On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in Nature: Two Essays (revised edition)Schopenhauer, Arthur
Philosophy
On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in Nature: Two Essays (revised edition)
Schopenhauer, Arthur
Sufficient reason; Will
The purely formal part of empirical perception--that is, Space, Time,
and the law of Causality--is contained _à priori_ in the intellect;
but this is not the case with the application of this formal part to
empirical data, which has to be acquired by the Understanding through
practice and experience. Therefore new-born infants, though they
no doubt receive impressions of light and of colour, still do not
apprehend or indeed, strictly speaking, see objects. The first weeks of
their existence are rather passed in a kind of stupor, from which they
awaken by degrees when their Understanding begins to apply its function
to the data supplied by the senses, especially those of touch and
of sight, whereby they gradually gain consciousness of the objective
world. This newly-arising consciousness may be clearly recognised
by the look of growing intelligence in their eyes and a degree of
intention in their movements, especially in the smile with which they
show for the first time recognition of those who take care of them.
They may even be observed to make experiments for a time with their
sight and touch, in order to complete their apprehension of objects by
different lights, in different directions and at different distances:
thus pursuing a silent, but serious course of study, till they have
succeeded in mastering all the intellectual operations in seeing which
have been described. The fact of this schooling can be ascertained
still more clearly through those who, being born blind, have been
operated upon late in life, since they are able to give an account
of their impressions. Cheselden's blind man[82] was not an isolated
instance, and we find in all similar cases the fact corroborated,
that those who obtain their sight late in life, no doubt, see light,
outlines, and colours, as soon as the operation is over, but that they
have no objective perception of objects until their Understanding has
learnt to apply its causal law to data and to changes which are new
to it. On first beholding his room and the various objects in it,
Cheselden's blind man did not distinguish one thing from another; he
simply received the general impression of a totality all in one piece,
which he took for a smooth, variegated surface. It never occurred to
him to recognise a number of detached objects, lying one behind the
other at different distances. With blind people of this sort, it is by
the sense of touch, to which objects are already known, that they have
to be introduced to the sense of sight. In the beginning, the patient
has no appreciation whatever of distances and tries to lay hold of
everything. One, when he first saw his own house from outside, could
not conceive how so small a thing could contain so many rooms. Another
was highly delighted to find, some weeks after the operation, that the
engravings hanging on the walls of his room represented a variety of
objects. The "Morgenblatt" of October 23rd, 1817, contains an account
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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