Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/486

470 walls of our prison. But, besides this, it may at least be assumed as probable that not only for us is knowledge of all that has been asked about impossible, but no such knowledge is possible in general, thus never and in no way; that these relations are not only relatively but absolutely insusceptible of investigation; that not only does no one know them, but that they are in themselves unknowable, because they do not enter into the form of knowledge in general. (This corresponds to what Scotus Erigena says, de mirabili divina ignorantia, qua Deus non intelligit quid ipse sit. Lib. ii.) For knowableness in general, with its most essential, and therefore constantly necessary form of subject and object, belongs merely to the phenomenal appearance, not to the being in itself of things. Where knowledge, and consequently idea, is, there is also only phenomenon, and we stand there already in the province of the phenomenal; nay, knowledge in general is known to us only as a phenomenon of brain, and we are not only unjustified in conceiving it otherwise, but also incapable of doing so. What the world is as world may be understood: it is phenomenal manifestation; and we can know that which manifests itself in it, directly from ourselves, by means of a thorough analysis of self-consciousness. Then, however, by means of this key to the nature of the world, the whole phenomenal manifestation can be deciphered, as I believe I have succeeded in doing. But if we leave the world in order to answer the questions indicated above, we have also left the whole sphere in which, not only connection according to reason and consequent, but even knowledge itself is possible; then all is instabilis tellus, innabilis unda. The nature of things before or beyond the world, and consequently beyond the will, is open to no investigation; because knowledge in general is itself only a phenomenon, and therefore exists only in the world as the world exists only in it. The inner being in itself of things is nothing that knows, no intellect, but an unconscious; knowledge is