Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/85

Rh of nature which hitherto were explained from necessity, or that the same strict necessity is recognised in motivation as in mechanical causality. The two have merely changed places: freedom has been transferred to the Esse, and necessity limited to the Operari.

In short, Determinism stands firm. For fifteen hundred years men have wearied themselves in vain to shake it, influenced by certain crotchets, which are well known, but dare scarcely yet be called by their name. Yet in accordance with it the world becomes a mere puppet-show, drawn by wires (motives), without it being even possible to understand for whose amusement. If the piece has a plan, then fate is the director; if it has none, then blind necessity. There is no other deliverance from this absurdity than the knowledge that the being and nature of all things is the manifestation of a really free will, which knows itself in them; for their doing and acting cannot be delivered from necessity. To save freedom from fate and chance, it had to be transferred from the action to the existence.

As now necessity only affects the phenomenon, not the thing in itself, i.e., the true nature of the world, so also does multiplicity. This is sufficiently explained in § 25 of the first volume. I have only to add here one remark in confirmation and illustration of this truth.

Every one knows only one being quite immediately – his own will in self-consciousness. Everything else he knows only indirectly, and then judges it by analogy with this; a process which he carries further in proportion to the grade of his reflective powers. Even this ultimately springs from the fact that there really is only one being; the illusion of multiplicity (Maja), which proceeds from the forms of external, objective comprehension, could not penetrate to inner, simple consciousness; therefore this always finds before it only one being.

If we consider the perfection of the works of nature, which can never be sufficiently admired, and which even