Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/188

178 On the other hand, it would certainly be possible to construct the world from matter and its properties if these were correctly, completely, and exhaustively known to us (which is far from being the case as yet). For all that has come to be has become actual through causes, which could operate and come together only by virtue of the fundamental forces of matter. But these must be perfectly capable of demonstration at least objectively, even if subjectively we never attain to a knowledge of them. But such an explanation and construction of the world would not only have at its foundation the assumption of an existence in itself of matter (while in truth it is conditioned by the subject), but it would also be obliged to allow all the original qualities in this matter to pass current and remain absolutely inexplicable, thus as gualitates occultæ. (Cf. § 26, 27 of the first volume.) For matter is only the vehicle of these forces, just as the law of causality is only the arranger of their manifestations. Therefore such an explanation of the world would always remain merely relative and conditioned, properly the work of a physical science, which at every step longed for a metaphysic. On the other hand, there is also something inadequate about the subjective starting-point and first principle, "the world is my idea," partly because it is one-sided, since the world is far more than that (the thing in itself, will), and indeed its existence as idea is to a certain extent only accidental to it; but partly also because it merely expresses the fact that the object is conditioned by the subject, without at the same time saying that the subject, as such, is also conditioned by the object. For the assertion, "the subject would still remain a knowing being if it had no object, i.e., if it had absolutely no idea," is just as false as the assertion of the crude understanding, "the world, the object, would still exist, even if there were no subject." A consciousness without an object is no consciousness. A thinking subject has conceptions for its object; a subject of sense perception has objects with the qualities