Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 1.djvu/193

THE OBJECTIFICATION OF THE WILL. 151, and perhaps it may be explained as something which is between the two. Marshall Hall ("On the Diseases of the Nervous System," § 293 sq.) explains it as a mixed function, for it is partly under the influence of the cerebral (voluntary), and partly under that of the spinal (non-voluntary) nerves. However, we are finally obliged to number it with the expressions of will which result from motives. For other motives, i.e., mere ideas, can determine the will to check it or accelerate it, and, as is the case with every other voluntary action, it seems to us that we could give up breathing altogether and voluntarily suffocate. And in fact we could do so if any other motive influenced the will sufficiently strongly to overcome the pressing desire for air. According to some accounts Diogenes actually put an end to his life in this way (Diog. Laert. VI. 76). Certain negroes also are said to have done this (F. B. Osiander "On Suicide " [1813] pp. 170-180). If this be true, it affords us a good example of the influence of abstract motives, i.e., of the victory of distinctively rational over merely animal will. For, that breathing is at least partially conditioned by cerebral activity is shown by the fact that the primary cause of death from prussic acid is that it paralyses the brain, and so, indirectly, restricts the breathing; but if the breathing be artificially maintained till the stupefaction of the brain has passed away, death will not ensue. We may also observe in passing that breathing affords us the most obvious example of the fact that motives act with just as much necessity as stimuli, or as causes in the narrowest sense of the word, and their operation can only be neutralised by antagonistic motives, as action is neutralised by re-action. For, in the case of breathing, the illusion that we can stop when we like is much weaker than in the case of other movements which follow upon motives; because in breathing the motive is very powerful, very near to us, and its satisfaction is very easy, for the muscles which accomplish it are never tired, nothing,