On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in Nature: Two Essays (revised edition)
Schopenhauer · en
nutritious--which spring from the same earth, upon which the same
sun shines and the same rain falls, all resemblance ceases, and with
it all comprehensibility for us. For here causality already appears
in increased potency: that is, as stimulus and as susceptibility for
stimulus. The schema of cause and effect alone has remained; we know
that this is cause, that effect; but we know nothing whatever of the
nature and disposition of causality. Between cause and effect there
is not only no qualitative resemblance, but no quantitative relation:
the relatively greater importance of the effect as compared with its
cause increases more and more; the effect of the stimulus too does
not augment in proportion with the enhancement of that stimulus; in
fact just the contrary often takes place. Finally, when we come to the
sphere of beings which have knowledge, there is no longer any sort of
resemblance or relation between the action performed and the object
which, as representation, evokes it. Animals, however, as they are
restricted to _perceptible_ representations, still need the _presence_
of the object acting as a motive, which action is then immediate and
infallible (if we leave training, _i.e._ habit enforced by fear, out
of the question). For animals are unable to carry about with them
conceptions that might render them independent of present impressions,
enable them to reflect, and qualify them for deliberate action. Man
can do this. Therefore when at last we come to rational beings, the
motive is even no longer a present, perceptible, actually existing,
real thing, but a mere conception having its present existence only
in the brain of the person who acts, but which is extracted from
many multifarious perceptions, from the experience of former years,
or has been handed down in words. Here the separation between cause
and effect is so wide, the effect has grown so much stronger as
compared with the cause, that the vulgar mind no longer perceives the
existence of a cause at all, and the acts of the will appear to it to
be unconditioned, causeless: that is to say, free. This is just why,
when we reflect upon them from outside, the movements of our own body
present themselves as if they took place without cause, or to speak
more properly, by a miracle. Experience and reflection alone teach
us that these movements, like all others, are only possible as the
effects of causes, here called motives, and that, on this ascending
scale, it is only as to material reality that the cause has failed
to keep pace with the effect; whereas it has kept pace with it as to
dynamical reality, energy.--At this degree of the scale therefore--the
highest in Nature--causality has become less intelligible to us than
ever. Nothing but the bare schema, taken in a quite general sense,
now remains, and the ripest reflection is needed to recognise its
applicability and the necessity that schema brings with it everywhere.