Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/324

 THE WILL IN NATURE.

as the merely intuitive faculty of representation raises the brute above the plant. Now beings which, like plants, have no faculty for representation, are called unconscious, and we conceive this condition as only slightly differing from non-existence; since the only existence such beings have, is in the consciousness of others, as the representation of those others. They are nevertheless not wanting in what is primary in existence, the will, but only in what is secondary; still, what is primary, and this is after all the existence of the thing–in–itself, appears to us, without that secondary element, to pass over into nullity. We are unable directly and clearly to distinguish unconscious existence from non-existence, although we have our own experience of it in deep sleep.

Bearing in mind, according to the contents of the last chapter, that the faculty of knowing, like every other organ, has only arisen for the purpose of self-preservation, and that it therefore stands in a precise relation, admitting of countless gradations, to the requirements of each animal species; we shall understand that plants, having so very much fewer requirements than animals, no longer need any knowledge at all. On this account precisely, as I have often said, knowledge is the true characteristic which denotes the limits of animality, because of the movement induced by motives which it conditions. Where animal life ceases, there knowledge proper, with whose essence our own experience has made us familiar, disappears; and henceforth analogy is our only way of making that which mediates between the influence of the outer world and the movements of beings intelligible to us. The will, on the other hand, which we have recognised as being the basis and kernel of every existing thing, remains one and the same at all times and in all places. Now, in the lower degree occupied by plant-life and by the vegetative life of animal organisms, it is the stimulus which takes the place

PHYSIOLOGY