Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/77

Rh leads it to the fiction of atoms, which now become the material out of which it thinks to construct the mysterious manifestations of all original forces. But here it has really no longer to do with empirically given matter, but with a matter which is not to be found in rerum natura, but is rather a mere abstraction of that real matter, a matter which would absolutely have no other than those mechanical qualities which, with the exception of gravity, can be pretty well construed a priori, just because they depend upon the forms of space, time, and causality, and consequently upon our intellect; to this poor material, then, it finds itself reduced for the construction of its castle in the air.

In this way it inevitably becomes atomism; as happened to it already in its childhood in the hands of Leucippus and Dernocritus, and happens to it again now that it has come to a second childhood through age; with the French because they have never known the Kantian philosophy, and with the Germans because they have forgotten it. And indeed it carries it further in this its second childhood than in its first. Not merely solid bodies are supposed to consist of atoms, but liquids, water, air, gas, nay, even light, which is supposed to be the undulations of a completely hypothetical and altogether unproved ether, consisting of atoms, the difference of the rapidity of these undulations causing colours. This is an hypothesis which, like the earlier Newtonian seven-colour theory, starts from an analogy with music, entirely arbitrarily assumed, and then violently carried out. One must really be credulous to an unheard-of degree to let oneself be persuaded that the innumerable different ether vibrations proceeding from the infinite multiplicity of coloured surfaces in this varied world could constantly, and each in its own time, run through and everywhere cross each other without ever disturbing each other, but should rather produce through such tumult and confusion the profoundly peaceful aspect of illumined nature and art.