Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/95

Rh they were works of the pen, and therefore had to resort to the assumption of the assistance of a devil in order to explain them. For, let it be said again, it is our intellect which by means of its own forms, space, time, and causality, apprehends as object the act of will, in itself metaphysical and indivisible, which exhibits itself in the phenomenon of an animal, – it is our intellect which first produces the multiplicity and diversity of the parts, and is then struck with amazement at their perfect agreement and conspiring together, which proceeds from the original unity; whereby then, in a certain sense, it marvels at its own work.

If we give ourselves up to the contemplation of the indescribably and infinitely ingenious construction of any animal, even if it were only the commonest insect, lose ourselves in admiration of it, and it now occurs to us that nature recklessly exposes even this exceedingly ingenious and highly complicated organism daily and by thousands to destruction by accident, animal rapacity, and human wantonness, this wild prodigality fills us with amazement; but our amazement is based upon an ambiguity of the conceptions, for we have in our minds the human work of art which is accomplished by the help of the intellect and by overcoming a foreign and resisting material, and therefore certainly costs much trouble. Nature's works, on the contrary, however ingenious they may be, cost her absolutely no trouble; for here the will to work is already the work itself, since, as has already been said, the organism is merely the visibility of the will which is here present, brought about in the brain.

In consequence of the nature of organised beings which has been set forth, teleology, as the assumption of the adaptation of every part to its end, is a perfectly safe guide in considering the whole of organised nature; on the other hand, in a metaphysical regard, for the explanation of nature beyond the possibility of experience, it must only be regarded as valid in a secondary and subsidiary manner for the confirmation of principles of