The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 3 of 3)

by Arthur Schopenhauer

Chapter IV.

In the fourth chapter Schopenhauer deals with the first class of objects for the subject and the form of the principle of sufficient reason which obtains in it. This first class is that of those complete ideas of perception which form part of our experience, and which are referable to some sensation of our bodies. These ideas are capable of being perceived only under the forms of Space and Time. If time were the only form there would be no coexistence, and therefore no persistence. [pg 481] If space were their only form there would be no succession, and therefore no change. Time may therefore be defined as the possibility of mutually exclusive conditions of the same thing. But the union of these two forms of existence is the essential condition of reality, and this union is the work of the understanding (see “World as Will and Idea,” vol. i. § 4, and the table of predicables annexed to vol. ii., chap. 4). In this class of objects for the subject the principle of sufficient reason appears as the law of causality or the principle of sufficient reason of becoming, and it is through it that all objects which present themselves in perception are bound together through the changes of their states. When a new state of one or more objects makes its appearance it must have been preceded by another on which it regularly follows. This is causal sequence, and the first state is the cause, the second the effect. The law has thus to do exclusively with the changes of objects of external experience, and not with things themselves, a circumstance which is fatal to the validity of the cosmological proof of the existence of God. It follows also from the essential connection of causality with succession that the notion of reciprocity, with its contemporaneous existence of cause and effect, is a delusion. The chain of causes and effects does not affect either matter, which is that in which all changes take place, or the original forces of nature, through which causation becomes possible, and which exist apart from all change, and in this sense out of time, but which yet are everywhere present (e.g., chemical forces, see supra, vol. i., § 26). In nature causation assumes three different forms; that of cause in the narrow sense, of stimulus, and of motive, on which differences depend the true distinctions between inorganic bodies, plants, and animals. It is only of cause properly so called that Newton's third law of the equality of action and reaction is true, and only here do we find the degree of the effect proportionate to that of the cause. The absence of this feature characterises stimulation. Motive demands knowledge as its condition, and intelligence is therefore the true characteristic of the animal. The three forms are in principle identical, the difference being due to the degrees of receptivity in existence. What is called freedom [pg 482] of the will is therefore an absurdity, as is also Kant's “Practical Reason.” These results are followed by an examination of the nature of vision, which Schopenhauer sums up in these words: “I have examined all these visual processes in detail in order to show that the understanding is active in all of them, the understanding which, by apprehending every change as an effect and referring it to its cause, creates on the basis of the a priori and fundamental intuitions or perceptions of space and time, the objective world, that phenomenon of the brain, for which the sensations of the senses afford only certain data. And this task the understanding accomplishes only through its proper form, the law of causality, and accomplishes it directly without the aid of reflection, that is, of abstract knowledge through concepts and words, which are the material of secondary knowledge, of thought, thus of the Reason.” “What understanding knows aright is reality; what reason knows aright is truth, i.e., a judgment which has a ground; the opposite of the former being illusion (what is falsely perceived), of the latter error (what is falsely thought).” All understanding is an immediate apprehension of the causal relation, and this is the sole function of understanding, and not the complicated working of the twelve Kantian Categories, the theory of which is a mistaken one. A consequence of this conclusion is, that arithmetical processes do not belong to the understanding, concerned as they are with abstract conceptions. But it must not be forgotten that between volition and the apparently consequential action of the body there is no causal relation, for they are the same thing perceived in two different ways. Section 23 contains a detailed refutation of Kant's proof of the a priori nature of the causal relation in the “Second Analogy of Experience” of the Critique of Pure Reason, the gist of the objection being that the so-called subjective succession is as much objective in reality as what is called objective by Kant: “Phenomena may well follow one another, without following from one another.”