Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/225

Rh the infinite regressus to which the application of the law of causality always leads. We said above: "Things, i.e., states or conditions of matter," for change and causality have only to do with states or conditions. It is these states which we understand by form, in the wider sense; and only the forms change, the matter is permanent. Thus it is only the form which is subject to the law of causality. But the form constitutes the thing, i.e., it is the ground of the difference of things; while matter must be thought as the same in all. Therefore the Schoolmen said, "Forma dat esse rei;" more accurately this proposition would run: Forma dat rei essentiam, materia existentiam. Therefore the question as to the cause of a thing always concerns merely its form, i.e., its state or quality, and not its matter, and indeed only the former so far as we have grounds for assuming that it has not always existed, but has come into being by means of a change. The union of form and matter, or of essentia and existentia, gives the concrete, which is always particular; thus, the thing. And it is the forms whose union with matter, i.e., whose appearance in matter by means of a change, are subject to the law of causality. By taking the conception too widely in the abstract the mistake slipped in of extending causality to the thing absolutely, that is, to its whole inner nature and existence, thus also to matter, and ultimately it was thought justifiable to ask for a cause of the world itself. This is the origin of the cosmological proof. This proof begins by inferring from the existence of the world its non-existence, which preceded its existence, and such an inference is quite unjustifiable; it ends, however, with the most fearful inconsistency, for it does away altogether with the law of causality, from which alone it derives all its evidencing power, for it stops at a first cause, and will not go further; thus ends, as it were, by committing parricide, as the bees kill the drones after they have served their end. All the talk about the absolute is referable to a shamefast, and therefore disguised cosmological proof,