Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/219

Rh occurs also in lameness, could be sufficient for this? We may add to this that before I attempt to affect external things they must necessarily have affected me as motives. But this almost presupposes the apprehension of the external world. According to the theory in question (as I have remarked in the place referred to above), a man born without arms and legs could never attain to the idea of causality, and consequently could never arrive at the apprehension of the external world. But that this is not the case is proved by a fact communicated in Froriep's Notizen, July 1838, No. 133 – the detailed account, accompanied by a likeness, of an Esthonian girl, Eva Lauk, then fourteen years old, who was born entirely without arms or legs. The account concludes with these words: "According to the evidence of her mother, her mental development had been quite as quick as that of her brothers and sisters; she attained just as soon as they did to a correct judgment of size and distance, yet without the assistance of hands. – Dorpat, 1st March 1838, Dr. A. Hueck."

Hume's doctrine also, that the conception of causality arises from the custom of seeing two states constantly following each other, finds a practical refutation in the oldest of all successions, that of day and night, which no one has ever held to be cause and effect of each other. And the same succession also refutes Kant's false assertion that the objective reality of a succession is only known when we apprehend the two succeeding events as standing in the relation of cause and effect to each other. Indeed the converse of this doctrine of Kant's is true. We know which of the two connected events is the cause and which the effect, empirically, only in the succession. Again, on the other hand, the absurd assertion of several professors of philosophy in our own day that cause and effect are simultaneous can be refuted by the fact that in cases in which the succession cannot be perceived on account of its great rapidity, we yet assume it with