Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/284

 Now, from my proposition: that the Will is what Kant calls the "thing–in–itself" or the ultimate substratum of every phenomenon, I had however not only deduced that the will is the agent in all inner, unconscious functions of the body, but also that the organism itself is nothing but the will which has entered the region of representation, the will itself, perceived in the cognitive form of Space. I had accordingly said that, just as each single momentary act of willing presents itself at once directly and infallibly in the outer perception of the body as one of its actions, so also must the collective volition of each animal, the totality 2 of its efforts, be faithfully portrayed in its whole body, in the constitution of its organism; and that the means supplied by its organisation for attaining the aims of its will must as a whole exactly correspond to those aims, in short, that the same relation must exist between the whole character of its volition and the shape and nature of its body, as between each single act of its will and the single bodily action which carries it out. Even this too has recently been recognised as a fact, and accordingly been confirmed a posteriori, by thoughtful zootomists and physiologists from their own point of view and independently of my doctrine: their judgments on this point make Nature testify even here to the truth of my theory.

1 der Inbegriff aller seiner Bestrebungen.

COMPARATIVE