Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/349

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causality has become less intelligible to us than ever. Nothing but the bare schema, taken in a quite general sense, now remains, and the ripest reflection is needed to recognise its applicability and the necessity that schema brings with it everywhere.

In the Grotto of Posilippo, darkness continues to augment as we advance towards the interior; but when once we have passed the middle, day-light again appears at the other end and shows us the way; so also in this case: just at the point where the outwardly directed light of the understanding with its form of causality, gradually yielding to increasing darkness, had been reduced to a feeble, flickering glimmer, behold! we are met by a totally different light proceeding from quite another quarter, from our own inner self, through the chance circumstance, that we, the judges, happen here to be the very objects that are to be judged. The growing difficulty of the comprehension of the causal nexus, at first so clear, had now become so great for perception and for the understanding the agent in it that, in animal actions, the very existence of that nexus seemed almost doubtful and those actions appeared to be a sort of miracle. But, just at this point, the observer receives from his own inner self the direct information that the agent in them is the will that very will, which he knows better and more intimately than any thing that external perception can ever supply. This knowledge alone must be the philosopher's key to an insight into the heart of all those processes in unconscious Nature, concerning which causal explanation although, here, to be sure, more satisfactory than in the processes last considered, and the clearer, the farther those processes were removed from these nevertheless had still left an unknown x, and could never quite illumine the inside of the process, even in a body propelled by impact or attracted by gravity. This x had continued expanding till

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