Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/79

Rh runs back to these is their a priori assumption; for these are their thing in itself. To attain this end the vital force is reduced to chemical forces (which are insidiously and unjustifiably called molecular forces), and all processes of unorganised nature to mechanism, i.e., to action and reaction. And thus at last the whole world and everything in it becomes merely a piece of mechanical ingenuity, like the toys worked by levers, wheels, and sand, which represent a mine or the work on a farm. The source of the evil is, that through the amount of hand-work which experimenting requires the head-work of thinking has been allowed to get out of practice. The crucible and the voltaic pile are supposed to assume its functions; hence also the profound abhorrence of all philosophy.

But the matter might be put in this way. One might say that materialism, as it has hitherto appeared, has only failed because it did not adequately know the matter out of which it thought to construct the world, and therefore was dealing, not with matter itself, but with a property-less substitute for it. If, on the contrary, instead of this, it had taken the actual and empirically given matter (i.e., material substance, or rather substances), endowed as it is with all physical, chemical, electrical properties, and also with the power of spontaneously producing life out of itself, thus the true mater rerum, from the obscurity of whose womb all phenomena and forms come forth, to fall back into it some time again; from this, i.e., from matter fully comprehended and exhaustively known, a world might have been constructed of which materialism would not need to be ashamed. Quite true: only the trick would then consist in this, that the Quæsita had been placed in the Data, for professedly what was taken as given, and made the starting-point of the deduction, was mere matter, but really it included all the mysterious forces of nature which cling to it, or more correctly, by means of it become visible to us, much the same as if