Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/216

206 nature of the will, which in itself is simple and identical, appears drawn out into a course of life. But just on account of this original simplicity and identity of what thus exhibits itself, its character remains always precisely the same, and hence also the course of life itself retains throughout the same key-note, indeed its multifarious events and scenes are at bottom just like variations of one and the same theme.

The a priori nature of the law of causality has, by Englishmen and Frenchmen, sometimes not been seen at all, sometimes not rightly conceived of; and therefore some of them still prosecute the earlier attempts to find for it an empirical origin. Maine de Biran places this in the experience that the act of will as cause is followed by the movement of the body as effect. But this fact itself is untrue. We certainly do not recognise the really immediate act of will as something different from the action of the body, and the two as connected by the bond of causality; but both are one and indivisible. Between them there is no succession; they are simultaneous. They are one and the same thing, apprehended in a double manner. That which makes itself known to inner apprehension (self-consciousness) as the real act of will exhibits itself at once in external perception, in which the body exists objectively as an action of the body. That physiologically the action of the nerve precedes that of the muscle is here immaterial, for it does not come within self-consciousness; and we are not speaking here of the relation between muscle and nerve, but of that between the act of will and the action of the body. Now this does not present itself as a causal relation. If these two presented themselves to us as cause and effect their connection would not be so incomprehensible to us as it actually is; for what we understand from its cause we understand as far as there is an understanding of things generally. On the other hand, the movement of our limbs by means of mere acts of will is indeed a miracle of such common occurrence that we