Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/260

 228 THE WILL IN NATURE.

processes, secretions, &c. &c. . § 71: "All convulsions prove that the manifestation of the will can take place without distinct power of representation." . § 72: "Every where do we meet with a spontaneous, uncommunicated activity, now determined by the sublimest human free will, now by animal desire and aversion, now again by simple, more vegetative requirements; which activity, in order to maintain itself, calls forth several other kinds of activity in the unity of the individual." P. 96: "A creative, spontaneous, uncommunicated activity shows itself in every vital manifestation." . . "The third factor in this individual creation is the will, the individual's life  itself." . . "The nerves are the conductors of this individual creation: by their means form and mixture are varied according to desire and aversion." P. 97: "Assimilation of foreign substance . . . makes the blood . . . It is not an absorption or an exudation of organic matter; ... on the contrary, here the sole factor of the phenomenon is in all cases the creative will, a life which cannot be brought back to any sort of imparted move ment."

When I wrote this (1835) I was still naïve enough seriously to believe that Brandis was unacquainted with my work, or I should not allude here to his writings; for they would then be merely a repetition, application and carrying out of my own doctrine on this point, not a corroboration of it. But I thought I might safely assume that he did not know me, because he has not mentioned me anywhere and because if he had known me, literary honesty would have made it his imperative duty not to remain silent concerning the man from whom he had borrowed his chief fundamental thought, the more so as he saw that man then enduring unmerited neglect, by his writings being generally ignored, a circumstance which might be con-