reason in all its aspects is only the form of knowledge, its validity
extends only to the idea, to the phenomena, to the visibility of the will,
but not to the will itself, which becomes visible.
If now every action of my body is the manifestation of an act of will in
which my will itself in general, and as a whole, thus my character,
expresses itself under given motives, manifestation of the will must be
the inevitable condition and presupposition of every action. For the fact
of its manifestation cannot depend upon something which does not exist
directly and only through it, which consequently is for it merely
accidental, and through which its manifestation itself would be merely
accidental. Now that condition is just the whole body itself. Thus the
body itself must be manifestation of the will, and it must be related to
my will as a whole, that is, to my intelligible character, whose
phenomenal appearance in time is my empirical character, as the particular
action of the body is related to the particular act of the will. The whole
body, then, must be simply my will become visible, must be my will itself,
so far as this is object of perception, an idea of the first class. It has
already been advanced in confirmation of this that every impression upon
my body also affects my will at once and immediately, and in this respect
is called pain or pleasure, or, in its lower degrees, agreeable or
disagreeable sensation; and also, conversely, that every violent movement
of the will, every emotion or passion, convulses the body and disturbs the
course of its functions. Indeed we can also give an etiological account,
though a very incomplete one, of the origin of my body, and a somewhat
better account of its development and conservation, and this is the
substance of physiology. But physiology merely explains its theme in
precisely the same way as motives explain action. Thus the physiological
explanation of the functions of the body detracts just as little from the
philosophical truth that the whole existence of this body and the sum
total of its functions are merely the objectification of that will which
appears in its outward actions in accordance with a motive, as the
establishment of the individual action through the motive and the
necessary sequence of the action from the motive conflicts with the fact
that action in general, and according to its nature, is only the
manifestation of a will which itself has no ground. If, however,
physiology tries to refer even these outward actions, the immediate
voluntary movements, to causes in the organism,—for example, if it
explains the movement of the muscles as resulting from the presence of
fluids (“like the contraction of a cord when it is wet,” says Reil in his
“Archiv für Physiologie,” vol. vi. p. 153), even supposing it really could
give a thorough explanation of this kind, yet this would never invalidate
the immediately certain truth that every voluntary motion (_functiones