On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in Nature: Two Essays (revised edition)
Schopenhauer · en
By the preceding explanations of the processes in seeing and feeling,
I have incontestably shown that empirical perception is essentially
the work of _the Understanding_, for which the material only is
supplied by the senses in sensation--and a poor material it is, on the
whole; so that _the Understanding_ is, in fact, the artist, while the
senses are but the under-workmen who hand it the materials. But the
process consists throughout in referring from given effects to their
causes, which by this process are enabled to present themselves as
objects in Space. The very fact that we presuppose Causality in this
process, proves precisely that this law must have been supplied by
the Understanding itself; for it could never have found its way into
the intellect from outside. It is indeed the first condition of all
empirical perception; but this again is the form in which all external
experience presents itself to us; how then can this law of Causality be
derived from experience, when it is itself essentially presupposed by
experience?--It was just because of the utter impossibility of this,
and because Locke's philosophy had put an end to all _à priority_,
that Hume denied the whole reality of the conception of Causality.
He had besides already mentioned two false hypotheses in the seventh
section of his "Inquiry concerning the Human Understanding," which
recently have again been advanced: the one, that the effect of the will
upon the members of our body; the other, that the resistance opposed
to our pressure by outward objects, is the origin and prototype of
the conception of Causality. Hume refutes both in his own way and
according to his own order of ideas. I argue as follows. There is
no causal connection whatever between acts of the will and actions
of the body; on the contrary, both are immediately one and the same
thing, only perceived in a double aspect--that is, on the one hand,
in our self-consciousness, or inner sense, as acts of the will; on
the other, simultaneously in exterior, spacial brain-perception,
as actions of the body.[91] The second hypothesis is false, first
because, as I have already shown at length, a mere sensation of touch
does not yet give any objective perception whatever, let alone the
conception of Causality, which never can arise from the feeling of an
impeded muscular effort: besides impediments of this kind often occur
without any external cause; secondly, because our pressing against an
external object necessarily has a motive, and this already presupposes
apprehension of that object, which again presupposes knowledge of
Causality.--But the only means of radically proving the conception of
Causality to be independent of all experience was by showing, as I have
done, that the whole possibility of experience is conditioned by the
conception of Causality. In § 23 I intend to show that Kant's proof,
propounded with a similar intent, is false.