Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/136

126 set apart for the world, there remained for the third Idea nothing but the disjunctive major. Fortunately there existed a previous work in this direction, the ens realissimum of the Scholastics, together with the ontological proof of the existence of God set up in a rudimentary form by Anselm of Canterbury and then perfected by Descartes. This was joyfully made use of by Kant, with some reminiscence also of an earlier Latin work of his youth. However, the sacrifice which Kant makes to his love of architectonic symmetry in this chapter is exceedingly great. In defiance of all truth, what one must regard as the grotesque idea of an essence of all possible realities is made an essential and necessary thought of the reason. For the deduction of this Kant makes use of the false assertion that our knowledge of particular things arises from a progressive limitation of general conceptions; thus also of a most general conception of all which contains all reality in itself. In this he stands just as much in contradiction with his own teaching as with the truth, for exactly the converse is the case. Our knowledge starts with the particular and is extended to the general, and all general conceptions arise by abstraction from real, particular things known by perception, and this can be carried on to the most general of all conceptions, which includes everything under it, but almost nothing in it. Thus Kant has here placed the procedure of our faculty of knowledge just upside down, and thus might well be accused of having given occasion to a philosophical charletanism that has become famous in our day, which, instead of recognising that conceptions are thoughts abstracted from things, makes, on the contrary the conceptions first, and sees in things only concrete conceptions, thus bringing to market the world turned upside down as a philosophical buffoonery, which of course necessarily found great acceptance.

Even if we assume that every reason must, or at least can, attain to the conception of God, even without