which my will itself in general, and as a whole, thus my character,
expresses itself under given motives, manifestation of the will must be
the inevitable condition and presupposition of every action. For the fact
of its manifestation cannot depend upon something which does not exist
directly and only through it, which consequently is for it merely
accidental, and through which its manifestation itself would be merely
accidental. Now that condition is just the whole body itself. Thus the
body itself must be manifestation of the will, and it must be related to
my will as a whole, that is, to my intelligible character, whose
phenomenal appearance in time is my empirical character, as the particular
action of the body is related to the particular act of the will. The whole
body, then, must be simply my will become visible, must be my will itself,
so far as this is object of perception, an idea of the first class. It has
already been advanced in confirmation of this that every impression upon
my body also affects my will at once and immediately, and in this respect
is called pain or pleasure, or, in its lower degrees, agreeable or
disagreeable sensation; and also, conversely, that every violent movement
of the will, every emotion or passion, convulses the body and disturbs the
course of its functions. Indeed we can also give an etiological account,
though a very incomplete one, of the origin of my body, and a somewhat
better account of its development and conservation, and this is the
substance of physiology. But physiology merely explains its theme in
precisely the same way as motives explain action. Thus the physiological
explanation of the functions of the body detracts just as little from the
philosophical truth that the whole existence of this body and the sum
total of its functions are merely the objectification of that will which
appears in its outward actions in accordance with a motive, as the
establishment of the individual action through the motive and the
necessary sequence of the action from the motive conflicts with the fact
that action in general, and according to its nature, is only the
manifestation of a will which itself has no ground. If, however,
physiology tries to refer even these outward actions, the immediate
voluntary movements, to causes in the organism,—for example, if it
explains the movement of the muscles as resulting from the presence of
fluids (“like the contraction of a cord when it is wet,” says Reil in his
“Archiv für Physiologie,” vol. vi. p. 153), even supposing it really could
give a thorough explanation of this kind, yet this would never invalidate
the immediately certain truth that every voluntary motion (_functiones
animales_) is the manifestation of an act of will. Now, just as little can
the physiological explanation of vegetative life (_functiones naturales
vitales_), however far it may advance, ever invalidate the truth that the
whole animal life which thus develops itself is the manifestation of will.
In general, then, as we have shown above, no etiological explanation can
ever give us more than the necessarily determined position in time and
space of a particular manifestation, its necessary appearance there,
according to a fixed law; but the inner nature of everything that appears
in this way remains wholly inexplicable, and is presupposed by every
etiological explanation, and merely indicated by the names, force, or law
of nature, or, if we are speaking of action, character or will. Thus,
although every particular action, under the presupposition of the definite
character, necessarily follows from the given motive, and although growth,
the process of nourishment, and all the changes of the animal body take
place according to necessarily acting causes (stimuli), yet the whole
series of actions, and consequently every individual act, and also its
condition, the whole body itself which accomplishes it, and therefore also
the process through which and in which it exists, are nothing but the
manifestation of the will, the becoming visible, _the objectification of
the will_. Upon this rests the perfect suitableness of the human and
animal body to the human and animal will in general, resembling, though
far surpassing, the correspondence between an instrument made for a
purpose and the will of the maker, and on this account appearing as
design, _i.e._, the teleological explanation of the body. The parts of the
body must, therefore, completely correspond to the principal desires
through which the will manifests itself; they must be the visible
expression of these desires. Teeth, throat, and bowels are objectified
hunger; the organs of generation are objectified sexual desire; the
grasping hand, the hurrying feet, correspond to the more indirect desires
of the will which they express. As the human form generally corresponds to
the human will generally, so the individual bodily structure corresponds
to the individually modified will, the character of the individual, and
therefore it is throughout and in all its parts characteristic and full of
expression. It is very remarkable that Parmenides already gave expression
to this in the following verses, quoted by Aristotle (Metaph. iii. 5):—
Ὁς γαρ ἑκαστος εχει κρασιν μελεων πολυκαμπτων
Τως νοος ανθρωποισι παρεστηκεν; το γαρ αυτο
Εστιν, ὁπερ φρονεει, μελεων φυσις ανθρωποισι
Και πασιν και παντι; το γαρ πλεον εστι νοημα.
(Ut enim cuique complexio membrorum flexibilium se habet, ita mens
hominibus adest: idem namque est, quod sapit, membrorum natura hominibus,
et omnibus et omni: quod enim plus est, intelligentia est.)(30)
§ 21. Whoever has now gained from all these expositions a knowledge _in
abstracto_, and therefore clear and certain, of what every one knows
directly _in concreto_, _i.e._, as feeling, a knowledge that his will is
the real inner nature of his phenomenal being, which manifests itself to
him as idea, both in his actions and in their permanent substratum, his
body, and that his will is that which is most immediate in his
consciousness, though it has not as such completely passed into the form
of idea in which object and subject stand over against each other, but
makes itself known to him in a direct manner, in which he does not quite
clearly distinguish subject and object, yet is not known as a whole to the
individual himself, but only in its particular acts,—whoever, I say, has
with me gained this conviction will find that of itself it affords him the
key to the knowledge of the inmost being of the whole of nature; for he
now transfers it to all those phenomena which are not given to him, like
his own phenomenal existence, both in direct and indirect knowledge, but
only in the latter, thus merely one-sidedly as _idea_ alone. He will
recognise this will of which we are speaking not only in those phenomenal
existences which exactly resemble his own, in men and animals as their
inmost nature, but the course of reflection will lead him to recognise the
force which germinates and vegetates in the plant, and indeed the force
through which the crystal is formed, that by which the magnet turns to the
north pole, the force whose shock he experiences from the contact of two
different kinds of metals, the force which appears in the elective
affinities of matter as repulsion and attraction, decomposition and
combination, and, lastly, even gravitation, which acts so powerfully
throughout matter, draws the stone to the earth and the earth to the
sun,—all these, I say, he will recognise as different only in their
phenomenal existence, but in their inner nature as identical, as that
which is directly known to him so intimately and so much better than
anything else, and which in its most distinct manifestation is called
_will_. It is this application of reflection alone that prevents us from
remaining any longer at the phenomenon, and leads us to the _thing in
itself_. Phenomenal existence is idea and nothing more. All idea, of
whatever kind it may be, all _object_, is _phenomenal_ existence, but the
_will_ alone is a _thing in itself_. As such, it is throughout not idea,
but _toto genere_ different from it; it is that of which all idea, all
object, is the phenomenal appearance, the visibility, the objectification.
It is the inmost nature, the kernel, of every particular thing, and also
of the whole. It appears in every blind force of nature and also in the
preconsidered action of man; and the great difference between these two is
merely in the degree of the manifestation, not in the nature of what
manifests itself.
§ 22. Now, if we are to think as an object this thing-in-itself (we wish
to retain the Kantian expression as a standing formula), which, as such,
is never object, because all object is its mere manifestation, and
therefore cannot be it itself, we must borrow for it the name and concept
of an object, of something in some way objectively given, consequently of
one of its own manifestations. But in order to serve as a clue for the
understanding, this can be no other than the most complete of all its
manifestations, _i.e._, the most distinct, the most developed, and
directly enlightened by knowledge. Now this is the human will. It is,
however, well to observe that here, at any rate, we only make use of a
_denominatio a potiori_, through which, therefore, the concept of will
receives a greater extension than it has hitherto had. Knowledge of the
identical in different phenomena, and of difference in similar phenomena,
is, as Plato so often remarks, a _sine qua non_ of philosophy. But
hitherto it was not recognised that every kind of active and operating
force in nature is essentially identical with will, and therefore the
multifarious kinds of phenomena were not seen to be merely different
species of the same genus, but were treated as heterogeneous. Consequently
there could be no word to denote the concept of this genus. I therefore
name the genus after its most important species, the direct knowledge of
which lies nearer to us and guides us to the indirect knowledge of all
other species. But whoever is incapable of carrying out the required
extension of the concept will remain involved in a permanent
misunderstanding. For by the word _will_ he understands only that species
of it which has hitherto been exclusively denoted by it, the will which is
guided by knowledge, and whose manifestation follows only upon motives,
and indeed merely abstract motives, and thus takes place under the
guidance of the reason. This, we have said, is only the most prominent
example of the manifestation of will. We must now distinctly separate in
thought the inmost essence of this manifestation which is known to us
directly, and then transfer it to all the weaker, less distinct
manifestations of the same nature, and thus we shall accomplish the
desired extension of the concept of will. From another point of view I
should be equally misunderstood by any one who should think that it is all
the same in the end whether we denote this inner nature of all phenomena
by the word _will_ or by any other. This would be the case if the
thing-in-itself were something whose existence we merely _inferred_, and
thus knew indirectly and only in the abstract. Then, indeed, we might call
it what we pleased; the name would stand merely as the symbol of an
unknown quantity. But the word _will_, which, like a magic spell,
discloses to us the inmost being of everything in nature, is by no means
an unknown quantity, something arrived at only by inference, but is fully
and immediately comprehended, and is so familiar to us that we know and
understand what will is far better than anything else whatever. The
concept of will has hitherto commonly been subordinated to that of force,
but I reverse the matter entirely, and desire that every force in nature
should be thought as will. It must not be supposed that this is mere
verbal quibbling or of no consequence; rather, it is of the greatest
significance and importance. For at the foundation of the concept of
force, as of all other concepts, there ultimately lies the knowledge in
sense-perception of the objective world, that is to say, the phenomenon,
the idea; and the concept is constructed out of this. It is an abstraction
from the province in which cause and effect reign, _i.e._, from ideas of
perception, and means just the causal nature of causes at the point at
which this causal nature is no further etiologically explicable, but is
the necessary presupposition of all etiological explanation. The concept
will, on the other hand, is of all possible concepts the only one which
has its source _not_ in the phenomenal, _not_ in the mere idea of
perception, but comes from within, and proceeds from the most immediate
consciousness of each of us, in which each of us knows his own
individuality, according to its nature, immediately, apart from all form,
even that of subject and object, and which at the same time is this
individuality, for here the subject and the object of knowledge are one.
If, therefore, we refer the concept of _force_ to that of _will_, we have
in fact referred the less known to what is infinitely better known;
indeed, to the one thing that is really immediately and fully known to us,
and have very greatly extended our knowledge. If, on the contrary, we
subsume the concept of will under that of force, as has hitherto always
been done, we renounce the only immediate knowledge which we have of the
inner nature of the world, for we allow it to disappear in a concept which
is abstracted from the phenomenal, and with which we can therefore never
go beyond the phenomenal.
§ 23. The _will_ as a thing in itself is quite different from its
phenomenal appearance, and entirely free from all the forms of the
phenomenal, into which it first passes when it manifests itself, and which
therefore only concern its _objectivity_, and are foreign to the will
itself. Even the most universal form of all idea, that of being object for
a subject, does not concern it; still less the forms which are subordinate
to this and which collectively have their common expression in the
principle of sufficient reason, to which we know that time and space
belong, and consequently multiplicity also, which exists and is possible
only through these. In this last regard I shall call time and space the
_principium individuationis_, borrowing an expression from the old
schoolmen, and I beg to draw attention to this, once for all. For it is
only through the medium of time and space that what is one and the same,
both according to its nature and to its concept, yet appears as different,
as a multiplicity of co-existent and successive phenomena. Thus time and
space are the _principium individuationis_, the subject of so many
subtleties and disputes among the schoolmen, which may be found collected
in Suarez (Disp. 5, Sect. 3). According to what has been said, the will as
a thing-in-itself lies outside the province of the principle of sufficient
reason in all its forms, and is consequently completely groundless,
although all its manifestations are entirely subordinated to the principle
of sufficient reason. Further, it is free from all _multiplicity_,
although its manifestations in time and space are innumerable. It is
itself one, though not in the sense in which an object is one, for the
unity of an object can only be known in opposition to a possible
multiplicity; nor yet in the sense in which a concept is one, for the
unity of a concept originates only in abstraction from a multiplicity; but
it is one as that which lies outside time and space, the _principium
individuationis_, _i.e._, the possibility of multiplicity. Only when all
this has become quite clear to us through the subsequent examination of
the phenomena and different manifestations of the will, shall we fully
understand the meaning of the Kantian doctrine that time, space and
causality do not belong to the thing-in-itself, but are only forms of
knowing.
The uncaused nature of will has been actually recognised, where it
manifests itself most distinctly, as the will of man, and this has been
called free, independent. But on account of the uncaused nature of the
will itself, the necessity to which its manifestation is everywhere
subjected has been overlooked, and actions are treated as free, which they
are not. For every individual action follows with strict necessity from
the effect of the motive upon the character. All necessity is, as we have
already said, the relation of the consequent to the reason, and nothing
more. The principle of sufficient reason is the universal form of all
phenomena, and man in his action must be subordinated to it like every
other phenomenon. But because in self-consciousness the will is known
directly and in itself, in this consciousness lies also the consciousness
of freedom. The fact is, however, overlooked that the individual, the
person, is not will as a thing-in-itself, but is a _phenomenon_ of will,
is already determined as such, and has come under the form of the
phenomenal, the principle of sufficient reason. Hence arises the strange
fact that every one believes himself _a priori_ to be perfectly free, even
in his individual actions, and thinks that at every moment he can commence
another manner of life, which just means that he can become another
person. But _a posteriori_, through experience, he finds to his
astonishment that he is not free, but subjected to necessity; that in
spite of all his resolutions and reflections he does not change his
conduct, and that from the beginning of his life to the end of it, he must
carry out the very character which he himself condemns, and as it were
play the part he has undertaken to the end. I cannot pursue this subject
further at present, for it belongs, as ethical, to another part of this
work. In the meantime, I only wish to point out here that the _phenomenon_
of the will which in itself is uncaused, is yet as such subordinated to
the law of necessity, that is, the principle of sufficient reason, so that
in the necessity with which the phenomena of nature follow each other, we
may find nothing to hinder us from recognising in them the manifestations
of will.
Only those changes which have no other ground than a motive, _i.e._, an
idea, have hitherto been regarded as manifestations of will. Therefore in
nature a will has only been attributed to man, or at the most to animals;
for knowledge, the idea, is of course, as I have said elsewhere, the true
and exclusive characteristic of animal life. But that the will is also
active where no knowledge guides it, we see at once in the instinct and
the mechanical skill of animals.(31) That they have ideas and knowledge is
here not to the point, for the end towards which they strive as definitely
as if it were a known motive, is yet entirely unknown to them. Therefore
in such cases their action takes place without motive, is not guided by
the idea, and shows us first and most distinctly how the will may be
active entirely without knowledge. The bird of a year old has no idea of
the eggs for which it builds a nest; the young spider has no idea of the
prey for which it spins a web; nor has the ant-lion any idea of the ants
for which he digs a trench for the first time. The larva of the
stag-beetle makes the hole in the wood, in which it is to await its
metamorphosis, twice as big if it is going to be a male beetle as if it is
going to be a female, so that if it is a male there may be room for the
horns, of which, however, it has no idea. In such actions of these
creatures the will is clearly operative as in their other actions, but it
is in blind activity, which is indeed accompanied by knowledge but not
guided by it. If now we have once gained insight into the fact, that idea
as motive is not a necessary and essential condition of the activity of
the will, we shall more easily recognise the activity of will where it is
less apparent. For example, we shall see that the house of the snail is no
more made by a will which is foreign to the snail itself, than the house
which we build is produced through another will than our own; but we shall
recognise in both houses the work of a will which objectifies itself in
both the phenomena—a will which works in us according to motives, but in
the snail still blindly as formative impulse directed outwards. In us also
the same will is in many ways only blindly active: in all the functions of
our body which are not guided by knowledge, in all its vital and
vegetative processes, digestion, circulation, secretion, growth,
reproduction. Not only the actions of the body, but the whole body itself
is, as we have shown above, phenomenon of the will, objectified will,
concrete will. All that goes on in it must therefore proceed through will,
although here this will is not guided by knowledge, but acts blindly
according to causes, which in this case are called _stimuli_.