Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/562

 540 SCHOPENHAUER. power, that it clarifies and transforms the content furnished ^ by intuition without increasing it by new representations. Objective cognition is confined within the circle of our representations ; all that is knowable is phenomenon. Space, time, and causality spread out like a triple veil 'between us and the per se of things, and prevent a vision of the true nature of the world. There is one point, however, at which we know more than mere phenomena, where of these three disturbing media only one, time-form, separates us from the thing in itself. This point is the consciousness of ourselves. On the one hand, I appear to myself as body. My body is a temporal, spatial, material object, an object like all others, and with them subject to the laws of objectivity. But besides this objective cognition, I have, further, an immediate consciousness of myself, through which I appre- hend my true being— I know myself as willing. My will is more than a mere representation, it is the original element in me, the truly real which appears to me as body. The will is related to the intellect as the primary to the second- ary, as substance to accident ; it is related to the body as the inner to the outer, as reality to phenomenon. The act of will is followed at once and inevitably by the move- ment of the body willed, nay, the two are one and the same, only given in different ways: will is the body seen from within, body the will seen from without, the will become visible, objectified. After the analogy of ourselves, again, who appear to ourselves as material objects but in truth are will, all existence is to be judged. The universe is the mac-anthropos ; the knowledge of our own essence, the key to the knowledge of the essence of the world. Like our body, the whole world is the visibility of will. The human will is the highest stage in the development of the same principle which manifests its activity in the various forces of nature, and which properly takes its name from the highest species. To penetrate further into the inner nature of things than tliisTs impossible. What that which presents itself as will and which still remains after the negation of the latter (see below) is in itself, is for us abso. lutely unknowable.