Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/370

 THE WILL IN NATURE.

rejection is based upon laws, whose a priori character precisely restricts them to phenomena; whereas things–in–themselves, to which even our own inner self must belong, remain untouched by them. But it is quite possible for these very things–in–themselves to have relations with us from which the above-mentioned occurrences may have arisen, concerning which accordingly we have to wait for the decision a posteriori, and must not forestall it. That the English and French should persist in denying a priori all such occurrences, comes at the bottom from the influence of Locke's philosophy, under which these nations still stand as to all essential points, and by which we are taught that, after merely subtracting sensation, we know things–in–themselves. According to this view therefore, the laws of the material world are held to be ultimate, and no other influence than influxus physicus [physical influence] is admitted. Consequently these nations believe, it is true, in a physical, but not in a metaphysical, science, and therefore reject all other than so-called "Natural Magic:" a term which contains the same contradictio in adjecto [contradiction between the adjective and its noun] as "Supernatural Physics," but is nevertheless constantly used quite seriously, while the latter was used but once, and then in joke, by Lichtenberg. On the other hand, the common people, with their universal readiness to give credit to supernatural influences, express by it in their own way the conviction, that all things which we perceive and comprehend are mere phenomena, not things–in–themselves; although, with them, conviction is only felt. I quote the following passage from Kant's Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, [Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, A450 f., "Of the Interest Attaching to the Ideas of Morality"] as a proof that this is not saying too much: "There is an observation requiring no great subtlety of reflection, which we may, on the contrary, suppose the most ordinary understanding capable of making, albeit in its own way and by an obscure distinction of the faculty of judgment, which it calls feeling. It is this, that all our

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