Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/287

Rh commentary which nature offers us for the understanding of that difficult passage.

For the substratum, or the content,, or the material of the present, is through all time really the same. The impossibility of knowing this identity directly is just time, a form and limitation of our intellect. That on account of it, for example, the future event is not yet, depends upon an illusion of which we become conscious when that event has come. That the essential form of our intellect introduces such an illusion explains and justifies itself from the fact that the intellect has come forth from the hands of nature by no means for the apprehension of the nature of things, but merely for the apprehension of motives, thus for the service of an individual and temporal phenomenon of will.

Whoever comprehends the reflections which here occupy us will also understand the true meaning of the paradoxical doctrine of the Eleatics, that there is no arising and passing away, but the whole remains immovable: "" (Parmenides et Melissus ortum et interitum tollebant, guoniam nihil moveri putabant), ''Stob. Ecl.,'' i. 21. Light is also thrown here upon the beautiful passage of Empedocles which Plutarch has preserved for us in the book, "Adversus Coloten," c. 12: –