Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/268

 236 THE WILL IN NATURE.

and dignity as a visitor at the house of the body. 1 " Truth lies at the bottom of a well," said Democritus; and the centuries with a sigh, have repeated his words. But small wonder, if it gets a rap on the knuckles as soon as it tries to come out !

The fundamental truth of my doctrine, which places that doctrine in opposition with all others that have ever existed, is the complete separation between the will and the intellect, which all philosophers before me had looked upon as inseparable; or rather, I ought to say that they had regarded the will as conditioned by, nay, mostly even as a mere function of, the intellect, assumed by them to be the fundamental substance of our spiritual being. But this separation, this analysis into two heterogeneous elements, of the ego or soul, which had so long been deemed an indivisible unity, is, for philosophy, what the analysis of water has been for chemistry, though it may take time to be acknowledged. With me, that which is eternal and indestructible in man, therefore, that which constitutes his vital principle, is not the soul, but if I may use a chemical term its radical: and this is the will. The so-called soul is already a compound: it is the union of the will and the intellect (νους). This intellect is the secondary element, the posterius of the organism and, as a mere cerebral function, is conditioned by the organism; whereas the will is what is primary, the prius of the organism, which is conditioned by it. For the will is that essential being in itself, which only be comes apparent as an organic body in our representation (that mere function of the brain): it is only through the forms of knowledge (or cerebral function), that is, only in our representation, not apart from that representation, not immediately in our self-consciousness, that our body is given to each of us as a thing which has extension, limbs

1 In which it is lodged in the garret. [Add. to 3rd ed.]