Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/275

251 world to know; and the world yonder exists in so far as I know it. In vain, moreover, would one seek for any thing in itself really outside of me as the cause of my experiences. For cause is just an idea of mine, useful and valid for the events of the show world, but wholly inapplicable to anything else. Within experience the law of causation is absolute, because such is my fashion of thinking experience and of perceiving the localized things of sense. But beyond experience what validity, what application, can one give to the principle of causation? None. There is no cause to be sought beyond my own true nature for my own experiences.

But what is this my nature? The second book answers the question. My nature, you must observe, is something very wealthy. It does not indeed cause my experiences, in any proper sense; for cause means only an event that in time or in space brings another event to pass; and there is nothing that, in time or in space, brings to pass my own deepest, timeless, and spaceless nature. As phenomenon in time, my body may move or die, as other events determine; but my deepest nature is so superior to space and time that, as we have just shown, space and time are in fact in me, in so far as they are my forms of seeing and of knowing. Therefore my true nature neither causes, nor is caused; but, as one now sees, it in truth is, comprises, embodies itself in, all my world of phenomena. Hence you see how wealthy my true nature must be in its implications. Yes, in a deeper sense, you also, in so far as you truly exist, must have the same deepest nature that I have. Only in space and in time do we seem to be separate beings. Space and time form, as Schopenhauer says, the dividing principle of things. In an illusory way they seem to distinguish us all from one another; but abstract space and time, with all their manifold and illusory distinctions of places and moments, and the real world collapses into one immanent nature of things.