Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/70

54 objectively, or perceived in itself, but only under all the conditions of the idea, and therefore only as phenomenon. Under these conditions, however, it exhibits itself at once as body, i.e., as matter clothed in form and quality. But form is conditioned by space, and quality or power of acting by causality; thus both depend upon the functions of the intellect. Matter without them would just be the thing in itself, i.e., the will itself. Therefore, as has been said, Plotinus and Giordano Bruno could only be brought by a completely objective path to the assertion that matter in and for itself is without extension, consequently without spatial properties, consequently incorporeal.

Because, then, matter is the visibility of the will, and every force in itself is will, no force can appear without a material substratum, and conversely no body can be without forces dwelling in it which constitute its quality. Therefore a body is the union of matter and form which is called substance (Stoff). Force and substance are in separable because at bottom they are one; for, as Kant has shown, matter itself is given us only as the union of two forces, the force of expansion and that of attraction. Thus there is no opposition between force and substance, rather they are precisely one.

Led by the course of our consideration to this standpoint, and having attained to this metaphysical view of matter, we will confess without reluctance that the temporal origin of forms, shapes, or species cannot reasonably be sought elsewhere than in matter. Some time or other they must have come forth from it, just because it is the mere visibility of the will which constitutes the inner nature of all phenomena. In that the will manifests itself, i.e., presents itself objectively to the intellect, matter, as its visibility, assumes form by means of the functions of the intellect. Hence the Schoolmen said: "Materia appetit formam." That such was the origin of all forms of life cannot be doubted: we cannot even conceive it otherwise. Whether, however, now, since the paths to the