Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/350

 THE WILL IN NATURE.

finally, on the highest degrees of the scale, it had wholly repelled causal explanation. But then, just when the power of causal explanation had been reduced to a minimum, that x revealed itself as the will reminding us of Mephistopheles when, yielding to Faust's learned exorcisms, he steps forth out of the huge grown poodle whose kernel he was [Faust I, line 1323]. In consequence of the considerations I have here set forth at length, we can surely hardly avoid recognising the identity of this x, even on the lowest degrees of the scale, where it was but faintly perceptible; then higher up, where it extended its obscurity more and more; and finally on the highest degrees, where it cast a shadow upon all things till, at the very top, it reveals itself to our consciousness in our own phenomenal being, as the will. The two primarily different sources of our knowledge, that is to say the inward and the outward source, have to be connected together at this point by reflection. It is quite exclusively out of this connection that our comprehension of Nature, and of our own selves arises; but then the inner side of Nature is disclosed to our intellect, which by itself alone can never reach further than to the mere outside; and the mystery which philosophy has so long tried to solve, lies open before us. For then indeed we clearly see what the Real and the Ideal (the thing–in– itself and the phenomenon) properly are; and this settles the principal question which has engaged the attention of philosophers since Descartes: that is to say, the question as to the relation between these two, whose complete diversity Kant had shown most thoroughly and with unexampled depth, yet whose absolute identity was immediately afterwards proclaimed by humbugs on the credit of intellectual intuition. But if we decline to avail ourselves of this insight, which is really the one strait gate to truth, we can never acquire comprehension of the intrinsic essence of Nature, to which absolutely no other road leads;

PHYSICAL ASTRONOMY.