Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 1.djvu/227

THE OBJECTIFICATION OF THE WILL. 185 and cohesion. Although this has been given up, precisely the same error is committed in our own day by the electrical, chemical, and mechanical physiologists, who obstinately attempt to explain the whole of life and all the functions of the organism from "form and combination." In Meckel's "Archiv für Physiologie" (1820, vol. v. p. 185) we still find it stated that the aim of physiological explanation is the reduction of organic life to the universal forces with which physics deals. Lamarck also, in his "Philosophie Zoologique," explains life as merely the effect of warmth and electricity: le calorique et la matière électrique suffisent parfaitement pour composer ensemble cette cause essentielle de la vie (p. 16). According to this, warmth and electricity would be the "thing-in-itself," and the world of animals and plants its phenomenal appearance. The absurdity of this opinion becomes glaringly apparent at the 306th and following pages of that work. It is well known that all these opinions, that have been so often refuted, have reappeared quite recently with renewed confidence. If we carefully examine the foundation of these views, we shall find that they ultimately involve the presupposition that the organism is merely an aggregate of phenomena of physical, chemical, and mechanical forces, which have come together here by chance, and produced the organism as a freak of nature without further significance. The organism of an animal or of a human being would therefore be, if considered philosophically, not the exhibition of a special Idea, that is, not itself immediate objectivity of the will at a definite higher grade, but in it would appear only those Ideas which objectify the will in electricity, in chemism, and in mechanism. Thus the organism would be as fortuitously constructed by the concurrence of these forces as the forms of men and beasts in clouds and stalactites, and would therefore in itself be no more interesting than they are. However, we shall see immediately how far the application of physical and chemical modes of