Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/167

 their contents, I have shown above (§ 29) that Truth is a quality belonging exclusively to judgments : that is, a logical quality ; and as to the other two abstracta, I refer my readers partly to § 65 of the first volume, partly to the entire Third Book of my chief work. If, nevertheless, a very solemn and mysterious air is assumed and the eyebrows are raised up to the wig whenever these three meagre abstracta are mentioned, young people may easily be induced to believe that something peculiar and inexpressible lies behind them, which entitles them to be called ideas, and harnessed to the triumphal car of this would-be metaphysical Reason.

When therefore we are told, that we possess a faculty for direct, material (i.e., not only formal, but substantial), supersensuous knowledge, (that is, a knowledge which transcends all possible experience), a faculty specially designed for metaphysical insight, and inherent in us for this purpose—I must take the liberty to call this a down right lie. For the slightest candid self-examination will suffice to convince us that absolutely no such faculty resides within us. The result at which all honest, competent, authoritative thinkers have arrived in the course of ages, moreover, tallies exactly with my assertion. It is as follows: All that is innate in the whole of our cognitive faculty, all that is therefore a priori and independent of experience, is strictly limited to the formal part of knowledge : that is, to the consciousness of the peculiar functions of the intellect and of the only way in which they can possibly act; but in order to give material knowledge, these functions one and all require material from outside. Within us therefore lie the forms of external, objective perception : Time and Space, and then the law of Causality as a mere form of the Understanding which enables it to construct the objective, corporeal world finally, the formal part of abstract knowledge : this last is deposited and treated of in Logic, which our forefathers