Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/92

 slight variation, still in itself always subjective and, as such therefore, incapable of containing anything objective, anything like perception. For sensation is and remains a process within the organism and is limited, as such, to the region within the skin ; it cannot therefore contain any thing which lies beyond that region, or, in other words, anything that is outside us. A sensation may be pleasant or unpleasant—which betokens a relation to the Will—but nothing objective can ever lie in any sensation. In the organs of the senses, sensation is heightened by the confluence of the nerve-extremities, and can easily be excited from without on account of their extensive distribution and the delicacy of the envelope which encloses them ; it is besides specially susceptible to particular influences, such as light, sound, smell ; notwithstanding which it is and remains mere sensation, like all others within our body, consequently something essentially subjective, of whose changes we only become immediately conscious in the form of the inner sense, Time : that is, successively. It is only when the Understanding begins to act—a function, not of single, delicate nerve-extremities, but of that mysterious, complicated structure weighing from five to ten pounds, called the brain—only when it begins to apply its sole form, the causal law, that a powerful transformation takes place, by which subjective sensation becomes objective perception. For, in virtue of its own peculiar form, therefore a priori, i.e. before all experience (since there could have been none till then), the Understanding conceives the given corporeal sensation as an effect (a word which the Understanding alone comprehends), which effect, as such, necessarily implies a cause. Simultaneously it summons to its assistance Space, the form of the outer sense, lying likewise ready in the intellect (i.e. the brain), in order to remove that cause beyond the organism ; for it is by this that the external world first arises, Space alone rendering it possible,