Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/347

Rh Therefore our memory and recollection is something very imperfect. How little of all that we have done, experienced, learnt, or read, can we recall! And even this little for the most part only laboriously and imperfectly. For the same reasons is it so very difficult for us to keep ourselves free from the impressions of the present. Unconsciousness is the original and natural condition of all things, and therefore also the basis from which, in particular species of beings, consciousness results as their highest efflorescence; wherefore even then unconsciousness always continues to predominate. Accordingly most existences are without consciousness; but yet they act according to the laws of their nature, i.e., of their will. Plants have at most a very weak analogue of consciousness; the lowest species of animals only the dawn of it. But even after it has ascended through the whole series of animals to man and his reason, the unconsciousness of plants, from which it started, still remains the foundation, and may be traced in the necessity for sleep, and also in all those essential and great imperfections, here set forth, of every intellect produced through physiological functions; and of another intellect we have no conception.

The imperfections here proved to be essential to the intellect are constantly increased, however, in particular cases, by non-essential imperfections. The intellect is never in every respect what it possibly might be. The perfections possible to it are so opposed that they exclude each other. Therefore no man can be at once Plato and Aristotle, or Shakspeare and Newton, or Kant and Goethe. The imperfections of the intellect, on the contrary, consort very well together; therefore in reality it for the most part remains far below what it might be. Its functions depend upon so very many conditions, which we can only comprehend as anatomical and physiological, in the phenomenon in which alone they are given us, that a decidedly excelling intellect, even in one respect alone, is among the rarest of natural phenomena. Therefore the productions of such an