Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/288

 THE WILL IN NATURE.

exclusively directed towards the outside, brings with it, that a will acting by means of it, can only act outwardly, that is, only from one being upon another. Therefore the will, of which unmistakable traces had been found, was not sought for where these were discovered, but was removed to the outside, and the animal became the product of a will foreign to it, guided by knowledge, which must have been very clear knowledge indeed, nay, the deeply excogitated conception of a purpose; and this purpose must have preceded the animal's existence, and, together with the will, whose product the animal is, have lain outside that animal. According to this, the animal would have existed in representation before existing in reality. This is the basis of the train of thought on which the Physico-theological Proof is founded. But this proof is no mere scholastic sophism, like the Ontological Proof: nor does it contain an untiring natural opponent within itself, like the Cosmological Proof, in that very same law of causality to which it owes its existence. On the contrary, it is, in reality, for the educated, what the Keraunological Proof 1 is for the vulgar, 2 and its plausibility is so great, so potent, that the most eminent and at the same time least prejudiced minds have been deeply entangled in it. Voltaire, for instance, who, after all sorts of other doubts, always comes back to it, sees no possibility of getting over it and even places its evidence almost on a level with that of a

1 I should like under this name to add a fourth to the three proofs brought forward by Kant, i.e. the proof a terrore [from teror], which the ancient saying of Petronius: primus in orbe Deos fecit timor [only fear was the origin of the belief in gods], designates and of which Hume's incomparable Natural History of Religion may be considered as the critique. Understood in this sense, even the theologist Schleiermacher's attempted proof might have its truth from the feeling of dependence, though perhaps not exactly that truth which its originator imagined it to have.

2 Socrates propounded it already in detail in Xenophon, (Memorabilia, I. 4.) [Add. to 3rd ed.]

COMPARATIVE