Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/147

 Western Hemisphere, where his skin has become bleached, and where the primitive, true, profound religions of his first home could not follow him, now no longer recognises animals as his brethren, and falsely believes them to differ fundamentally from him, seeking to confirm this illusion by calling them brutes, giving degrading names to the vital functions which they have in common with him, and proclaiming them outlaws ; and thus he hardens his heart against that identity of being between them and himself, which is nevertheless constantly obtruding itself upon him.

Still, as we have said, the whole difference lies in this—that, besides the intuitive representations examined in the last chapter, which are shared by animals, other, abstract representations derived from these intuitive ones, are lodged in the human brain, which is chiefly on this account so much larger than that of animals. Representations of this sort have been called conceptions, because each comprehends innumerable individual things in, or rather under, itself, and thus forms a complex. We may also define them as representations drawn from representations. For, in forming them, the faculty of abstraction decomposes the complete, intuitive representations described in our last chapter into their component parts, in order to think each of these parts separately as the different qualities of, or relations between, things. By this process, however, the representations necessarily forfeit their perceptibility ; just as water, when decomposed, ceases to be fluid and visible. For although each quality thus isolated (abstracted) can quite well be thought by itself, it does not at all follow that it can be perceived by itself. We form conceptions by dropping a good deal of what is given us in perception, in order to be