue,
regarding it as a self-existent order (or arrangement) of things, _veritas
aeterna_, and so fails to take account of the understanding, in which and
for which alone causality is. It seeks the primary and most simple state
of matter, and then tries to develop all the others from it; ascending
from mere mechanism, to chemism, to polarity, to the vegetable and to the
animal kingdom. And if we suppose this to have been done, the last link in
the chain would be animal sensibility—that is knowledge—which would
consequently now appear as a mere modification or state of matter produced
by causality. Now if we had followed materialism thus far with clear
ideas, when we reached its highest point we would suddenly be seized with
a fit of the inextinguishable laughter of the Olympians. As if waking from
a dream, we would all at once become aware that its final
result—knowledge, which it reached so laboriously, was presupposed as the
indispensable condition of its very starting-point, mere matter; and when
we imagined that we thought matter, we really thought only the subject
that perceives matter; the eye that sees it, the hand that feels it, the
understanding that knows it. Thus the tremendous _petitio principii_
reveals itself unexpectedly; for suddenly the last link is seen to be the
starting-point, the chain a circle, and the materialist is like Baron
Münchausen who, when swimming in water on horseback, drew the horse into
the air with his legs, and himself also by his cue. The fundamental
absurdity of materialism is that it starts from the _objective_, and takes
as the ultimate ground of explanation something _objective_, whether it be
matter in the abstract, simply as it is _thought_, or after it has taken
form, is empirically given—that is to say, is _substance_, the chemical
element with its primary relations. Some such thing it takes, as existing
absolutely and in itself, in order that it may evolve organic nature and
finally the knowing subject from it, and explain them adequately by means
of it; whereas in truth all that is objective is already determined as
such in manifold ways by the knowing subject through its forms of knowing,
and presupposes them; and consequently it entirely disappears if we think
the subject away. Thus materialism is the attempt to explain what is
immediately given us by what is given us indirectly. All that is
objective, extended, active—that is to say, all that is material—is
regarded by materialism as affording so solid a basis for its explanation,
that a reduction of everything to this can leave nothing to be desired
(especially if in ultimate analysis this reduction should resolve itself
into action and reaction). But we have shown that all this is given
indirectly and in the highest degree determined, and is therefore merely a
relatively present object, for it has passed through the machinery and
manufactory of the brain, and has thus come under the forms of space, time
and causality, by means of which it is first presented to us as extended
in space and ever active in time. From such an indirectly given object,
materialism seeks to explain what is immediately given, the idea (in which
alone the object that materialism starts with exists), and finally even
the will from which all those fundamental forces, that manifest
themselves, under the guidance of causes, and therefore according to law,
are in truth to be explained. To the assertion that thought is a
modification of matter we may always, with equal right, oppose the
contrary assertion that all matter is merely the modification of the
knowing subject, as its idea. Yet the aim and ideal of all natural science
is at bottom a consistent materialism. The recognition here of the obvious
impossibility of such a system establishes another truth which will appear
in the course of our exposition, the truth that all science properly so
called, by which I understand systematic knowledge under the guidance of
the principle of sufficient reason, can never reach its final goal, nor
give a complete and adequate explanation: for it is not concerned with the
inmost nature of the world, it cannot get beyond the idea; indeed, it
really teaches nothing more than the relation of one idea to another.
Every science must start from two principal data. One of these is always
the principle of sufficient reason in some form or another, as organon;
the other is its special object as problem. Thus, for example, geometry
has space as problem, and the ground of existence in space as organon.
Arithmetic has time as problem, and the ground of existence in time as
organon. Logic has the combination of concepts as such as problem, and the
ground of knowledge as organon. History has the past acts of men treated
as a whole as problem, and the law of human motives as organon. Natural
science has matter as problem, and the law of causality as organon. Its
end and aim is therefore, by the guidance of causality, to refer all
possible states of matter to other states, and ultimately to one single
state; and again to deduce these states from each other, and ultimately
from one single state. Thus two states of matter stand over against each
other in natural science as extremes: that state in which matter is
furthest from being the immediate object of the subject, and that state in
which it is most completely such an immediate object, _i.e._, the most
dead and crude matter, the primary element, as the one extreme, and the
human organism as the other. Natural science as chemistry seeks for the
first, as physiology for the second. But as yet neither extreme has been
reached, and it is only in the intermediate ground that something has been
won. The prospect is indeed somewhat hopeless. The chemists, under the
presupposition that the qualitative division of matter is not, like
quantitative division, an endless process, are always trying to decrease
the number of the elements, of which there are still about sixty; and if
they were to succeed in reducing them to two, they would still try to find
the common root of these. For, on the one hand, the law of homogeneity
leads to the assumption of a primary chemical state of matter, which alone
belongs to matter as such, and precedes all others which are not
essentially matter as such, but merely contingent forms and qualities. On
the other hand, we cannot understand how this one state could ever
experience a chemical change, if there did not exist a second state to
affect it. Thus the same difficulty appears in chemistry which Epicurus
met with in mechanics. For he had to show how the first atom departed from
the original direction of its motion. Indeed this contradiction, which
develops entirely of itself and can neither be escaped nor solved, might
quite properly be set up as a chemical _antinomy_. Thus an antinomy
appears in the one extreme of natural science, and a corresponding one
will appear in the other. There is just as little hope of reaching this
opposite extreme of natural science, for we see ever more clearly that
what is chemical can never be referred to what is mechanical, nor what is
organic to what is chemical or electrical. Those who in our own day are
entering anew on this old, misleading path, will soon slink back silent
and ashamed, as all their predecessors have done before them. We shall
consider this more fully in the second book. Natural science encounters
the difficulties which we have cursorily mentioned, in its own province.
Regarded as philosophy, it would further be materialism; but this, as we
have seen, even at its birth, has death in its heart, because it ignores
the subject and the forms of knowledge, which are presupposed, just as
much in the case of the crudest matter, from which it desires to start, as
in that of the organism, at which it desires to arrive. For, “no object
without a subject,” is the principle which renders all materialism for
ever impossible. Suns and planets without an eye that sees them, and an
understanding that knows them, may indeed be spoken of in words, but for
the idea, these words are absolutely meaningless. On the other hand, the
law of causality and the treatment and investigation of nature which is
based upon it, lead us necessarily to the conclusion that, in time, each
more highly organised state of matter has succeeded a cruder state: so
that the lower animals existed before men, fishes before land animals,
plants before fishes, and the unorganised before all that is organised;
that, consequently, the original mass had to pass through a long series of
changes before the first eye could be opened. And yet, the existence of
this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened,
even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary
condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only
in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable. The world is
entirely idea, and as such demands the knowing subject as the supporter of
its existence. This long course of time itself, filled with innumerable
changes, through which matter rose from form to form till at last the
first percipient creature appeared,—this whole time itself is only
thinkable in the identity of a consciousness whose succession of ideas,
whose form of knowing it is, and apart from which, it loses all meaning
and is nothing at all. Thus we see, on the one hand, the existence of the
whole world necessarily dependent upon the first conscious being, however
undeveloped it may be; on the other hand, this conscious being just as
necessarily entirely dependent upon a long chain of causes and effects
which have preceded it, and in which it itself appears as a small link.
These two contradictory points of view, to each of which we are led with
the same necessity, we might again call an _antinomy_ in our faculty of
knowledge, and set it up as the counterpart of that which we found in the
first extreme of natural science. The fourfold antinomy of Kant will be
shown, in the criticism of his philosophy appended to this volume, to be a
groundless delusion. But the necessary contradiction which at last
presents itself to us here, finds its solution in the fact that, to use
Kant’s phraseology, time, space, and causality do not belong to the
thing-in-itself, but only to its phenomena, of which they are the form;
which in my language means this: The objective world, the world as idea,
is not the only side of the world, but merely its outward side; and it has
an entirely different side—the side of its inmost nature—its kernel—the
thing-in-itself. This we shall consider in the second book, calling it
after the most immediate of its objective manifestations—will. But the
world as idea, with which alone we are here concerned, only appears with
the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot
be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to
say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time
has no beginning, but all beginning is in time. Since, however, it is the
most universal form of the knowable, in which all phenomena are united
together through causality, time, with its infinity of past and future, is
present in the beginning of knowledge. The phenomenon which fills the
first present must at once be known as causally bound up with and
dependent upon a sequence of phenomena which stretches infinitely into the
past, and this past itself is just as truly conditioned by this first
present, as conversely the present is by the past. Accordingly the past
out of which the first present arises, is, like it, dependent upon the
knowing subject, without which it is nothing. It necessarily happens,
however, that this first present does not manifest itself as the first,
that is, as having no past for its parent, but as being the beginning of
time. It manifests itself rather as the consequence of the past, according
to the principle of existence in time. In the same way, the phenomena
which fill this first present appear as the effects of earlier phenomena
which filled the past, in accordance with the law of causality. Those who
like mythological interpretations may take the birth of Kronos (χρονος),
the youngest of the Titans, as a symbol of the moment here referred to at
which time appears, though, indeed it has no beginning; for with him,
since he ate his father, the crude productions of heaven and earth cease,
and the races of gods and men appear upon the scene.
This explanation at which we have arrived by following the most consistent
of the philosophical systems which start from the object, materialism, has
brought out clearly the inseparable and reciprocal dependence of subject
and object, and at the same time the inevitable antithesis between them.
And this knowledge leads us to seek for the inner nature of the world, the
thing-in-itself, not in either of the two elements of the idea, but in
something quite distinct from it, and which is not encumbered with such a
fundamental and insoluble antithesis.