Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/339

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own efforts upon bodies belonging to the outer world. It is only in countries like England, where the light of Kantian philosophy has not yet begun to dawn, that the Concept of causality can be thought of as originating in experience (professors of philosophy, who pooh-pooh Kant's doctrines and think me beneath their notice, being left out of the question); least of all can it be thought of by those who are acquainted with my proof of the a priority of that conception, which differs completely from Kant's proof and rests upon the fact, that knowledge of causality must necessarily precede all perception of the outer world itself as its condition; since perception is only brought about through the transition effected by the understanding from the sensation in the organ of sense to its cause, which cause now presents itself as an object in Space, itself like wise an a priori intuition. Now, as the perception of objects must be anterior to our conscious action upon them, the experience of that conscious action cannot be the origin of the conception of causality; for, before I can act upon things, they must first have acted upon me as motives. I have entered fully into all that has to do with this in my chief work, 1 and in the second edition of my treatise on the Principle of Sufficient Reason, § 21, 2 where the assumption adopted by Herschel finds special refutation; it is therefore useless to enter into it once more here. But it would be even quite possible to refute this assumption empirically, since it would necessarily follow from it, that a man who came into the world without arms or legs, could never attain any knowledge of causality or perception of the outer world. Now Nature has effectually disproved this by a case, of which I have reproduced the account from its original source in the above-mentioned chapter of my chief

1 See The World as Will and Representation. vol. ii. ch. 4, pp. 38-42 (3rd edition, pp. 41-46).

2 ibid., p. 74 (3rd edition, p. 79), p. 92 of the translation in the present volume.

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