Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/221

Rh shrinks up into an affair of a moment. This proof is analogous to the proof that every sheet of paper must have a certain thickness, because otherwise the whole book would have none. To say when the cause ceases and the effect begins is in almost all cases difficult, and often impossible. For the changes (i.e., the succession of states) are continuous, like the time which they fill, and therefore also, like it, they are infinitely divisible. But their succession is as necessarily determined and as unmistakable as that of the moments of time itself, and each of them is called, with reference to the one which precedes it, "effect," and with reference to the one which follows it, "cause."

Every change in the material world can only take place because another has immediately preceded it: this is the true and the whole content of the law of causality. But no conception has been more misused in philosophy than that of cause, by means of the favourite trick or blunder of conceiving it too widely, taking it too generally, through abstract thinking. Since Scholasticism, indeed properly since Plato and Aristotle, philosophy has been for the most part a systematic misuse of general conceptions. Such, for example, are substance, ground, cause, the good, perfection, necessity, and very many others. A tendency of the mind to work with such abstract and too widely comprehended conceptions has shown itself almost at all times. It may ultimately rest upon a certain indolence of the intellect, which finds it too difficult a task to be constantly controlling thought by perception. By degrees such unduly wide conceptions come to be used almost like algebraical symbols, and tossed about like them, and thus philosophy is reduced to a mere process of combination, a kind of reckoning which (like all calculations) employs and demands only the lower faculties. Indeed there finally results from this a mere juggling with words, of which the most shocking example is afforded us by the mind-destroying Hegelism, in which it is carried to the extent of pure nonsense. But Scholasticism also