Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/226

216 which, in the face of the "Critique of Pure Reason," has passed for philosophy in Germany for the last sixty years. What does the absolute mean? Something that is, and of which (under pain of punishment) we dare not ask further whence and why it is. A precious rarity for professors of philosophy! In the case, however, of the honestly expressed cosmological proof, through the assumption of a first cause, and therefore of a first beginning in a time which has absolutely no beginning, this beginning is always pushed further back by the question: Why not earlier? And so far back indeed that one never gets down from it to the present, but is always marvelling that the present itself did not occur already millions of years ago. In general, then, the law of causality applies to all things in the world, but not to the world itself, for it is immanent in the world, not transcendent; with it it comes into action, and with it it is abolished. This depends ultimately upon the fact that it belongs to the mere form of our understanding, like the whole of the objective world, which accordingly is merely phenomenal, and is conditioned by the understanding. Thus the law of causality has full application, without any exception, to all things in the world, of course in respect of their form, to the variation of these forms, and thus to their changes. It is valid for the actions of men as for the impact of a stone, yet, as we have said always, merely with regard to events, to changes. But if we abstract from its origin in the understanding and try to look at it as purely objective, it will be found in ultimate analysis to depend upon the fact that every thing that acts does so by virtue of its original, and therefore eternal or timeless, power; therefore its present effect would necessarily have occurred infinitely earlier, that is, before all conceivable time, but that it lacked the temporal condition. This temporal condition is the occasion, i.e., the cause, on account of which alone the effect only takes place now, but now takes place necessarily; the cause assigns it its place in time.