Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/491

Rh gave it a positive appearance by means of a strictly dogmatic form, although its content is chiefly negative. His identification of the world with God has also this negative significance alone. For to call the world God is not to explain it: it remains a riddle under the one name as under the other. But these two negative truths had value for their age, as for every age in which there still are conscious or unconscious Cartesians. He makes the mistake, common to all philosophers before Locke, of starting from conceptions, without having previously investigated their origin, such, for example, as substance, cause, &c., and in such a method of procedure these conceptions then receive a much too extensive validity. Those who in the most recent times refused to acknowledge the Neo-Spinozism which had appeared, for example, Jacobi, were principally deterred from doing so by the bugbear of fatalism. By this is to be understood every doctrine which refers the existence of the world, together with the critical position of mankind in it, to any absolute necessity, i.e., to a necessity that cannot be further explained. Those who feared fatalism, again, believed that all that was of importance was to deduce the world from the free act of will of a being existing outside it; as if it were antecedently certain which of the two was more correct, or even better merely in relation to us. What is, however, especially assumed here is the non datur tertium, and accordingly hitherto every philosophy has represented one or the other. I am the first to depart from this; for I have actually established the Tertium: the act of will from which the world arises is our own. It is free; for the principle of sufficient reason, from which alone all necessity derives its significance, is merely the form of its phenomenon. Just on this account this phenomenon, if it once exists, is absolutely necessary in its course; in consequence of this alone we can recognise in it the nature of the act of will, and accordingly eventualiter will otherwise.