Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/332

 THE WILL IN NATURE.

and will, first becomes quite distinct. But this does not immediately put an end to the subservience of the intellect to the will. Ordinary human beings after all only comprehend quite clearly that which, in some way or other, refers directly or indirectly to their own selves (has an interest for them); with respect to everything else, their understanding continues to be unconquerably inert; the rest therefore remains in the back-ground and does not come into consciousness under the radiant light of complete distinctness. Philosophical astonishment and artistic emotion occasioned by the contemplation of phenomena remain eternally foreign to them, whatever they may do; for at the bottom, everything appears to them to be a matter of course. Complete liberation and separation of the intellect from the will and its bondage is the prerogative of genius, as I have fully shown in the aesthetic part of my chief work. Genius is objectivity. The pure objectivity and distinctness with which things present themselves in [intuitive] perception, that fundamental and most substantial source of knowledge, actually stands every moment in inverse proportion to the interest which the will has in those things; and knowing without willing is the condition, not to say the essence, of all gifts of aesthetic intelligence. Why does an ordinary artist produce so bad a painting of yonder landscape, notwithstanding all the pains he has taken ? Because he sees it so. And why does he see so little beauty in it ? Because his intellect has not freed itself sufficiently from his will. The degrees of this separation give rise to great intellectual distinctions between men; for the more knowledge has freed itself from the will, the purer, consequently the more objective and correct, it is; just as that fruit is best, which has no after-taste of the soil on which it has grown.

This relation, as important as it is interesting, deserves surely to be made still clearer by a retrospective view of the

PHYSIOLOGY