a beautiful series of which was recently laid before the Académie des sciences by Chevreul, who let sunlight act upon different coloured materials. The most beautiful thing in these experiments is, that a white roll of paper which has been exposed to the sunlight exhibits the same effects, nay, does so even after six months, if during this time it has been secured in a firmly closed metal tube. Has, then, the tremulation paused for six months, and does it now fall into time again? (Comptes rendus of 20th December 1858.) This whole hypothesis of vibrating ether atoms is not only a chimera, but equals in awkward crudeness the worst of Democritus, and yet is shameless enough, at the present day, to profess to be an established fact, and has thus brought it about that it is orthodoxly repeated by a thousand stupid scribblers of all kinds, who are devoid of all knowledge of such things, and is believed in as a gospel. But the doctrine of atoms in general goes still further: it is soon a case of Spartam, quam nactus es, orna! Different perpetual motions are then ascribed to all the atoms, revolving, vibrating, &c., according to the office of each; in the same way every atom has its atmosphere of ether, or something else, and whatever other similar fancies there may be. The fancies of Schelling's philosophy of nature and its disciples were for the most part ingenious, lofty, or at least witty; but these, on the contrary, are clumsy, insipid, paltry, and awkward, the production of minds which, in the first place, are unable to think any other reality than a fabulous, qualityless matter, which is also an absolute object, i. e., an object without a subject; and secondly can think of no other activity than motion and impact: these two alone are comprehensible to them, and that everything 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 propertyless 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 under the name of the dish we understand what lies upon it. For in fact, for our knowledge, matter is really merely the vehicle of the qualities and natural forces, which appear as its accidents, and just because I have traced these back to the will I call matter the mere visibility of the will. Stripped of all these qualities, matter remains behind as that which is without qualities, the caput mortuum of nature, out of which nothing can honestly be made. If, on the contrary, in the manner referred to, one leaves it all these properties, one is guilty of a concealed petitio principii, for one has assumed the Quæsita beforehand as Data. But what is accomplished with this will no longer be a proper materialism, but merely naturalism, i. e., an absolute system of physics, which, as was shown in chap. 17 already referred to, can never assume and fill the place of metaphysics, just because it only begins after so many assumptions, thus never undertakes to explain things from the foundation. Mere naturalism is therefore essentially based simply upon qualitates occultæ, which one can never get beyond except, as I have done, by calling in the aid of the subjective source of knowledge, which then certainly leads to the long and toilsome round-about path of metaphysics, for it presupposes the complete analysis of self-consciousness and of the intellect and will given in it. However, the starting from what is objective, at the foundation of which lies external perception, so distinct and comprehensible, is a path so natural and which presents itself of its own accord to man, that naturalism, and consequently, because this cannot satisfy as it is not exhaustive, materialism, are systems to which the speculative reason must necessarily have come, nay, must have come first of all. Therefore at the very beginning of the history of philosophy we meet naturalism, in the systems of the Ionic philosophers, and then materialism in the teaching of Leucippus and Democritus, and also later we see them ever appear anew from time to time.
Chapter XXV. Transcendent Considerations Concerning The Will As Thing In Itself
Even the merely empirical consideration of nature recognises a constant transition from the simplest and most necessary manifestation of a universal force of nature up to the life and consciousness of man himself, through gentle gradations, and with only relative, and for the most part fluctuating, limits. Reflection, following this view, and penetrating somewhat more deeply into it, will soon be led to the conviction that in all these phenomena, the inner nature, that which manifests itself, that which appears, is one and the same, which comes forth ever more distinctly; and accordingly that what exhibits itself in a million forms of infinite diversity, and so carries on the most varied and the strangest play without beginning or end, this is one being which is so closely disguised behind all these masks that it does not even recognise itself, and therefore often treats itself roughly. Thus the great doctrine of the ἑν και παν early appeared both in the east and in the west, and, in spite of all contradiction, has asserted itself, or at least constantly revived. We, however, have now entered even deeper into the secret, since by what has already been said we have been led to the insight that when in any phenomenon a knowing consciousness is added to that inner being which lies at the foundation of all phenomena, a consciousness which when directed inwardly becomes self-consciousness, then that inner being presents itself to this self-consciousness as that which is so familiar and so mysterious, and is denoted by the word will. Accordingly we have called that universal fundamental nature of all phenomena the will, after that manifestation in which it unveils itself to us most fully; and by this word nothing is further from our intention than to denote an unknown x; but, on the contrary, we denote that which at least on one side is infinitely better known and more intimate than anything else.
Let us now call to mind a truth, the fullest and most thorough proof of which will be found in my prize essay on the freedom of the will – the truth that on account of the absolutely universal validity of the law of causality, the conduct or the action of all existences in this world is always strictly necessitated by the causes which in each case call it forth. And in this respect it makes no difference whether such an action has been occasioned by causes in the strictest sense of the word, or by stimuli, or finally by motives, for these differences refer only to the grade of the susceptibility of the different kinds of existences. On this point we must entertain no illusion: the law of causality knows no exception; but everything, from the movement of a mote in a sunbeam to the most deeply considered action of man, is subject to it with equal strictness. Therefore, in the whole course of the world, neither could a mote in a sunbeam describe any other line in its flight than it has described, nor a man act any other way than he has acted; and no truth is more certain than this, that all that happens, be it small or great, happens with absolute necessity. Consequently, at every given moment of time, the whole condition of all things is firmly and accurately determined by the condition which has just preceded it, and so is it with the stream of time back to infinity and on to infinity. Thus the course of the world is like that of a clock after it has been put together and wound up;
