The will is the original. It has created the world, but not through the medium of an intellect either outside or inside of the world, for we know of the intellect only through the mediation of the animal world, the very last in creation. The will itself, the unintentional will which is discovered in everything, is the creator of the world. The animals, therefore, are organized in accordance with their mode of living, and their mode of living is not shaped in conformity with their organs; the structure of any animal is the result of its will to be what it is. Nature, which never lies, tells us the same in its naïve way; it lets any being just kindle the first spark of its life on one of his equals, and then lets it finish itself before our eyes. The form and the movement it takes from its own self, the substance from outside. This is called growth and development. Thus even empirically do all beings stand before us as their own work; but the language of nature is too simple, and therefore but few understand it.
Cognition, since all motives are dependent on it, is the essential characteristic of the animal kingdom. When animal life ceases, cognition ceases also; and arrived at that point, we can comprehend the medium by which the influences from the external world on the movements of other beings are effected only by analogy, whilst the will, which we have recognized as the basis and as the very kernel of all beings, always and everywhere remains the same. On the low stage of the vegetable world, and of the vegetative life in the animal organizations, it is irritation, and in the inorganic world it is the mechanical relation in general which appears as the substitute or as the analogue of the intellect. We cannot say that the plants perceive the light and the sun, but we see that they are differently affected by the presence or absence of the sun, and that they turn themselves towards it; and though in fact that movement mostly coincides with their growth, like the rotation of the moon with its revolution, that movement nevertheless exists, and the direction of the growth of a plant is just in the same way determined and systematically modified as an action is by a motive. Inasmuch, therefore, as a plant has its wants, though not of the kind which require a sensorium or an intellect, something analogous must take their place to enable the will to seize at least a supply offered to it, if not to go in quest of it. This is the susceptibility for irritation, which differs from the intellect, in that the motive and subsequent act of volition are clearly separated from each other, and the clearer, the more perfect the intellect is; whilst at the mere susceptibility for an irritation, the feeling of the irritation and the resulting volition can no longer be discriminated. In the inorganic world, finally, even the susceptibility for irritation, whose analogy with the intellect cannot be mistaken, ceases, and there remains nothing but the varied reaction of the bodies against the various influences. This reaction is the substitute for the intellect. Whenever the reaction of a body differs from another, the influence also must be different, creating a different affection, which even in its dullness yet shows a remote analogy with the intellect. If, for instance, the water in an embankment finds an issue and eagerly precipitates itself through it, it certainly does not perceive the break, just as the acid does not perceive the alkali, for which it leaves the metal; yet we must confess that what in all these bodies has effected such sudden changes, has a certain resemblance with that which moves ourselves whenever we act in consequence of an unexpected motive. We therefore see that the intellect appears as the medium of our motives, that is, as the medium of causality in regard to intellectual beings, as that which receives the change from the external world, and which must be followed by a change in ourselves, as the mediator between both. On this narrow line, balances the whole world as representation, i. e. that whole extensive world in space and time, which as such cannot be anywhere else but in our brain, just as dreams; for the periods of their duration stand on the very same basis. Whatever to the animals and to man is given by his intellect as a medium of the motives, the same is given to the plants by their susceptibility for irritation, and to inorganic bodies by their reaction on the various causes, which in fact only differ in respect to the degree of volition; for, just in consequence of the fact, that in proportion to their wants the susceptibility for external impressions was raised to such a degree in the animals that a brain and a system of nerves had to develop itself, did consciousness, moreover, originate as a function of this brain, and in this consciousness the whole objective world, whose forms (time, space and causality) are the rules for the exercise of this function. We therefore discover that the intellect is calculated only for the subjective, merely to be a servant of the will, appearing only “per accidens” as a condition of animal life, where motives take the place of irritation. The picture of the external world, which at this stage enters into the forms of time and space, is but the background on which motives represent themselves as ends; it is also the condition of the connection of the external objects in regard to space and causality, but yet is nothing else but the mediation and the tie between the motive and the will. What a leap would it be to take this picture to be the true, ultimate essence of things,—this image of the world, which originates accidentally in the intellect as a function of animal brains, whereby the means to their ends are shown them, and their ways on this planet cleared up! What a temerity to take this image and the connection of its parts to be the absolute rule of the world, the relations of the things in themselves—and to suppose that all that could just as well exist independently of our brain! And yet this supposition is the very ground on which all the dogmatical systems previous to Kant were based, for it is the implicit pre-supposition of their Ontology, Cosmology, Theology, and of all their Eternal Verities.
By this realistic examination we have gained very unexpectedly the objective point of view of Kant’s immortal discovery, arriving by our empirical, physiological way to the same point whence Kant started with his transcendental criticism. Kant made the subjective his basis, positing consciousness; but from its à priori nature he comes to the result, that all that happens in it can be nothing else but representation. We, on the contrary, starting from the objective, have discovered what are the ends and the origin of the intellect, and to what class of phenomena it belongs. We discover in our way, that the intellect is limited to mere representations, and that what is exhibited in it is conditioned by the subject, that is, a mundane phenomenon, and that just in the same way the order and the connection of all external things is conditioned by the subject, and is never a knowledge of what they are in themselves, and how they may be connected with each other. We, in our way, like Kant in his, have discovered that the world as representation, balances on that narrow line between the external cause (motive) and the produced effect (act of will) of intelligent (animal) beings, where the clear discrimination of the two commences. Ita res accendent lumina rebus.
Our objective stand-point is realistic, and therefore conditioned, inasmuch as starting from natural beings as posited, we have abstracted from the circumstance that their objective existence presupposes an intellect, in which they find themselves as representations; but Kant’s subjective and idealistic stand-point is equally conditioned, inasmuch as it starts from the intellect, which itself is conditioned by nature, in consequence of whose development up to the animal world it only comes into existence. Holding fast to this, our realistic-objective stand-point, Kant’s doctrine may be characterized thus: after Locke had abstracted the rôle of the senses, under the name of “secondary properties,” for the purpose of distinguishing things in themselves from things as they appear, Kant, with far greater profundity, abstracted the rôle of the brain functions [conceptions of the understanding]—a less considerable rôle than that of the senses—and thus abstracted as belonging to the subjective all that Locke had included under the head of primary properties. I, on the other hand, have merely shown why all stands thus in relation, by exhibiting the position which the intellect assumes in the System of Nature when we start realistically from the objective as a datum, and take the Will, of which alone we are immediately conscious, as the true που στῶ of all metaphysics—as the essence of which all else is only the phenomenon.
INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY.
CHAPTER VII.
COMPREHENSION AND IDEA.
I.
Everything, to be known, must be thought as belonging to a system. This result was the conclusion of Chapter VI. To illustrate: acid is that which hungers for a base; its sharp taste is the hunger itself; it exists only in a tension. Hence to think an acid we must think a base; the base is ideally in the acid, and is the cause of its sharpness. The union of the acid and base gives us a salt, and in the salt we cannot taste the acid nor the base distinctly, for each is thoroughly modified by the other, each is cancelled. We separate the acid and base again and there exist two contradictions—acid and base—each calling for the other, each asserting its complement to be itself. For the properties of a somewhat are its wants, i. e. what it lacks of the total.
Such elements of a total as we are here considering, have been called “moments” by Hegel. The total is the “negative unity” (See Chap. IV.)
In the illustration we have salt as the negative unity of the moments, acid and base. The unity is called negative because its existence destroys each of the moments by adding the other to it. After the negative unity exists, each of the moments is no longer in a tension, but has become thoroughly modified by the other. The negative unity is ideal when the moments are held asunder—it is then potential, and through it each moment has its own peculiar properties.