Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/259

Rh place of experience, because conceptions always remain general, and consequently do not get down to the particular, which, however, is just what has to be dealt with in life; and, besides this, all conceptions are abstracted from what is particular and perceived in experience, and therefore one must have come to know these in order adequately to understand even the general conceptions which the books communicate. Learning cannot take the place of genius, because it also affords merely conceptions, but the knowledge of genius consists in the apprehension of the (Platonic) Ideas of things, and therefore is essentially intuitive. Thus in the first of these phenomena the objective condition of perceptive or intuitive knowledge is wanting; in the second the subjective; the former may be attained, the latter cannot.

Wisdom and genius, these two summits of the Parnassus of human knowledge, have their foundation not in the abstract and discursive, but in the perceptive faculty. Wisdom proper is something intuitive, not something abstract. It does not consist in principles and thoughts, which one can carry about ready in his mind, as results of his own research or that of others; but it is the whole manner in which the world presents itself in his mind. This varies so much that on account of it the wise man lives in another world from the fool, and the genius sees another world from the blockhead. That the works of the man of genius immeasurably surpass those of all others arises simply from the fact that the world which he sees, and from which he takes his utterances, is so much clearer, as it were more profoundly worked out, than that in the minds of others, which certainly contains the same objects, but is to the world of the man of genius as the Chinese picture without shading and perspective is to the finished oil-painting. The material is in all minds the same; but the difference lies in the perfection of the form which it assumes in each, upon which the numerous grades of intelligence ultimately depend. These grades thus