| yellow | = 3/4 |
| orange | = 2/3 |
| red | = 1/2 |
| green | = 1/2 |
| blue | = 1/3 |
| violet | = 1/4 |
| black | = 0" |
Now I should like to know how anyone could do this by the way, without having first thought out my whole colour-theory, to which alone these numbers refer, and apart from which they are mere abstract numbers without meaning; above all, how anyone could do it who, like Professor Rosas, professes to be a follower of Newton's colour-theory, with which these numbers are in direct contradiction? Finally, I should like to know how it came, that during the thousands of years in which men have thought and written, no one but myself and Professor Rosas should ever have thought of using just these particular fractions to denote colours? For the words I have quoted above tell us, that he would have stated those fractions precisely as he has done, even had I not chanced to do it 'already' fourteen years before and thus needlessly anticipated his statement; they also tell us, that all that is required is 'to wish,' in order to do so. Now it is precisely in these numerical fractions that the secret of colours lies: by them alone can we rightly solve the mystery of their nature and of their difference from one another.—I should however be heartily glad, were plagiarism the worst kind of dishonesty that defiled German literature; there are others far more mischievous, which penetrate more deeply, and to which plagiarism bears the same proportion as picking pockets in a mild way to capital crime. I allude to that mean, despicable spirit, whose loadstar is personal interest, when it ought to be truth, and in which the voice of intention makes itself heard beneath the mask of insight. Double-dealing and time-serving are the order of the day. Tartuffe comedies are performed without rouge; nay, Capuchin sermons are preached in halls consecrated to Science; enlightenment, that once revered word, has become a term of opprobrium; the greatest thinkers of the past century, Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, are slandered—those heroes, ornaments and benefactors of mankind, whose fame, diffused throughout both hemispheres, can only be increased, if by anything, by the fact that wherever and whenever obscurantists show themselves, it is as their bitterest enemies—and with good reason. Literary coteries and associations are formed to deal out praise and blame, and spurious merit is then trumpeted forth and extolled, while sterling merit is slandered or, as Göthe says, "secreted, by means of an inviolable silence, in which sort of inquisitorial censure the Germans have attained great proficiency."[195] The motives and considerations however from which all this proceeds, are of too low a nature for me to care to enumerate them in detail. But what a difference there is between periodicals such as the "Edinburgh Review," in which gentlemen of independent means are induced to write by a genuine interest in the subjects treated, and which honourably upholds its noble motto taken from Publius Syrus: Judex damnnatur cum nocens absolvitur, and our mean-spirited, disingenuous, German literary journals, full of considerations and intentions, that are mostly compiled for the sake of pay by hired editors, and ought properly to have for their motto: Accedas socius laudes, lauderis, ut absens.[196] Now, after twenty years, do I understand what Göthe said to me at Berka in 1814. As I found him reading Madame de Staël's "De l'Allemagne," I remarked in course of conversation that she had given too exaggerated a description of German honesty and one that might mislead foreigners. He laughed and said: "Yes, to be sure, they will not secure their baggage behind and will have it cut off." He then added in a graver tone: "But one has to know German literature in order to realise the full extent of German dishonesty."—All well and good! But the most revolting kind of dishonesty in German literature is that of the time-servers, who pass themselves off for philosophers, while in reality they are obscurantists. The word 'time-serving' no more needs explanation than the thing needs a proof; for anyone who had the face to deny it would furnish strong evidence in support of my present argument. Kant taught, that man ought to use his fellow-man only as an end, never as a means: he did not think it necessary to say, that philosophy ought only to be dealt with as an end, never as a means. Time-serving may after all be excused under every garb, the cowl as well as the ermine, save only the philosopher's cloak (Tribonion); for he who has once assumed this, has sworn allegiance to truth, and from that moment every other consideration, no matter of what kind, becomes base treachery. Therefore it was that Socrates did not shun the hemlock, nor Bruno the stake, while 'for a piece of bread these men will transgress.' Are they too short-sighted to see posterity close at hand, with the history of philosophy at its side, recording two lines of bitter condemnation with unflinching hand and iron pen in its immortal pages? Or has this no sting for them?—Well to be sure, if it comes to the worst, 'après moi le déluge' may be pronounced; but as to 'après moi le mépris,' that is a more difficult matter. Therefore I fancy they will answer that austere judge as follows: "Ah, dear posterity and history of philosophy! you are quite wrong to take us in earnest; we are not philosophers at all, Heaven forbid! No, we are only professors of philosophy, mere servants of the state, mere philosophers in jest. You might as well drag puppet-knights in pasteboard armour into a real tournament." Then the judge will most likely see how matters stand, erase all their names, and confer upon them the beneficium perpetui silentii.
From this digression—to which I had been led away eighteen years ago, by the cant and time-serving I then witnessed, though they were not nearly as flourishing then as they are now—I return to that part of my doctrine which Dr. Brandis has confirmed, though he did not originate it, in order to add a few explanations with which I shall then connect some further corroborations it has since received from Physiology.
The three assumptions which are criticised by Kant in his Transcendental Dialectic under the names of Ideas of Reason, and have in consequence since been set aside in theoretical philosophy, had always stood in the way of a deeper insight into Nature, until that great thinker brought about a complete transformation in philosophy. That supposed Idea of Reason, the soul: that metaphysical being, in it whose absolute singleness knowing and willing were knit and blended together to eternal, inseparable unity, was an impediment of this sort for the subject-matter of this chapter. As long as it lasted, no philosophical Physiology was possible: the less so, as its correlate, real, purely passive Matter, had necessarily also to be assumed together with it, as the substance of the body.[197] It was this Idea of Reason, the soul, therefore, that caused the celebrated chemist and physiologist, George Ernest Stahl, at the beginning of the last century to miss the discovery of the truth he so nearly approached and would have quite reached, had he been able to put that which is alone metaphysical, the bare will—as yet without intellect—in the place of the anima rationalis. Under the influence of this Idea of Reason however, he could not teach anything but that it is this simple, rational soul which builds itself a body, all whose inner organic functions it directs and performs, yet has no knowledge or consciousness of all this, although knowledge is the fundamental destination and, as it were, the substance, of its being. There was something absurd in this doctrine which made it utterly untenable. It was superseded by Haller's Irritability and Sensibility, which, to be sure, are taken in a purely empirical sense, but, to make up for this, are also two qualitates occultæ, at which all explanation ceases. The movement of the heart and of the intestines was now attributed to Irritability. But the anima rationalis still remained in undiminished honour and dignity as a visitor at the house of the body.[198]—"Truth lies at the bottom of a well," said Democritus; and the centuries with a sigh, have repeated his words. But small wonder, if it gets a rap on the knuckles as soon as it tries to come out!
The fundamental truth of my doctrine, which places that doctrine in opposition with all others that have ever existed, is the complete separation between the will and the intellect, which all philosophers before me had looked upon as inseparable; or rather, I ought to say that they had regarded the will as conditioned by, nay, mostly even as a mere function of, the intellect, assumed by them to be the fundamental substance of our spiritual being. But this separation, this analysis into two heterogeneous elements, of the ego or soul, which had so long been deemed an indivisible unity, is, for philosophy, what the analysis of water has been for chemistry, though it may take time to be acknowledged. With me, that which is eternal and indestructible in man, therefore, that which constitutes his vital principle, is not the soul, but—if I may use a chemical term—its radical: and this is the will. The so-called soul is already a compound: it is the union of the will and the intellect (νούς). This intellect is the secondary element, the posterius of the organism and, as a mere cerebral function, is conditioned by the organism; whereas the will is what is primary, the prius of the organism, which is conditioned by it. For the will is that thing in itself, which only becomes apparent as an organic body in our representation (that mere function of the brain): it is only through the forms of knowledge (or cerebral function), that is, only in our representation—not apart from that representation, not immediately in our self-consciousness—that our body is given to each of us as a thing which has extension, limbs and organs. As the actions of our body are only acts of volition portraying themselves in representation, so likewise is their substratum, the shape of that body, in the main the portrait of the will: so that, in all the organic functions of our body, the will is just as much the agent as in its external actions. True Physiology, at its highest, shows the spiritual (the intellectual) in man to be the product of the physical in him, and no one has done this so thoroughly as Cabanis; but true Metaphysic teaches us, that the physical in man is itself mere product, or rather phenomenon, of a spiritual (the will); nay, that Matter itself is conditioned by representation, in which alone it exists. Perception and reflection will more and more find their explanation through the organism; but not the will, by which conversely the organism is explained, as I shall show in the following chapter. First of all therefore I place the will, as thing in itself and quite primary; secondly, its mere visibility, its objectification: i.e. the body; thirdly, the intellect, as a mere function of one part of that body. This part is itself the objectified will to know (the will to know having entered into representation), since the will needs knowledge to attain its own ends. Now the entire world as representation, together with the body itself therefore, inasmuch as it is a perceptible object, nay, Matter in general as existing only in representation,—all this, I say, is again conditioned by that function; for, duly considered, we cannot possibly conceive an objective world without a Subject, in whose consciousness it is present. Thus knowledge and matter (Subject and Object) exist only relatively one for the other and constitute phenomenon. The whole thing therefore, owing to the radical change made by me, stands in a different light from that in which it has hitherto been regarded.
As soon as it is directed outwardly and acts upon a recognised object, as soon therefore as it has passed through the medium of knowledge, we all recognise the will at once to be the active principle, and call it by its right name. Yet it is no less active in those inner processes which have preceded such outward actions as their conditions: in those, for instance, which create and maintain organic life and its substratum; and the circulation of the blood, secretion, digestion, &c. &c., are its work likewise. But just because the will was only recognised as the active principle in those cases in which it abandons the individual whence it proceeds, in order to direct itself towards the outer world—now presenting itself precisely for this end, as perception—knowledge has been taken for its essential condition, its sole element, nay, as the substance of which it consists: and hereby was perpetrated the greatest ὕστερον πρότερον that has ever been.
But before all things we must learn to distinguish will [Wille] (voluntas) from free-will [Willkühr] (arbitrium)[199] and to understand that the former can subsist without the latter; this however presupposes my whole philosophy. The will is called free-will when it is illumined by knowledge, therefore when the causes which move it are motives: that is, representations. Objectively speaking this means: when the influence from outside which causes the act, has a brain for its mediator. A motive may be defined as an external stimulus, whose action first of all causes an image to arise in the brain, through the medium of which the will carries out the effect proper—an outward action of the body. Now, in the human species however, the place of such an image as this may be taken by a conception drawn from former images of this kind by dropping their differences, which conception consequently is no longer perceptible, but merely denoted and fixed by words. As the action of motives accordingly does not depend upon contact, they can try their power on the will against each other: in other words, they permit a certain choice which, in animals, is limited to the narrow sphere of that which has perceptible existence for them; whereas, in man, its range comprises the vast extent of all that is thinkable: that is, of his conceptions. Accordingly we designate as voluntary those movements which are occasioned, not by causes in the narrowest sense of the word, as in inorganic bodies, nor even by mere stimuli, as in plants, but by motives.[200] These motives however presuppose an intellect as their mediator, through which causality here acts, without prejudice to its entire necessity in all other respects. Physiologically, the difference between stimulus and motive admits also of the following definition. The stimulus provokes immediate reaction, which proceeds from the very part on which the stimulus has acted; whereas the motive is a stimulus that has to go a roundabout way through the brain, where its action first causes an image to arise, which then, but not till then, provokes the consequent reaction, which is now called an act of volition, and voluntary. The distinction between voluntary and involuntary movement does not therefore concern what is essential and primary—for this is in both cases the will—but only what is secondary, the rousing of the will's manifestation: it has to do with the determination whether causes proper, stimuli or motives (i.e. causes having passed through the medium of knowledge) are the guidance under which that manifestation takes place. It is in human consciousness,—differing from that of animals by not only containing perceptible representations but also abstract conceptions independent of time-distinctions, which act simultaneously and collaterally, whereby deliberation, i.e. a conflict of motives, becomes possible—it is in human consciousness, I say, that free-will (arbitrium) in its narrowest sense first makes its appearance; and this I have called elective decision. It nevertheless merely consists in the strongest motive for a given individual character overcoming the others and thus determining the act, just as an impact is overcome by a stronger counter-impact, the result thus ensuing with precisely the same necessity as the movement of a stone that has been struck. That all great thinkers in all ages were decided and at one on this point, is just as certain, as that the multitude will never understand, never grasp, the important truth, that the work of our freedom must not be sought in our individual actions but in our very existence and nature itself. In my prize-essay on Freedom of the Will, I have shown this as clearly as possible. The liberum arbitrium indifferentiæ which is assumed to be the distinctive characteristic of movements proceeding from the will, is accordingly quite inadmissible: for it asserts that effects are possible without causes.
As soon therefore as we have got so far as to distinguish will [Wille] from free-will [Willkühr], and to consider the latter as a particular kind or particular phenomenon of the former, we shall find no difficulty in recognising the will, even in unconscious processes. Thus the assertion, that all bodily movements, even those which are purely vegetative and organic, proceed from the will, by no means implies that they are voluntary. For that would mean that they were occasioned by motives; but motives are representations, and their seat is the brain: only those parts of our body which communicate with the brain by means of the nerves, can be put in movement by the brain, consequently by motives, and this movement alone is what is called voluntary. The movement of the inner economy of the organism, on the contrary, is directed, as in plant-life, by stimuli; only as, on the one hand, the complex nature of the animal organism necessitated an outer sensorium for the apprehension of the outer world and the will's reaction on that outer world, so, on the other hand, did it necessitate a cerebrum abdominale, the sympathetic nervous system, in order to direct the will's reaction upon inner stimuli likewise. We may compare the former to a Home Ministry, the latter to a Foreign Office; but the will remains the omnipresent Autocrat.
The progress made in Physiology since Haller has placed beyond doubt, that not only those actions which are consciously performed (functiones animales), but even vital processes that take place quite unconsciously (functiones vitales et naturales), are directed throughout by the nervous system. Likewise that their only difference, as far as our consciousness of them is concerned, consists in the former being directed by nerves proceeding from the brain, the latter by nerves that do not directly communicate with that chief centre of the nervous system—mainly directed towards the outside—but with subordinate, minor centres, with the nerve-knots, the ganglia and their net-work, which preside as it were like vice-gerents over the various departments of the nervous system, directing those internal processes that follow upon internal stimuli, just as the brain directs the external actions that follow upon external motives, and thus receiving impressions from inside upon which they react correspondingly, just as the brain receives representations on the strength of which it forms resolutions; only each of these minor centres is confined to a narrower sphere of action. Upon this rests the vita propria of each system, in referring to which Van Helmont said that each organ has, as it were, its own ego. It accounts also for life continuing in parts which have been cut off the bodies of insects, reptiles, and other inferior animals, whose brain has no marked preponderance over the ganglia of single parts; and it likewise explains how many reptiles are able to live for weeks, nay even months, after their brain has been removed. Now, if our surest experience teaches us that the will, which is known to us in most immediate consciousness and in a totally different way from the outer world, is the real agent in actions attended by consciousness and directed by the chief centre of the nervous system; how can we help admitting that those other actions which, proceeding from that nervous system but obeying the direction of its subordinate centres, keep the vital processes constantly going, must also be manifestations of the will? Especially as we know perfectly well the cause because of which they are not, like the others, attended by consciousness: we know, that is to say, that all consciousness resides in the brain and therefore is limited to such parts as have nerves which communicate directly with the brain; and we know also that, even in these, consciousness ceases when those nerves are severed. By this the difference between all that is conscious and unconscious and together with it the difference between all that is voluntary and involuntary in the movements of the body is perfectly explained, and no reason remains for assuming two entirely different primary sources of movement: especially as principia præter necessitatem non sunt multiplicanda. All this is so obvious, that, on impartial reflection from this standpoint, it seems almost absurd to persist in making the body serve two masters by deriving its actions from two radically different origins and then ascribing on the one hand the movements of our arms and legs, of our eyes, lips, throat, tongue and lungs, of the facial and abdominal muscles, to the will; while on the other hand the action of the heart, the movements of the veins, the peristaltic movements of the intestines, the absorption by the intestinal villi and glands and all those movements which accompany secretion, are supposed to proceed from a totally different, ever mysterious principle of which we have no knowledge, and which is designated by names such as vitality, archeus, spiritus animales, vital energy, instinct, all of which mean no more than x.[201]
It is curious and instructive to see the trouble that excellent writer, Treviranus[202] takes, to find out in the lower animals, such as infusoria and zoophyta, which movements are voluntary, and which are what he calls automatic or physical, i.e. merely vital. He founds his inquiry upon the assumption that he has to do with two primarily different sources of movement; whereas in truth they all proceed from the will, and the whole difference consists in their being occasioned by stimuli or by motives, i.e. in their having a brain for their medium or not; and the stimulus may again be merely interior or exterior. In several animals of a higher order—crustaceans and even fishes—he finds that the voluntary and vital movements, for instance locomotion and respiration, entirely coincide: a clear proof that their origin and essence are identical. He says p. 188: "In the family of the actinia, star-fishes, sea-urchins, and holothuriæ (echinodermata pedata Cuv.), it is evident that the movement of the fluids depends upon the will of the animals and that it is a means of locomotion." Then again p. 288: "The gullet of mammals has at its upper end the pharynx, which expands and contracts by means of muscles resembling voluntary muscles in their formation, yet which do not obey the will." Here we see how the limits of the movements proceeding from the will and of those assumed to be foreign to it, merge into one another. Ibid., p. 293: "Thus movements having all the appearance of being voluntary, take place in the stomachs of ruminants. They do not however always stand in connection with the ruminating process only. Even the simpler human stomach and that of many animals only allows free passage to what is digestible through its lower orifice, and rejects what is indigestible by vomiting."