Page:A Brief History of Modern Philosophy.djvu/200

Rh depths of our being, beneath every idea, which is manifest in pleasure and in pain, hope and fear, love and hate,— a will, which constitutes our inmost nature, the primary phenomenon! We understand the inmost nature of the world by our own inmost nature. Thus, with the help of analogy, an analogy whose justification, due to his romantic temper, he never questions, he makes the transition to metaphysics.—The fact that all volition is a temporal process and that all we know about it is merely phenomenal, of course constitutes a real difficulty. (Herbart called attention to this difficulty already in a review in 1820.) Schopenhauer concedes this difficulty in the second volume of his chief work (which appeared twenty-five years later than the first), but thinks that volition is nevertheless the phenomenon with which we are really identical. But in that case the principle of sufficient reason, which applies to all phenomena, must likewise apply to volition,—and then the thing-in-itself still remains undiscovered!

It was a matter of profound importance for the development of psychology that volitional life was emphasized so vigorously—and in its details frequently so ingeniously—in contrast to the Hegelian intellectualism.—Beyond this Schopenhauer is evidently affected by Fichte, not only in his theory of will, but likewise in his projection theory which forms an essential part of his theory of knowledge (especially by Fichte's lectures Uber die Thatsachen des Bewusstseins).

Our knowledge of will does not rest upon direct introspection alone. It likewise possesses phenomenal form, because our whole body is the material expression of will. Body and will are one. Schopenhauer could therefore call knowledge (the idea and its object) a product of the will quite as consistently as a product of the body. The body