which knowledge presents itself as belonging, when considered, not as is usual from the inside, but realistically, from a standpoint outside itself, as if it were something foreign: that is, when we gain the objective point of view for it, which is so extremely important in order to complete the subjective one.[258] We find that knowledge then presents itself as the _mediator of motives_, _i.e._ of the action of causality upon beings endowed with intellect--in other words, as that which receives the changes from outside upon which those in the inside must follow, as that which acts as mediator between both. Now upon this narrow line hovers _the world as representation_--that is to say, the whole corporeal world, stretched out in Space and Time, which _as such_ can never exist anywhere but in the brain any more than dreams, which, as long as they last, exist in the same way. What the intellect does for animals and for man, as the mediator of motives, susceptibility for stimuli does for plants, and susceptibility for every sort of cause for inorganic bodies: and strictly speaking, all this differs merely in degree. For, exclusively as a consequence of this susceptibility to outward impressions having enhanced itself in animals proportionately to their requirements till it has reached the point where a nervous system and a brain become necessary, does consciousness arise as a function of that brain, and in it the objective world, whose forms (Time, Space, Causality) are the way in which that function is performed. Therefore we find the intellect originally laid out entirely with a view to subjectivity, destined merely to serve the purposes of the will, consequently as something quite secondary and subordinate; nay, in a sense, as something which appears only _per accidens_; as a condition of the action of mere motives, instead of stimuli, which has become necessary in the higher degree of animal existence. The image of the world in Space and Time, which thus arises, is only the map[259] on which the motives present themselves as ends. It also conditions the spacial and causal connection in which the objects perceived stand to one another; nevertheless it is only the mediating link between the motive and the act of volition. Now, to take such an image as this of the world, arising in this manner, accidentally, in the intellect, _i.e._ in the cerebral function of animal beings, through the means to their ends being represented and the path of these ephemera on their planet being thus illumined--to take this image, we say, this mere cerebral phenomenon, for the true, ultimate essence of things (thing in itself), to take the concatenation of its parts for the absolute order of the Universe (relations between things in themselves), and to assume all this to exist even independently of the brain, would indeed be a leap! Here in fact, an assumption such as this must appear to us as the height of rashness and presumption; yet it is the foundation