Page:A Brief History of Modern Philosophy.djvu/199

196 relation between intuition and thought which he maintains. Sensation, which is the correlate of a bodily change, is the only thing which is directly given. But the faculties of understanding and intuition likewise coöperate instinctively; we conceive the cause of sensation as an external object, distinct from our body, by an act which reveals the theory of causality. Space, time and causality cooperate in this projection. Experience never modifies this act, which indeed even forms the basis of the possibility of experience.

Cognition (sensation, understanding, intuition) is a product of our physical organization. The methods of natural science never get beyond materialism. Just as we discover the cause of a sensation in a physical object distinct from our body, so we likewise find the cause of such object, as well as its states, in a third object, etc. The law of inertia and the permanence of matter are the direct implications of the law of causality. The insufficiency of materialism however rests upon the fact that the principle of sufficient reason pertains only to the objective correlate of the idea; matter itself, which is the cause of the sensation and of the idea, is present only as the object of the idea. For cognition the world is nothing more than idea. We are not concerned with anything beyond the relations of ideas to each other. It is impossible, on the basis of theoretical knowledge, to get beyond this circle.

But what is being? What really constitutes the aggregate of these objects of ideas? Schopenhauer believes that he has discovered a method of unveiling the "thing-initself." The principle of sufficient reason appertains only to us as cognizing beings. As volitional beings we ourselves are thing-in-itself. An aspiration and yearning, an impulse towards self-assertion, is active in the profound