Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/151

 content mere appearance, it is to that extent, not in fact free, primary, and original, but it is a result of necessity, and is a secondary element proceeding just as it is from a higher primary element, viz., the general law of appearance. Now, the thinking of man, as we have mentioned several times already, represents man to himself just as he actually is, and always remains the true copy and mirror of his inner being. For this reason, although such a decision of the will appears at first sight to be free, just because it is called a decision of the will, yet it cannot appear so at all to deeper and prolonged thinking; on the contrary, the latter must think that it is a result of necessity, which, of course, it actually is in fact. For those people, whose will has never yet raised itself to a higher sphere than the one in which it is held that a will merely appears in them, the belief in freedom is, of course, a delusion and a deception, proceeding from a view that is casual and does not go beneath the surface. For them there is truth only in thought—thought that shows them everywhere only the chain of strict necessity.

103. The first and fundamental law of appearance, simply as such, (we are entitled to refrain from stating the reason, all the more so because it has been sufficiently given elsewhere) is this: that it falls into a manifoldness, which, in a certain respect, is an endless whole and, in a certain other respect, a whole complete in itself. In this completed whole of manifoldness every single part is determined by all the rest, and, again, all the rest are determined by this single part. Hence, if in the decision of the will of the individual there emerges into appearance nothing but the possibility of appearance and of representation, and visibility in general, which is in fact the visibility of nothing, then the content of such a decision of the will is determined by the completed whole of all