understand are those which are of most frequent occurrence, and which are
most universal and simple; for, on the contrary, these are just the
phenomena that we are most accustomed to see about us, and to be ignorant
of. It is just as inexplicable to us that a stone should fall to the earth
as that an animal should move itself. It has been supposed, as we have
remarked above, that, starting from the most universal forces of nature
(gravitation, cohesion, impenetrability), it was possible to explain from
them the rarer forces, which only operate under a combination of
circumstances (for example, chemical quality, electricity, magnetism),
and, lastly, from these to understand the organism and the life of
animals, and even the nature of human knowing and willing. Men resigned
themselves without a word to starting from mere _qualitates occultæ_, the
elucidation of which was entirely given up, for they intended to build
upon them, not to investigate them. Such an intention cannot, as we have
already said, be carried out. But apart from this, such structures would
always stand in the air. What is the use of explanations which ultimately
refer us to something which is quite as unknown as the problem with which
we started? Do we in the end understand more of the inner nature of these
universal natural forces than of the inner nature of an animal? Is not the
one as much a sealed book to us as the other? Unfathomable because it is
without ground, because it is the content, that which the phenomenon is,
and which can never be referred to the form, to the how, to the principle
of sufficient reason. But we, who have in view not etiology but
philosophy, that is, not relative but unconditioned knowledge of the real
nature of the world, take the opposite course, and start from that which
is immediately and most completely known to us, and fully and entirely
trusted by us—that which lies nearest to us, in order to understand that
which is known to us only at a distance, one-sidedly and indirectly. From
the most powerful, most significant, and most distinct phenomenon we seek
to arrive at an understanding of those that are less complete and weaker.
With the exception of my own body, all things are known to me only on
_one_ side, that of the idea. Their inner nature remains hidden from me
and a profound secret, even if I know all the causes from which their
changes follow. Only by comparison with that which goes on in me if my
body performs an action when I am influenced by a motive—only by
comparison, I say, with what is the inner nature of my own changes
determined by external reasons, can I obtain insight into the way in which
these lifeless bodies change under the influence of causes, and so
understand what is their inner nature. For the knowledge of the causes of
the manifestation of this inner nature affords me merely the rule of its
appearance in time and space, and nothing more. I can make this comparison
because my body is the only object of which I know not merely the _one_
side, that of the idea, but also the other side which is called will.
Thus, instead of believing that I would better understand my own
organisation, and then my own knowing and willing, and my movements
following upon motives, if I could only refer them to movements due to
electrical, chemical, and mechanical causes, I must, seeing that I seek
philosophy and not etiology, learn to understand from my own movements
following upon motives the inner nature of the simplest and commonest
movements of an unorganised body which I see following upon causes. I must
recognise the inscrutable forces which manifest themselves in all natural
bodies as identical in kind with that which in me is the will, and as
differing from it only in degree. That is to say, the fourth class of
ideas given in the Essay on the Principle of Sufficient Reason must be the
key to the knowledge of the inner nature of the first class, and by means
of the law of motivation I must come to understand the inner meaning of
the law of causation.
Spinoza (Epist. 62) says that if a stone which has been projected through
the air had consciousness, it would believe that it was moving of its own
will. I add to this only that the stone would be right. The impulse given
it is for the stone what the motive is for me, and what in the case of the
stone appears as cohesion, gravitation, rigidity, is in its inner nature
the same as that which I recognise in myself as will, and what the stone
also, if knowledge were given to it, would recognise as will. In the
passage referred to, Spinoza had in view the necessity with which the
stone flies, and he rightly desires to transfer this necessity to that of
the particular act of will of a person. I, on the other hand, consider the
inner being, which alone imparts meaning and validity to all real
necessity (_i.e._, effect following upon a cause) as its presupposition.
In the case of men this is called character; in the case of a stone it is
called quality, but it is the same in both. When it is immediately known
it is called will. In the stone it has the weakest, and in man the
strongest degree of visibility, of objectivity. St. Augustine recognises,
with a true instinct, this identity of the tendencies of all things with
our own willing, and I cannot refrain from quoting his naïve account of
the matter:—“_Si pecora essemus, carnalem vitam et quod secundum sensum
ejusdem est amaremus, idque esset sufficiens bonum nostrum, et secundum
hoc si esset nobis bene, nihil aliud quæreremus. Item, si arbores essemus,
nihil quidem sentientes motu amare possemus: verumtamen id quasi appetere
videremur, quo feracius essemus, uberiusque fructuosæ. Si essemus lapides,
aut fluctus, aut ventus, aut flamma, vel quid ejusmodi, sine ullo quidem
sensu atque vita, non tamen nobis deesset quasi quidam nostrorum locorum
atque ordinis appetitus. Nam velut amores corporum momenta sunt ponderum,
sive deorsum gravitate, sive sursum levitate nitantur: ita enim corpus
pondere, sicut animus amore fertur quocunque fertur_” (De Civ. Dei, xi.
28).
It ought further to be mentioned that Euler saw that the inner nature of
gravitation must ultimately be referred to an “inclination and desire”
(thus will) peculiar to material bodies (in the 68th letter to the
Princess). Indeed, it is just this that makes him averse to the conception
of gravitation as it existed for Newton, and he is inclined to try a
modification of it in accordance with the earlier Cartesian theory, and so
to derive gravitation from the impact of an ether upon the bodies, as
being “more rational and more suitable for persons who like clear and
intelligible principles.” He wishes to banish attraction from physics as a
_qualitas occulta_. This is only in keeping with the dead view of nature
which prevailed at Euler’s time as the correlative of the immaterial soul.
It is only worth noticing because of its bearing upon the fundamental
truth established by me, which even at that time this fine intellect saw
glimmering in the distance. He hastened to turn in time, and then, in his
anxiety at seeing all the prevalent fundamental views endangered, he
sought safety in the old and already exploded absurdities.
We know that _multiplicity_ in general is necessarily conditioned by space
and time, and is only thinkable in them. In this respect they are called
the _principium individuationis_. But we have found that space and time
are forms of the principle of sufficient reason. In this principle all our
knowledge _a priori_ is expressed, but, as we showed above, this _a
priori_ knowledge, as such, only applies to the knowableness of things,
not to the things themselves, _i.e._, it is only our form of knowledge, it
is not a property of the thing-in-itself. The thing-in-itself is, as such,
free from all forms of knowledge, even the most universal, that of being
an object for the subject. In other words, the thing-in-itself is
something altogether different from the idea. If, now, this
thing-in-itself is _the will_, as I believe I have fully and convincingly
proved it to be, then, regarded as such and apart from its manifestation,
it lies outside time and space, and therefore knows no multiplicity, and
is consequently _one_. Yet, as I have said, it is not one in the sense in
which an individual or a concept is one, but as something to which the
condition of the possibility of multiplicity, the _principium
individuationis_, is foreign. The multiplicity of things in space and
time, which collectively constitute the objectification of will, does not
affect the will itself, which remains indivisible notwithstanding it. It
is not the case that, in some way or other, a smaller part of will is in
the stone and a larger part in the man, for the relation of part and whole
belongs exclusively to space, and has no longer any meaning when we go
beyond this form of intuition or perception. The more and the less have
application only to the phenomenon of will, that is, its visibility, its
objectification. Of this there is a higher grade in the plant than in the
stone; in the animal a higher grade than in the plant: indeed, the passage
of will into visibility, its objectification, has grades as innumerable as
exist between the dimmest twilight and the brightest sunshine, the loudest
sound and the faintest echo. We shall return later to the consideration of
these grades of visibility which belong to the objectification of the
will, to the reflection of its nature. But as the grades of its
objectification do not directly concern the will itself, still less is it
concerned by the multiplicity of the phenomena of these different grades,
_i.e._, the multitude of individuals of each form, or the particular
manifestations of each force. For this multiplicity is directly
conditioned by time and space, into which the will itself never enters.
The will reveals itself as completely and as much in _one_ oak as in
millions. Their number and multiplication in space and time has no meaning
with regard to it, but only with regard to the multiplicity of individuals
who know in space and time, and who are themselves multiplied and
dispersed in these. The multiplicity of these individuals itself belongs
not to the will, but only to its manifestation. We may therefore say that
if, _per impossibile_, a single real existence, even the most
insignificant, were to be entirely annihilated, the whole world would
necessarily perish with it. The great mystic Angelus Silesius feels this
when he says—
“I know God cannot live an instant without me,
He must give up the ghost if I should cease to be.”
Men have tried in various ways to bring the immeasurable greatness of the
material universe nearer to the comprehension of us all, and then they
have seized the opportunity to make edifying remarks. They have referred
perhaps to the relative smallness of the earth, and indeed of man; or, on
the contrary, they have pointed out the greatness of the mind of this man
who is so insignificant—the mind that can solve, comprehend, and even
measure the greatness of the universe, and so forth. Now, all this is very
well, but to me, when I consider the vastness of the world, the most
important point is this, that the thing-in-itself, whose manifestation is
the world—whatever else it may be—cannot have its true self spread out and
dispersed after this fashion in boundless space, but that this endless
extension belongs only to its manifestation. The thing-in-itself, on the
contrary, is present entire and undivided in every object of nature and in
every living being. Therefore we lose nothing by standing still beside any
single individual thing, and true wisdom is not to be gained by measuring
out the boundless world, or, what would be more to the purpose, by
actually traversing endless space. It is rather to be attained by the
thorough investigation of any individual thing, for thus we seek to arrive
at a full knowledge and understanding of its true and peculiar nature.
The subject which will therefore be fully considered in the next book, and
which has, doubtless, already presented itself to the mind of every
student of Plato, is, that these different grades of the objectification
of will which are manifested in innumerable individuals, and exist as
their unattained types or as the eternal forms of things, not entering
themselves into time and space, which are the medium of individual things,
but remaining fixed, subject to no change, always being, never becoming,
while the particular things arise and pass away, always become and never
are,—that these _grades of the objectification of will_ are, I say, simply
_Plato’s Ideas_. I make this passing reference to the matter here in order
that I may be able in future to use the word _Idea_ in this sense. In my
writings, therefore, the word is always to be understood in its true and
original meaning given to it by Plato, and has absolutely no reference to
those abstract productions of dogmatising scholastic reason, which Kant
has inaptly and illegitimately used this word to denote, though Plato had
already appropriated and used it most fitly. By Idea, then, I understand
every definite and fixed grade of the objectification of will, so far as
it is thing-in-itself, and therefore has no multiplicity. These grades are
related to individual things as their eternal forms or prototypes. The
shortest and most concise statement of this famous Platonic doctrine is
given us by Diogenes Laertes (iii. 12): “ὁ Πλατων φησι, εν τῃ φυσει τας
ιδεας ἑσταναι, καθαπερ παραδειγματα, τα δ᾽ αλλα ταυταις εοικεναι, τουτων
ὁμοιωματα καθεστωτα”—(“_Plato ideas in natura velut exemplaria dixit
subsistere; cetera his esse similia, ad istarum similitudinem
consistentia_”). Of Kant’s misuse of the word I take no further notice;
what it is needful to say about it will be found in the Appendix.
§ 26. The lowest grades of the objectification of will are to be found in
those most universal forces of nature which partly appear in all matter
without exception, as gravity and impenetrability, and partly have shared
the given matter among them, so that certain of them reign in one species
of matter and others in another species, constituting its specific
difference, as rigidity, fluidity, elasticity, electricity, magnetism,
chemical properties and qualities of every kind. They are in themselves
immediate manifestations of will, just as much as human action; and as
such they are groundless, like human character. Only their particular
manifestations are subordinated to the principle of sufficient reason,
like the particular actions of men. They themselves, on the other hand,
can never be called either effect or cause, but are the prior and
presupposed conditions of all causes and effects through which their real
nature unfolds and reveals itself. It is therefore senseless to demand a
cause of gravity or electricity, for they are original forces. Their
expressions, indeed, take place in accordance with the law of cause and
effect, so that every one of their particular manifestations has a cause,
which is itself again just a similar particular manifestation which
determines that this force must express itself here, must appear in space
and time; but the force itself is by no means the effect of a cause, nor
the cause of an effect. It is therefore a mistake to say “gravity is the
cause of a stone falling;” for the cause in this case is rather the
nearness of the earth, because it attracts the stone. Take the earth away
and the stone will not fall, although gravity remains. The force itself
lies quite outside the chain of causes and effects, which presupposes
time, because it only has meaning in relation to it; but the force lies
outside time. The individual change always has for its cause another
change just as individual as itself, and not the force of which it is the
expression. For that which always gives its efficiency to a cause, however
many times it may appear, is a force of nature. As such, it is groundless,
_i.e._, it lies outside the chain of causes and outside the province of
the principle of sufficient reason in general, and is philosophically
known as the immediate objectivity of will, which is the “in-itself” of
the whole of nature; but in etiology, which in this reference is physics,
it is set down as an original force, _i.e._, a _qualitas occulta_.
In the higher grades of the objectivity of will we see individuality
occupy a prominent position, especially in the case of man, where it
appears as the great difference of individual characters, _i.e._, as
complete personality, outwardly expressed in strongly marked individual
physiognomy, which influences the whole bodily form. None of the brutes
have this individuality in anything like so high a degree, though the
higher species of them have a trace of it; but the character of the
species completely predominates over it, and therefore they have little
individual physiognomy. The farther down we go, the more completely is
every trace of the individual character lost in the common character of
the species, and the physiognomy of the species alone remains. We know the
physiological character of the species, and from that we know exactly what
is to be expected from the individual; while, on the contrary, in the
human species every individual has to be studied and fathomed for himself,
which, if we wish to forecast his action with some degree of certainty,
is, on account of the possibility of concealment that first appears with
reason, a matter of the greatest difficulty. It is probably connected with
this difference of the human species from all others, that the folds and
convolutions of the brain, which are entirely wanting in birds, and very
weakly marked in rodents, are even in the case of the higher animals far
more symmetrical on both sides, and more constantly the same in each
individual, than in the case of human beings.(34) It is further to be
regarded as a phenomenon of this peculiar individual character which
distinguishes men from all the lower animals, that in the case of the
brutes the sexual instinct seeks its satisfaction without observable
choice of objects, while in the case of man this choice is, in a purely
instinctive manner and independent of all reflection, carried so far that
it rises into a powerful passion. While then every man is to be regarded
as a specially determined and characterised phenomenon of will, and indeed
to a certain extent as a special Idea, in the case of the brutes this
individual character as a whole is wanting, because only the species has a
special significance. And the farther we go from man, the fainter becomes
the trace of this individual character, so that plants have no individual
qualities left, except such as may be fully explained from the favourable
or unfavourable external influences of soil, climate, and other accidents.
Finally, in the inorganic kingdom of nature all individuality disappears.
The crystal alone is to be regarded as to a certain extent individual. It
is a unity of the tendency in definite directions, fixed by
crystallisation, which makes the trace of this tendency permanent. It is
at the same time a cumulative repetition of its primitive form, bound into
unity by an idea, just as the tree is an aggregate of the single
germinating fibre which shows itself in every rib of the leaves, in every
leaf, in every branch; which repeats itself, and to some extent makes each
of these appear as a separate growth, nourishing itself from the greater
as a parasite, so that the tree, resembling the crystal, is a systematic
aggregate of small plants, although only the whole is the complete
expression of an individual Idea, _i.e._, of this particular grade of the
objectification of will. But the individuals of the same species of
crystal can have no other difference than such as is produced by external
accidents; indeed we can make at pleasure large or small crystals of every
species. The individual, however, as such, that is, with traces of an
individual character, does not exist further in unorganised nature. All
its phenomena are expressions of general forces of nature, _i.e._, of
those grades of the objectification of will which do not objectify
themselves (as is the case in organised nature), by means of the
difference of the individualities which collectively express the whole of
the Idea, but show themselves only in the species, and as a whole, without
any variation in each particular example of it. Time, space, multiplicity,
and existence conditioned by causes, do not belong to the will or to the
Idea (the grade of the objectification of will), but only to their
particular phenomena. Therefore such a force of nature as, for example,
gravity or electricity, must show itself as such in precisely the same way
in all its million phenomena, and only external circumstances can modify
these. This unity of its being in all its phenomena, this unchangeable
constancy of the appearance of these, whenever, under the guidance of
causality, the necessary conditions are present, is called a _law of
nature_. If such a law is once learned from experience, then the
phenomenon of that force of nature, the character of which is expressed
and laid down in it, may be accurately forecast and counted upon. But it
is just this conformity to law of the phenomena of the lower grades of the
objectification of will which gives them such a different aspect from the
phenomena of the same will in the higher, _i.e._, the more distinct,
grades of its objectification, in animals, and in men and their actions,
where the stronger or weaker influence of the individual character and the
susceptibility to motives which often remain hidden from the spectator,
because they lie in knowledge, has had the result that the identity of the
inner nature of the two kinds of phenomena has hitherto been entirely
overlooked.
If we start from the knowledge of the particular, and not from that of the
Idea, there is something astonishing, and sometimes even terrible, in the
absolute uniformity of the laws of nature. It might astonish us that
nature never once forgets her laws; that if, for example, it has once been
according to a law of nature that where certain materials are brought
together under given conditions, a chemical combination will take place,
or gas will be evolved, or they will go on fire; if these conditions are
fulfilled, whether by our interposition or entirely by chance (and in this
case the accuracy is the more astonishing because unexpected), to-day just
as well as a thousand years ago, the determined phenomenon will take place
at once and without delay. We are most vividly impressed with the
marvellousness of this fact in the case of rare phenomena, which only
occur under very complex circumstances, but which we are previously
informed will take place if these conditions are fulfilled. For example,
when we are told that if certain metals, when arranged alternately in
fluid with which an acid has been mixed, are brought into contact, silver
leaf brought between the extremities of this combination will suddenly be
consumed in a green flame; or that under certain conditions the hard
diamond turns into carbonic acid. It is the ghostly omnipresence of
natural forces that astonishes us in such cases, and we remark here what
in the case of phenomena which happen daily no longer strikes us, how the
connection between cause and effect is really as mysterious as that which
is imagined between a magic formula and a spirit that must appear when
invoked by it. On the other hand, if we have attained to the philosophical
knowledge that a force of nature is a definite grade of the
objectification of will, that is to say, a definite grade of that which we
recognise as our own inmost nature, and that this will, in itself, and
distinguished from its phenomena and their forms, lies outside time and
space, and that, therefore, the multiplicity, which is conditioned by time
and space, does not belong to it, nor directly to the grade of its
objectification, _i.e._, the Idea, but only to the phenomena of the Idea;
and if we remember that the law of causality has significance only in
relation to time and space, inasmuch as it determines the position of the
multitude of phenomena of the different Ideas in which the will reveals
itself, governing the order in which they must appear; if, I say, in this
knowledge the inner meaning of the great doctrine of Kant has been fully
grasped, the doctrine that time, space, and causality do not belong to the
thing-in-itself, but merely to the phenomenon, that they are only the
forms of our knowledge, not qualities of things in themselves; then we
shall understand that this astonishment at the conformity to law and
accurate operation of a force of nature, this astonishment at the complete
sameness of all its million phenomena and the infallibility of their
occurrence, is really like that of a child or a savage who looks for the
first time through a glass with many facets at a flower, and marvels at
the complete similarity of the innumerable flowers which he sees, and
counts the leaves of each of them separately.