If, from all the foregoing remarks on the forces of nature and their phenomena, we have come to see clearly how far explanation from causes can go, and where it must stop, unless it is to lapse into the foolish attempt to reduce the content of all phenomena to their mere form, when ultimately nothing but form would remain, we shall now be able to determine in general what is to be demanded of all etiology. It has to search for the causes of all phenomena in nature, in other words, for the circumstances under which they always appear. Then it has to refer the many different phenomena having various forms in various circumstances, to what operates in every phenomenon and is presupposed with the cause, namely to original forces of nature. It must correctly distinguish whether a difference of the phenomenon is due to a difference of the force, or only to a difference in the circumstances in which the force manifests itself. With equal care it must guard against regarding as phenomenon of different forces what is merely manifestation of one and the same force under different circumstances, and conversely against regarding as manifestations of one force what belongs originally to different forces. Now this directly requires the power of judgement; hence it is that so few are capable of broadening our insight into physics, but all are able to enlarge experience. Indolence and ignorance make us disposed to appeal too soon to original forces. This is seen with an exaggeration resembling irony in the entities and quiddities of the scholastics. Nothing is farther from my desire than to favour their reintroduction. We are as little permitted to appeal to the objectification of the will, instead of giving a physical explanation, as to appeal to the creative power of God. For physics demands causes, but the will is never a cause. Its relation to the phenomenon is certainly not in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason; but that which in itself is will, exists on the other hand as representation, that is to say, is phenomenon. As such, it follows the laws that constitute the form of the phenomenon. For example, although every movement is always phenomenon of will, it must nevertheless have a cause from which it is to be explained with reference to a definite time and place, in other words, not in general according to its inner nature, but as a particular phenomenon. In the case of the stone, this cause is mechanical; in the case of a man’s movement, it is a motive; but it can never be absent. On the other hand, the universal, the common reality, of all phenomena of a definite kind, that which must be presupposed if explanation from the cause is to have sense or meaning, is the universal force of nature, which in physics must remain a qualitas occulta, just because etiological explanation here ends and the metaphysical begins. But the chain of causes and effects is never interrupted by an original force to which appeal has to be made. It does not run back to this force, as if it were the first link, but the nearest link of the chain, as well as the remotest, presupposes the original force, and could otherwise explain nothing. A series of causes and effects can be the phenomenon of the most various kinds of forces; the successive entry of such forces into visibility is conducted through the series, as I have illustrated above by the example of a metal machine. But the variety of these original forces, that cannot be derived from one another, in no way interrupts the unity of that chain of causes, and the connexion between all its links. The etiology and the philosophy of nature never interfere with each other; on the contrary, they go hand in hand, considering the same object from different points of view. Etiology gives an account of the causes which necessarily produce the particular phenomenon to be explained. It shows, as the basis of all its explanations, the universal forces that are active in all these causes and effects. It accurately determines these forces, their number, their differences, and then all the effects in which each force appears differently according to the difference of the circumstances, always in keeping with its own peculiar character. It discloses this character in accordance with an infallible rule that is called a law of nature. As soon as physics has achieved all this completely in every respect, it has attained perfection. In inorganic nature there is then no longer any force unknown, and there is no longer any effect which has not been shown to be the phenomenon of one of those forces under definite circumstances according to a law of nature. However, a law of nature remains merely the observed rule by which nature proceeds every time, as soon as certain definite circumstances arise. Therefore we can certainly define a law of nature as a fact generally expressed, un fait généralisé. Accordingly, a complete statement of all the laws of nature would be only a complete catalogue of facts. The consideration of the whole of nature is then completed by morphology, which enumerates, compares, and arranges all the enduring forms of organic nature. It has little to say about the cause of the appearance of individual beings, for this in the case of all is procreation, the theory of which is a separate matter; and in rare cases it is generario aequivoca. But to this last belongs, strictly speaking, the way in which all the lower grades of the will’s objectivity, that is, physical and chemical phenomena, appear in detail, and it is precisely the task of etiology to state the conditions for the appearance of these. On the other hand, philosophy everywhere, and hence in nature also, considers the universal alone. Here the original forces themselves are its object, and it recognizes in them the different grades of the objectification of the will that is the inner nature, the in-itself, of this world. When it regards the world apart from will, it declares it to be the mere representation of the subject. But if etiology, instead of paving the way for philosophy and supplying its doctrines with application by examples, imagines that its aim is rather to deny all original forces, except perhaps one, the most universal, e.g., impenetrability, which it imagines that it thoroughly understands, and to which it consequently tries to refer by force all the others, then it withdraws from its own foundation, and can only give us error instead of truth. The content of nature is now supplanted by the form; everything is ascribed to the circumstances working from outside, and nothing to the inner nature of things. If we could actually succeed in this way, then, as we have said already, an arithmetical sum would ultimately solve the riddle of the world. But this path is followed if, as already mentioned, it is thought that all physiological effects ought to be referred to form and combination, thus possibly to electricity, this again to chemical force, and chemical force to mechanism. The mistake of Descartes, for instance, and of all the Atomists, was of this last description. They referred the movement of heavenly bodies to the impact of a fluid, and the qualities to the connexion and form of the atoms. They endeavoured to explain all the phenomena of nature as mere phenomena of impenetrability and cohesion. Although this has been given up, the same thing is done in our day by the electrical, chemical, and mechanical physiologists who obstinately try to explain the whole of life and all the functions of the organism from the “form and combination” of its component parts. In Meckel’s Archiv für Physiologie, 1820, Vol. V, p. 185, we still find it stated that the aim of physiological explanation is the reduction of organic life to the universal forces considered by physics. In his Philosophie zoologique (Vol. II, chap. 3) Lamarck also declares life to be a mere effect of heat and electricity: le calorique et la matière électrique suffisent parfaitement pour composer ensemble cette cause essentielle de la vie (p. 16).67 Accordingly, heat and electricity would really be the thing-in-itself, and the animal and plant worlds its phenomenon. The absurdity of this opinion stands out glaringly on pages 306 seqq. of that work. It is well known that all those views, so often exploded, have again appeared with renewed audacity in recent times. If we examine the matter closely, then ultimately at the basis of these views is the presupposition that the organism is only an aggregate of phenomena of physical, chemical, and mechanical forces that have come together in it by chance, and have brought about the organism as a freak of nature without further significance. Accordingly, the organism of an animal or of a human being would be, philosophically considered, not the exhibition of a particular Idea, in other words, not itself immediate objectivity of the will at a definite higher grade, but there would appear in it only those Ideas that objectify the will in electricity, chemistry, and mechanism. Hence the organism would be just as fortuitously put together from the chance meeting of these forces as are the forms of men and animals in clouds or stalactites; and hence in itself it would be no more interesting. However, we shall see immediately to what extent this application of physical and chemical methods of explanation to the organism may still, within certain limits, be permissible and useful, for I shall explain that the vital force certainly avails itself of and uses the forces of inorganic nature. Yet these forces in no way constitute the vital force, any more than a hammer and an anvil constitute a blacksmith. Therefore, not even the simplest plant life can ever be explained from them, say from capillary attraction and endosmosis, much less animal life. The following observations will prepare for us the way to this somewhat difficult discussion.
From all that has been said, it follows that it is indeed a mistake of natural science for it to try to refer the higher grades of the will’s objectivity to lower ones. Failing to recognize and denying original and self-existing natural forces is just as unsound as is the groundless assumption of characteristic forces, where what occurs is only a particular kind of manifestation of something already known. Therefore Kant is right when he says that it is absurd to hope for the Newton of a blade of grass, in other words, for the man who would reduce the blade of grass to phenomena of physical and chemical forces, of which it would be a chance concretion, and so a mere freak of nature. In such a freak no special and characteristic Idea would appear, that is to say, the will would not directly reveal itself in it at a higher and special grade, but only as in the phenomena of inorganic nature, and by chance in this form. The scholastics, who would certainly not have allowed such things, would have said quite rightly that it would be a complete denial of the forma substantialis, and a degrading of it to the mere forma accidentalis. For Aristotle’s forma substantialis denotes exactly what I call the degree of the will’s objectification in a thing. On the other hand, it must not be overlooked that in all Ideas, that is to say, in all the forces of inorganic and in all the forms of organic nature, it is one and the same will that reveals itself, i.e., enters the form of representation, enters objectivity. Therefore, its unity must make itself known also through an inner relationship between all its phenomena. Now this reveals itself at the higher grades of the will’s objectivity, where the whole phenomenon is more distinct, and thus in the plant and animal kingdoms, through the universally prevailing analogy of all forms, namely the fundamental type recurring in all phenomena. This has therefore become the guiding principle of the admirable zoological systems begun by the French in the nineteenth century, and is most completely established in comparative anatomy as l’unité de plan, l’uniformité de l’élément anatomique. 68 To discover this fundamental type has been the main concern, or certainly at any rate the most laudable endeavour, of the natural philosophers of Schelling’s school. In this respect they have much merit, although in many cases their hunting for analogies in nature degenerates into mere facetiousness. However, they have rightly shown the universal relationship and family likeness even in the Ideas of inorganic nature, for instance between electricity and magnetism, the identity of which was established later; between chemical attraction and gravitation, and so on. They drew special attention to the fact that polarity, that is to say, the sundering of a force into two qualitatively different and opposite activities striving for reunion, a sundering which also frequently reveals itself spatially by a dispersion in opposite directions, is a fundamental type of almost all the phenomena of nature, from the magnet and the crystal up to man. Yet in China this knowledge has been current since the earliest times in the doctrine of the contrast of Yin and Yang. Indeed, since all things in the world are the objectivity of one and the same will, and consequently identical according to their inner nature, there must be between them that unmistakable analogy, and in everything less perfect there must be seen the trace, outline, and plan of the next more perfect thing. Moreover, since all these forms belong only to the world as representation, it can even be assumed that, in the most universal forms of the representation, in this peculiar framework of the appearing phenomenal world, and thus in space and time, it is already possible to discover and establish the fundamental type, outline, and plan of all that fills the forms. It seems to have been an obscure discernment of this that was the origin of the Kabbala and of all the mathematical philosophy of the Pythagoreans, as well as of the Chinese in the I Ching. Also in the school of Schelling we find, among their many different efforts to bring to light the analogy between all the phenomena of nature, many attempts, although unfortunate ones, to derive laws of nature from the mere laws of space and time. However, we cannot know how far the mind of a genius will one day realize both endeavours.
Now the difference between phenomenon and thing-in-itself is never to be lost sight of, and therefore the identity of the will objectified in all Ideas (because it has definite grades of its objectivity) can never be distorted into an identity of the particular Ideas themselves in which the will appears; thus, for example, chemical or electrical attraction can never be reduced to attraction through gravitation, although their inner analogy is known, and the former can be regarded, so to speak, as higher powers of the latter. Just as little does the inner analogy in the structure of all animals justify us in mixing and identifying the species, and in declaring the more perfect to be variations of the less perfect. Finally, although the physiological functions are likewise never to be reduced to chemical or physical processes, yet, in justification of this method of procedure, we can, within certain limits, assume the following as highly probable.
If several of the phenomena of will at the lower grades of its objectification, that is, in inorganic nature, come into conflict with one another, because each under the guidance of causality wants to take possession of the existing matter, there arises from this conflict the phenomenon of a higher Idea. This higher Idea subdues all the less perfect phenomena previously existing, yet in such a way that it allows their essential nature to continue in a subordinate manner, since it takes up into itself an analogue of them. This process is intelligible only from the identity of the will apparent in all the Ideas, and from its striving for higher and higher objectification. Thus, for example, we see in the solidifying of bones an unmistakable analogy of crystallization, which originally controlled the lime, although ossification is never to be reduced to crystallization. This analogy appears more feebly in flesh becoming firm. The combination of humours in the animal body and secretion are also an analogue of chemical combination and separation. Indeed, the laws of chemistry continue to operate here, but are subordinated, much modified, and subdued by a higher Idea. Hence mere chemical forces outside the organism will never furnish such humours, but
Encheiresin naturae, this Chemistry names,
Nor knows how herself she banters and blames!
Goethe [Faust, Part I].
The more perfect Idea, resulting from such a victory over several lower Ideas or objectifications of the will, gains an entirely new character just by taking up into itself from each of the subdued Ideas an analogue of higher power. The will is objectified in a new and more distinct way. There arise originally through generatio aequivoca, subsequently through assimilation to the existing germ, organic humour, plant, animal, man. Thus from the contest of lower phenomena the higher one arises, swallowing up all of them, but also realizing in the higher degree the tendency of them all. Accordingly, the law Serpens, nisi serpentem comederit, non fit draco69 already applies here.
I wish it had been possible for me by clearness of explanation to dispel the obscurity that clings to the subject-matter of these thoughts. But I see quite well that the reader’s own observation must help me a great deal, if I am not to remain uncomprehended or misunderstood. According to the view I have put forth, we shall certainly find in the organism traces of chemical and physical modes of operation, but we shall never explain the organism from these, because it is by no means a phenomenon brought about by the united operation of such forces, and therefore by accident, but a higher Idea that has subdued these lower ones through overwhelming assimilation. For the one will, that objectifies itself in all Ideas, strives for the highest possible objectification, and in this case gives up the low grades of its phenomenon after a conflict, in order to appear in a higher grade that is so much the more powerful. No victory without struggle; since the higher Idea or objectification of will can appear only by subduing the lower Ideas, it endures the opposition of these. Although these lower Ideas have been brought into subjection, they still constantly strive to reach an independent and complete expression of their inner nature. The magnet that has lifted a piece of iron keeps up a perpetual struggle with gravitation which, as the lowest objectification of the will, has a more original right to the matter of that iron. In this constant struggle, the magnet even grows stronger, since the resistance stimulates it, so to speak, to greater exertion. In the same way, every phenomenon of the will, and even that which manifests itself in the human organism, keeps up a permanent struggle against the many chemical and physical forces that, as lower Ideas, have a prior right to that matter. Thus a man’s arm falls which he held upraised for a while by overcoming gravity. Hence the comfortable feeling of health which expresses the victory of the Idea of the organism, conscious of itself, over the physical and chemical laws which originally controlled the humours of the body. Yet this comfortable feeling is so often interrupted, and in fact is always accompanied by a greater or lesser amount of discomfort, resulting from the resistance of those forces; through such discomfort the vegetative part of our life is constantly associated with a slight pain. Thus digestion depresses all the animal functions, because it claims the whole vital force for overcoming by assimilation the chemical forces of nature. Hence also generally the burden of physical life, the necessity of sleep, and ultimately of death; for at last, favoured by circumstances, those subdued forces of nature win back from the organism, wearied even by constant victory, the matter snatched from them, and attain to the unimpeded expression of their being. It can therefore be said that every organism represents the Idea of which it is the image or copy, only after deduction of that part of its force which is expended in overcoming the lower Ideas that strive with it for the matter. This seems to have been present in the mind of Jacob Boehme, when he says somewhere that all the bodies of men and animals, and even all plants, are really half dead. Now, according as the organism succeeds more or less in subduing those natural forces that express the lower grades of the will’s objectivity, it becomes the more or less perfect expression of its Idea, in other words, it stands nearer to or farther from the Ideal to which beauty in its species belongs.
Thus everywhere in nature we see contest, struggle, and the fluctuation of victory, and later on we shall recognize in this more distinctly that variance with itself essential to the will. Every grade of the will’s objectification fights for the matter, the space, and the time of another. Persistent matter must constantly change the form, since, under the guidance of causality, mechanical, physical, chemical, and organic phenomena, eagerly striving to appear, snatch the matter from one another, for each wishes to reveal its own Idea. This contest can be followed through the whole of nature; indeed only through it does nature exist: εἰ γὰρ µὴ ἦν τὸ νεĩϰος ἐν τοῖς πράγμασιν, ἓν ἄν ἦν ἃπαντα, ὥς ϕησίν ’Eμπεδoxλῆς. (nam si non inesset in rebus contentio, unum omnia essent, ut ait Empedocles. Aristotle, Metaphysica, ii, 5 [4]) .70 Yet this strife itself is only the revelation of that variance with itself that is essential to the will. This universal conflict is to be seen most clearly in the animal kingdom. Animals have the vegetable kingdom for their nourishment, and within the animal kingdom again every animal is the prey and food of some other. This means that the matter in which an animal’s Idea manifests itself must stand aside for the manifestation of another Idea, since every animal can maintain its own existence only by the incessant elimination of another’s. Thus the will-to-live generally feasts on itself, and is in different forms its own nourishment, till finally the human race, because it subdues all the others, regards nature as manufactured for its own use. Yet, as will be seen in the fourth book, this same human race reveals in itself with terrible clearness that conflict, that variance of the will with itself, and we get homo homini lupus.71 However, we shall again recognize the same contest, the same subjugation, just as well at the low grades of the will’s objectivity. Many insects (especially the ichneumon flies) lay their eggs on the skin, and even in the body, of the larvae of other insects, whose slow destruction is the first task of the newly hatched brood. The young hydra, growing out of the old one as a branch, and later separating itself therefrom, fights while it is still firmly attached to the old one for the prey that offers itself, so that the one tears it out of the mouth of the other (Trembley, Polypod. II, p. 110, and III, p. 165 ) . But the most glaring example of this kind is afforded by the bulldog-ant of Australia, for when it is cut in two, a battle begins between the head and the tail. The head attacks the tail with its teeth, and the tail defends itself bravely by stinging the head. The contest usually lasts for half an hour, until they die or are dragged away by other ants. This takes place every time. (From a letter by Howitt in the W. Journal, reprinted in Galignani’s Messenger, 17 November 1855.) On the banks of the Missouri one sometimes sees a mighty oak with its trunk and all its branches so entwined, fettered, and interlaced by a gigantic wild vine, that it must wither as if choked. The same thing shows itself even at the lowest grades, for example where, through organic assimilation, water and carbon are converted into the sap of plants, plants or bread into blood; and so wherever, with the restriction of chemical forces to a subordinate mode of operation, animal secretion takes place. It also occurs in inorganic nature, when, for example, crystals in process of formation meet, cross, and disturb one another, so that they are unable to show the purely crystalline form; for almost every druse is the copy of such a conflict of the will at that low grade of its objectification. Or again, when a magnet forces magnetism on iron, in order to manifest its Idea in it; or when galvanism overcomes elective affinities, decomposes the closest combinations, and so entirely suspends the laws of chemistry that the acid of a salt, decomposed at the negative pole, must pass to the positive pole without combining with the alkalis through which it passes on its way, or without being able to turn red the litmus paper it touches. On a large scale, it shows itself in the relation between central body and planet; for although the planet is decidedly dependent, it always resists, just like the chemical forces in the organism. From this there results the constant tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces which keeps the globe in motion, and is itself an expression of that universal conflict which is essential to the phenomenon of the will, and which we are now considering. For, as every body must be regarded as the phenomenon of a will, which will necessarily manifests itself as a striving, the original condition or state of every heavenly body formed into a globe cannot be rest, but motion, a striving forward into endless space, without rest or aim. Neither the law of inertia nor that of causality is opposed to this. According to the law of inertia, matter as such is indifferent to rest and motion, and so its original condition can just as well be motion as rest. Therefore, if we first find it in motion, we are just as little entitled to assume that a state of rest preceded this, and to ask about the cause of the appearance of the motion, as conversely, if we found it at rest, we should be to assume a motion preceding this, and ask about the cause of its elimination. Therefore we cannot seek a first impulse for the centrifugal force, but in the case of the planets it is, according to the hypothesis of Kant and Laplace, the residue of the original rotation of the central body from which the planets were separated as it contracted. But to this central body itself motion is essential; it still always rotates, and at the same time sweeps along in endless space; or possibly it circulates round a greater central body invisible to us. This view agrees entirely with the conjecture of astronomers about a central sun, as well as with the observed advance of our whole solar system, and perhaps of the whole cluster of stars to which our sun belongs. From this we are led finally to infer a general advance of all fixed stars together with the central sun. Naturally this loses all meaning in endless space (for motion in absolute space does not differ from rest), and, as directly through striving and aimless flight, it thus becomes the expression of that nothingness, that lack of an ultimate purpose or object, which at the close of this book we shall have to attribute to the striving of the will in all its phenomena. Thus again, endless space and endless time must be the most universal and essential forms of the collective phenomenon of the will, which exists for the expression of its whole being. Finally, we can once more recognize the conflict we are considering of all the phenomena of the will with one another even in mere matter considered as such, namely in so far as the essential nature of its phenomenon is correctly expressed by Kant as repulsive and attractive force. Thus matter has its existence only in a struggle of conflicting forces. If we abstract from all chemical difference of matter, or if we think back so far in the chain of causes and effects that no chemical difference as yet exists, we are then left with mere matter, the world rounded into a globe. The life of this, i.e., objectification of the will, is now formed by the conflict between the force of attraction and that of repulsion. The former as gravitation presses from all sides towards the centre; the latter as impenetrability resists the former, either as rigidity or as elasticity. This constant pressure and resistance can be regarded as the objectivity of the will at the very lowest grade, and even there it expresses its character.
Here we see at the very lowest grade the will manifesting itself as a blind impulse, an obscure, dull urge, remote from all direct knowableness. It is the simplest and feeblest mode of its objectification. But it appears as such a blind urge and as a striving devoid of knowledge in the whole of inorganic nature, in all the original forces. It is the business of physics and chemistry to look for these forces and to become acquainted with their laws. Each of these forces manifests itself to us in millions of exactly similar and regular phenomena, showing no trace of individual character, but is merely multiplied through time and space, i.e., through the principium individuationis, just as a picture is multiplied through the facets of a glass.
Objectifying itself more distinctly from grade to grade, yet still completely without knowledge as an obscure driving force, the will acts in the plant kingdom. Here not causes proper, but stimuli, are the bond ot its phenomena. Finally, it also acts in the vegetative part of the animal phenomenon, in the production and formation of every animal, and in the maintenance of its interior economy, where mere stimuli still always determine its phenomenon. The higher and higher grades of the will’s objectivity lead ultimately to the point where the individual expressing the Idea could no longer obtain its food for assimilation through mere movement consequent on stimuli. Such a stimulus must be waited for; but here the food is of a kind that is more specially determined, and with the ever-growing multiplicity of the phenomena, the crowd and confusion have become so great that they disturb one another, and the chance event from which the individual moved by mere stimuli has to expect its food would be too unfavourable. The food must therefore be sought and selected, from the point where the animal has delivered itself from the egg or the womb in which it vegetated without knowledge. Thus movement consequent on motives and, because of this, knowledge, here become necessary; and hence knowledge enters as an expedient, μηχανή, required at this stage of the will’s objectification for the preservation of the individual and the propagation of the species. It appears represented by the brain or a larger ganglion, just as every other effort or determination of the self-objectifying will is represented by an organ, in other words, is manifested for the representation as an organ.72 But with this expedient, with this μηχανή, the world as representation now stands out at one stroke with all its forms, object and subject, time, space, plurality, and causality. The world now shows its second side; hitherto mere will, it is now at the same time representation, object of the knowing subject. The will, which hitherto followed its tendency in the dark with extreme certainty and infallibility, has at this stage kindled a light for itself. This was a means that became necessary for getting rid of the disadvantage which would result from the throng and the complicated nature of its phenomena, and would accrue precisely to the most perfect of them. The hitherto infallible certainty and regularity with which the will worked in inorganic and merely vegetative nature, rested on the fact that it alone in its original inner being was active as blind urge, as will, without assistance, but also without interruption, from a second and entirely different world, namely the world as representation. Indeed, such a world is only the copy of the will’s own inner being, but yet it is of quite a different nature, and now intervenes in the sequence of phenomena of the will. Thus their infallible certainty now comes to an end. Animals already are exposed to illusion, to deception; they, however, have merely representations from perception, no concepts, no reflection; they are therefore bound to the present, and cannot take the future into consideration. It appears as if this knowledge without reason was not in all cases sufficient for its purpose, and occasionally needed some assistance, as it were. For we have the very remarkable phenomenon that the blind working of the will and that enlightened by knowledge encroach in a most astonishing way on each other’s spheres in two kinds of phenomena. In the one case we find, amid those actions of animals that are guided by knowledge of perception and its motives, one action that is carried out without these, and hence with the necessity of the blindly operating will. I refer to the mechanical instincts; these, not guided by any motive or knowledge, have the appearance of bringing about their operations from abstract rational motives. The other case, the opposite of this, is that where, on the contrary, the light of knowledge penetrates into the workshop of the blindly operating will, and illuminates the vegetative functions of the human organism. I refer to magnetic clairvoyance. Finally, where the will has attained to the highest degree of its objectification, knowledge of the understanding, which has dawned on the animals, for which the senses supply the data, and out of which arises mere perception or intuition bound to the present, no longer suffices. That complicated, many-sided, flexible being, man, who is extremely needy and exposed to innumerable shocks and injuries, had to be illuminated by a twofold knowledge in order to be able to exist. A higher power of knowledge of perception, so to speak, had to be added to this, a reflection of that knowledge of perception, namely reason as the faculty for forming abstract concepts. With this there came into existence thoughtfulness, surveying the future and the past, and, as a consequence thereof, deliberation, care, ability for premeditated action independent of the present, and finally the fully distinct consciousness of the decisions of one’s own will as such. Now with the mere knowledge of perception there arises the possibility of illusion and deception, whereby the previous infallibility of the will acting without knowledge is abolished. Thus mechanical and other instincts, as manifestations of the will-without-knowledge, have to come to its aid, guided in the midst of manifestations from knowledge. Then with the appearance of reason, this certainty and infallibility of the will’s manifestations (appearing at the other extreme in inorganic nature as strict conformity to law) are almost entirely lost. Instinct withdraws altogether; deliberation, now supposed to take the place of everything, begets (as was explained in the first book) irresolution and uncertainty. Error becomes possible, and in many cases obstructs the adequate objectification of the will through actions. For although the will has already taken in the character its definite and unalterable course, in accordance with which the willing itself invariably occurs on the occasion of motives, error can still falsify the manifestations of the will, since delusive motives, resembling the real ones, slip in and abolish these.73 For example, when superstition foists on to a man imaginary motives that compel him to a course of action directly opposed to the way in which his will would otherwise manifest itself in the existing circumstances. Agamemnon slays his daughter; a miser dispenses alms out of pure egoism, in the hope of one day being repaid a hundredfold, and so on.
Thus knowledge in general, rational knowledge as well as mere knowledge from perception, proceeds originally from the will itself, belongs to the inner being of the higher grades of the will’s objectifications as a mere μηχανή, a means for preserving the individual and the species, just like any organ of the body. Therefore, destined originally to serve the will for the achievement of its aims, knowledge remains almost throughout entirely subordinate to its service; this is the case with all animals and almost all men. However, we shall see in the third book how, in the case of individual persons, knowledge can withdraw from this subjection, throw off its yoke, and, free from all the aims of the will, exist purely for itself, simply as a clear mirror of the world; and this is the source of art. Finally, in the fourth book we shall see how, if this kind of knowledge reacts on the will, it can bring about the will’s self-elimination, in other words, resignation. This is the ultimate goal, and indeed the innermost nature of all virtue and holiness, and is salvation from the world.