§142

This nothingness finds its expression in the entire form of existence; in the infinity of time and space, as opposed to the finitude of the individual in both; in the fleeting present as the sole mode of reality's existence; in the dependence and relativity of all things; in constant becoming without being; in constant desire without satisfaction; in the constant obstruction of dying, of which life consists until the obstruction is overcome. Time and the transitoriness of all things in it and by means of it are merely the form under which the nothingness of its own striving is revealed to the will to life, which is intransitory as thing in itself. – Time is that by virtue of which everything at every moment turns to nothing in our hands, whereby it loses all true value.

§143

What has been, that is no more; it exists no more than that which has never been. But everything that is, in the next moment has already been. Therefore the most insignificant present has the advantage of reality over the most significant past, whereby it relates to the former as something to nothing.

All of a sudden, to one's astonishment, one exists after not having been for countless millennia, and after a brief period, one must not be again for the same length of time. – This can never be right, says the heart; and even a crude mind has to have an inkling of the ideality of time from considerations of this kind. But this, along with the ideality of space, is the key to all true metaphysics, because through it room is made for an entirely different order of things than nature. This is why Kant is so great.

Every event of our life belongs only for a moment to the Is, then forever to the Was. Each evening we are poorer by one day. Perhaps we would go insane watching the brief span of our time running out, if not for a mysterious awareness lying deep at the bottom of our being that the never to be exhausted fountain of eternity belongs to us, in order to enable us to refresh the period of life forever.

§183

As much as I admire the religious and philosophical works of Sanskrit literature, I still have only rarely been able to find pleasure in the poetic; in fact, at times it has seemed to me as though these were as tasteless and monstrous as the sculpture of the same people. Even their dramatic works I value chiefly only for the very didactic elucidations and proofs of religious faith and morals that they contain. All this might stem from the fact that poetry by nature is untranslatable. For in it thoughts and words are so intimately and firmly intertwined, like the uterine and foetal parts of the placenta, that we cannot substitute foreign words without affecting the thoughts. After all, everything with metre and rhyme is inherently a compromise between thought and language; however, by its nature this can only be accomplished on its own native soil of thought, not on a foreign soil in which we would like to transplant it, let alone in one so barren as the minds of translators usually are. What greater contrast could there be, really, than the free outpouring of the poet's inspiration, which on its own and instinctively comes into being dressed in metre and rhyme, and the painstaking, calculating, cold, syllable-counting and rhyme-seeking agony of the translator? Moreover, since there is no lack in Europe of poetic works that address us directly, but there is indeed a lack of proper metaphysical insights, I'm of the opinion that translators from Sanskrit should apply their efforts much less to poetry and much more to the Vedas, Upanishads and philosophical works.

I am aware of an act of self-denial in presenting to the public verses which have no claim to make on poetic merit, simply because one cannot be poet and philosopher at the same time. This takes place solely and strictly for the sake of those who one day, in the course of time, will take such a lively interest in my philosophy that they will even desire to have some kind of personal acquaintance with its author, but which then will no longer be possible to make. Now since people dare to show their subjective inner selves more freely in poems, under the guise of metre and rhyme, than in prose, and generally communicate in a more purely human, more personal and in any case quite different way than in philosophemes, and precisely by doing so get a bit closer to their readers, so I make the sacrifice to those future sympathetic readers of a few attempts at poetry, mostly from my youth, presenting them here in the expectation that they will thank me for it. I ask any others to view this as a private matter between us, which just happens to be conducted here publicly. Publishing verse is to literature what singing solo is to society, namely an act of personal devotion – to which only the foregoing considerations have been able to motivate me.

§1

The very ground upon which all our knowledge and science rest is the inexplicable. Therefore every explanation leads back to this, by means of middle terms more or less, as on the sea the sounding lead now finds the bottom in greater, now in lesser depths, yet ultimately must reach it everywhere. This inexplicable devolves to metaphysics.

§2

Almost everyone thinks constantly that they are this or that human being (tis anthrôpos), along with the corollaries arising from this; on the other hand, that they are a human being at all (ho anthrôpos), and which corollaries arise from this, scarcely occurs to them and yet it is the main thing. Those few who incline more the way of the latter than the former principle are philosophers. The direction of the others, however, traces back to the fact that from the start they see always only the particular and individual in things, not what is universal in them. Only the more highly gifted see, more and more and according to their degree of eminence, the universal in particular things. This important difference permeates the entire cognitive faculty to such an extent that it reaches down to the intuition of the most mundane objects; which is why this intuition is different in eminent minds than in ordinary ones. This comprehension of the universal in the particular as it presents itself each time also corresponds with what I have called the pure, will-less subject of cognition, and what I have set up as the subjective correlate of the Platonic Idea. This is so because cognition can only remain will-less when it is trained upon the universal, whereas the objects of willing lie in particular things. Hence also why the cognition of animals is strictly limited to this particular and correspondingly their intellect remains exclusively in the service of their will. Moreover the former direction of the spirit towards the universal is the unavoidable condition for genuine achievements in philosophy, poetry, and in general in the arts and sciences.

For the intellect in the service of the will, hence in practical use, there are only particular things; for the intellect that does art or science, and is therefore active for itself, there are only universalities, entire varieties, species, classes, Ideas of things, since even the plastic artist wants to represent the Idea in the individual, hence the species.

§257

Just as the largest library when not properly arranged does not provide as much use as a very moderate but well arranged one, so the greatest amount of knowledge, if not worked through by one's own thinking, has much less value than a far lesser quantity that has been thought through in various ways. For only through the universal combination of what we know, and comparing every truth with every other, do we completely assimilate our own knowledge and take control of it. One can only think through what one knows, which is why we should learn something; but one also knows only what has been thought through.

Now we can always apply ourselves arbitrarily to reading and learning, whereas to thinking we really cannot. For thinking must be kindled and sustained like a fire by a draught of air; there must be some interest in its subject, which may be purely objective or merely subjective. The latter is only present in our personal affairs, but the former is only for those minds who think by nature, for whom thinking is as natural as breathing, but who are very rare. Therefore in most scholars there is so little of it.

§258

The difference between the effect that thinking for oneself has on the mind, versus that of reading is incredibly large, which is why it constantly magnifies the original difference between minds, by virtue of which we are driven to one or the other. Reading, that is, forces thoughts on the mind that are as foreign and heterogeneous to its momentary direction and mood as is the seal to the wax on which it presses its imprint. The mind here experiences a total external compulsion to think this or that at random, for which it simply has no inclination or mood. – On the other hand, with thinking for oneself it follows its own peculiar drive, as this for the moment was more specifically determined by either the external environment or some recollection. For the intuitive environment does not force one specific thought on the mind, like reading; instead, it provides the mind with material and occasion to think what is in accordance with its nature and present mood.

§244

When we see the many and manifold institutions of teaching and learning and the great throng of pupils and masters, one could think that the human race is quite keen about insight and truth. But here appearance is deceiving. The masters teach in order to earn money and they do not strive for truth, but for its appearance and standing; the pupils do not learn in order to attain knowledge and insight, but in order to babble and give themselves airs. Thus a new generation like this appears every thirty years, a wide-eyed child, knowing nothing and in all haste summarily devouring the results of human knowledge accumulated over thousands of years, and then claiming to be smarter than all the past. For this purpose he attends universities and reaches for books, moreover for the newest ones as his contemporaries and peers. Everything has to be brief and new, just as he is new! Then he gets ready to start judging. – I have not even taken into account here the actual professions.

§245

Students and scholars of all kinds and every age as a rule are only focused on information, not on insight. They make it a point of honour to have information about everything, about all rocks, plants, battles, experiments and especially about every manner of book. It does not occur to them that information is a mere means to insight, having little or no value in itself, whereas it is the way of thinking that characterizes philosophical minds. Occasionally, when I consider the impressive erudition of these know-it-alls I say to myself: oh how little they have had to think about, in order to have been able to read so much! Even when it is reported of the elder Pliny that he was constantly reading, or having things read to him at the table, on trips, in the bath and so on, the question arises for me whether the man was so terribly lacking in thoughts of his own that those of others had to be incessantly transfused to him, just as a consommé is given to a consumptive to keep him alive. And neither his undiscriminating gullibility nor his unspeakably repulsive, incomprehensible, and paper-saving collectanea style does anything to give me a high opinion of his capacity to think for himself.

§61

Thing in itself means that which exists independently of our perception, hence that which actually is. For Democritus it was formed matter, and basically it was the same thing for Locke; to Kant it was = x, to me will.

How Democritus took the issue entirely in this sense and therefore stands at the top of this arrangement, is demonstrated by the following passage from Sextus Empiricus (Against the Mathematicians, Book III, § 135) who had his works in front of him and often quotes from them verbatim: ‘But Democritus denies what appears to sense perception and asserts that nothing of it appears as it is in truth, but instead only as it seems to us; in truth however what actually is present is the existence of atoms and the void.’ I recommend the entire passage be read, where later we also find: ‘In reality therefore we do not know how a thing is constituted or not constituted’, also ‘How everything is constituted is in truth difficult to know’.

All this simply states that ‘we do not know things according to what they may be in themselves, but instead merely as they appear’, and it opens that series that originates from the most decisive materialism but leads to idealism and concludes with me. We find a strikingly clear and distinct separation of the thing in itself from appearance in a passage in Porphyry which Stobaeus has preserved for us in the forty-third chapter of his first book, fragment 3. It reads: ‘When it is said of the sensual and material that it is pulled apart from all sides and is changeable, then this is actually the case … But what is valid for that which actually is and exists in itself is that it is eternally grounded in itself and likewise that it always remains the same to itself etc.’ (Stobaeus, vol. II, p. 716.)

§62

Just as we know merely the surface but not the great solid mass of the interior of the globe, so too we know empirically of the things and of the world generally nothing but their appearance, i.e., their surface. The precise knowledge of these things is physics in the broadest sense of the word.

§304

Every animal being, especially the human, requires a certain suitability and proportion between his will and his intellect in order to exist and get on in the world. The more precisely and properly nature has achieved these, the more easily, certainly and pleasantly he will go through the world. Meanwhile a mere approximation to the actual correct point suffices to protect him from ruin. Accordingly there is a certain latitude within the borders of the correctness and suitability of said relationship. Now the norm that applies to this is as follows. Since the determination of the intellect is to be the beacon and guide of the will's steps, then the more vehement, impetuous and passionate the inner stress of a will, the more perfect and bright must be the intellect assigned to it, so that the vehemence of willing and striving, the smoulder of the passions and the impetuosity of the affects do not lead the human being astray, or sweep him towards thoughtless, wrong and ruinous activity, all of which will inevitably be the case given a very vehement will and very weak intellect. On the other hand a phlegmatic character, and thus a weak, dull will, can even manage and get by with a negligible intellect, while a moderate will requires a moderate intellect. Generally any misalignment between a will and its intellect, i.e., any deviation from the proportion resulting from the above norm, tends to make someone unhappy, and this regardless of which side is misaligned. That is, even the abnormally strong and overwhelming development of the intellect and the disproportionate preponderance over the will that stems from it, as that which constitutes what is essential in the real genius, are not only superfluous for the needs and purposes of life, but outright harmful to them. For then in youth the excessive energy of apprehending the objective world, accompanied by lively imagination and lacking all experience, renders the mind susceptible to and easily fills it with extravagant concepts and even chimeras, which produces an eccentric and indeed fantastical character.

§235

Kant presented his aesthetic in the Critique of the Power of Judgment; accordingly, in this chapter I will add to my aesthetic meditations above a small critique of the power of judgement, but only that which is empirically given, mainly for the purpose of saying that for the most part there is no such thing, since it is as rare a bird as the phoenix, for whose appearance one has to wait five hundred years.

§236

With the expression taste, not itself tastefully selected, we refer to that discovery or even mere recognition of the aesthetically correct, which happens without the guidance of a rule since either no rule extends so far or it was unknown to the exerciser or to the mere critic, respectively. – Instead of taste one could say aesthetic feeling, if this did not contain a tautology.

The interpreting, judging taste is, so to speak, the female to the male of productive talent or genius. Incapable of begetting, it consists in the capacity to conceive, i.e., to recognize as such the correct, the beautiful, the suitable – as well as its opposite, and therefore to distinguish between good and bad, to identify and honour the former, and to reject the latter.

§237

Authors can be divided into meteors, planets and fixed stars. – The first kind deliver momentary explosive effects; one looks up, cries “look there!” and they are gone forever. – The second kind, the planets, have much greater longevity. They shine often more brightly than the fixed stars, although merely because of their proximity, and those who do not know better take them for the fixed stars. Meanwhile they too must soon give up their place, and furthermore they have only borrowed light and a sphere of influence restricted to their fellow orbiters (contemporaries). They wander and change; theirs is a circulation of a few years. – The third kind alone are unchanging, stand fixed in the firmament, have their own light, and act at one time as well as another, since they do not alter their appearance by a change in our standpoint, having no parallax. They do not belong to one system (nation) like the others, but to the world. But precisely because of their lofty position their light usually requires many years before it is visible to inhabitants of the earth.

§161

To a certain extent it can be seen a priori, and colloquially it is self-evident, that that which now produces the phenomenon of the world must also be capable of not doing this, consequently of remaining at rest; or, in other words, that there must also be a systole to the present diastole. Now if the former is the appearance of life's willing, then the other will be the appearance of its non-willing. Also this will essentially be identical with the great Sakhepat of the Veda doctrine (in the Oupnek'hat, vol. 1, p. 163), the Nirvana of the Buddhists, also with the epekeina of the Neoplatonists.

Counter to certain silly objections I maintain that the negation of the will to life in no way signifies the annihilation of a substance, but the mere act of not-willing; the same thing that willed hitherto wills no more. Since we know this being, the will, as thing in itself merely in and through the act of willing, we are incapable of saying or grasping what else it is or does after it has given up this act; this is why negation for us, who are the appearance of the will, is a transition to nothingness.

The affirmation and negation of the will to life is a mere velle and nolle. The subject of these two acts is one and the same, and consequently as such it is not annihilated by one or the other act. Its velle manifests itself in this intuitive world, which is precisely why it is the appearance of its thing in itself. Of the nolle, on the other hand, we know no other appearance than merely its occurrence, and moreover in the individual, who already belongs originally to the appearance of the velle. Thus we see the nolle struggling always with the velle as long as the individual exists; if the individual has come to an end and the nolle achieved the upper hand in him, then this has been a pure declaration of the nolle (this is the meaning of the Papal canonization). Of the latter we can only say that its appearance cannot be that of the velle, but we do not know whether it appears at all, i.e., whether it obtains a secondary existence for an intellect which it would first have to produce.

§378

Kant wrote an essay on the living forces, but I would like to write a dirge and a threnody on them, because their all too excessive use in knocking, hammering and ramming has been a daily pain to me my whole life through. Of course there are people, indeed quite a few who smile at this, because they are insensitive to sounds; but these are the same ones who are also insensitive to reasons, thoughts, poetry and works of art, in brief, to spiritual impressions of any kind, due to the tough and unyielding texture of their brain matter. On the other hand, in the biographies or other accounts of personal utterances of almost all great writers, for instance Kant, Goethe, Lichtenberg, Jean Paul, I find complaints about the anguish caused to thinking men by noise; indeed, if such information is missing in any one case, then it is merely because the context did not lead to it. I interpret the matter as follows: just as a large diamond cut into pieces is equal in value only to so many small ones, or an army shattered to pieces and dissolved into small units is no longer capable of anything, so too a great mind is no more capable than an ordinary one as soon as it is interrupted, disturbed, distracted and diverted, because its superiority is conditioned by concentrating all its powers on one point and object, as a concave mirror does all of its rays, and precisely this is prevented by the noisy interruption. This is why eminent minds have always abhorred every kind of disturbance, interruption and diversion, especially those of a violent nature through noise, whereas others are not especially bothered by this. The most sensible and intelligent of all European nations has even called the rule ‘never interrupt’ its eleventh commandment. But noise is the most impertinent of all interruptions, since it breaks up and indeed breaks down even our own thoughts. But where there is nothing to interrupt, noise is of course not particularly sensed. – Occasionally I am tormented and bothered by a moderate and constant noise before I am clearly aware of it, in that I sense it merely as a constant hindrance to my thinking, like dragging a weight with my foot, until I realize what it is.

§148

If suffering is not the closest and most immediate goal of our life, then our existence is the most inexpedient thing in the world. For it is absurd to assume that endless pain, which springs from the distress that is essential to life and of which the world is everywhere full, should be pointless and purely accidental. Our sensitivity for pain is almost infinite, while that for pleasure has narrow limits. Each individual misfortune appears to be an exception, to be sure, but misfortune generally is the rule.

§ 149

Just as the brook makes no eddy as long as it encounters no obstacles, so too human as well as animal nature entail that we do not properly notice and realize everything that goes in accordance with our will. If we were to notice it, then it must not have immediately gone in accordance with our will, but must have met with some obstacle. – On the other hand, we sense directly, immediately and very clearly everything that opposes, crosses and resists our will, therefore all that is unpleasant and painful. Just as we do not feel the health of our entire body but only the small place where the shoe pinches, so too we do not think of the totality of our well-functioning affairs, but of some insignificant trifle that annoys us. – On this rests the negativity of well-being and happiness, frequently emphasized by me, as opposed to the positivity of pain.

Accordingly I know of no greater absurdity than that of most metaphysical systems which declare evil to be something negative, whereas it is precisely the positive that is making itself felt. On the other hand, the good, i.e., all happiness and satisfaction, is the negative, that is, the mere suspending of desire and ceasing of a pain.

What is also consistent with this is that as a rule we find joys far below but pains far above our expectation.

Whoever would like to briefly test the assertion that pleasure outweighs pain in the world, or that they are at least in equilibrium, should compare the feelings of the animal that devours another with those of the one being devoured.

§22

Every general truth is related to the special ones as gold is to silver, insofar as one can convert it into a considerable number of special truths that result from it, like a gold coin into small change. For example, that the entire life of plants is a deoxidation process, whereas an animal's is a process of oxidation; or that wherever an electric current circulates, a magnetic one immediately arises that cuts through it perpendicularly; or ‘no animal that does not breathe through a lung has a voice’ or ‘every fossilized animal belongs to an extinct species’; or ‘no egg laying animal has a diaphragm’ – these are general truths from which very many individual ones can be derived in order to use them for explaining phenomena that occur or even for anticipating them before they appear. The general truths are just as valuable in matters of morals and psychology; how golden is every general rule here too, every sentence of the kind, indeed, every proverb! For they are the quintessence of thousands of occurrences that repeat themselves each day and are illustrated by them through exemplification.

§23

An analytic judgement is merely a concept pulled apart; a synthetic judgement on the other hand is the formation of a new concept from two already present in different form in the intellect. But the combination of these must then be brought about and grounded by some kind of intuition; according to whether the latter is empirical or purely a priori, the judgement stemming from it will be synthetic a posteriori or a priori.

Every analytic judgement contains a tautology and every judgement without any tautology is synthetic. From this it follows that in communicating, analytic judgements are only to be used under the condition that the one who is addressed does not know the concept of the subject so completely, or have it as present to mind as the one who is speaking. – Furthermore, the synthetic nature of geometric propositions can be proven by the fact that they contain no tautology; this is not so apparent in arithmetic propositions, and yet it is the case.

§174

A dialogue

Demopheles: Just between us, dear friend, I do not like how you occasionally display your philosophical ability using sarcasms, indeed outright mockery of religion. Each person's faith is sacred to him, and so it should also be to you.

Philalethes: I dispute the conclusion! I do not see why I should have respect for a pack of lies due to the simple-mindedness of others. I respect the truth everywhere, but for the very same reason not what opposes it. Truth will never shine on earth as long as you shackle minds in such a manner. My motto is: Let truth reign, even if the world should perish, or adjusted for the lawyers: Let justice be done, even if the world should perish. Every faculty should have an analogous motto of their own.

Demopheles: Then I suppose the medical faculty's would be: fabricate pills, even if the world should perish – which would be the easiest to bring about.

Philalethes: Heaven help us! Everything with a pinch of salt.

Demopheles: Good then, and that is exactly why I wanted you also to understand and view religion with a pinch of salt, and see that the needs of the people must be met according to the measure of their power of comprehension. Religion is the only means of proclaiming and rendering palpable the lofty meaning of life to the crude mind and clumsy understanding of the masses, who are deeply sunk in lowly toil and material labour. For mankind, as they normally are, originally have a mind for nothing other than the gratification of their physical needs and desires, and after that for a bit of entertainment and fun. Founders of religion and philosophers come into the world to shake them out of their lethargy and to point out the lofty meaning of existence; philosophers for the few, the exempt; founders of religion for the many, for humanity on a large scale. For ‘it is impossible for the broad masses to be philosophically educated’, as even your Plato said, and you should not forget. Religion is the metaphysics of the people, which we must absolutely allow them and therefore outwardly respect; for to discredit it means to deprive them of it.

Schopenhauer is one of the great original writers of the nineteenth century, and a unique voice in the history of thought. His central concept of the will leads him to regard human beings as striving irrationally and suffering in a world that has no purpose, a condition redeemed by the elevation of aesthetic consciousness and finally overcome by the will's self-denial and a mystical vision of the self as one with the world as a whole. He is in some ways the most progressive post-Kantian, an atheist with profound ideas about the human essence and the meaning of existence which point forward to Nietzsche, Freud and existentialism. He was also the first major Western thinker to seek a synthesis with Eastern thought. Yet at the same time he undertakes an ambitious global metaphysics of a conservative, more or less pre-Kantian kind, and is driven by a Platonic vision of escape from empirical reality into a realm of higher knowledge.

Schopenhauer was born in 1788, and by 1809 had gone against his family's expectations of a career as a merchant and embarked on a university career. He completed his doctoral dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason in 1813, then spent several years in intensive preparation of what became the major work of his life, The World as Will and Representation, which was published at the end of 1818, with 1819 on the title page. Shortly afterwards his academic career suffered a setback when his only attempt at a lecture course ended in failure. Thereafter Schopenhauer adopted a stance of intellectual self-sufficiency and antagonism towards university philosophy, for which he was repaid by a singular lack of reaction to his writings. In 1835 he published On Will in Nature, an attempt to corroborate his metaphysics with findings from the sciences, and in 1841 two self-standing essays on free will and moral philosophy, entitled The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics. A large supplementary second volume to The World as Will and Representation appeared in 1844, accompanied by a revised version of the original which now appeared as Volume One; then in 1851 another two-volume work, Parerga and Paralipomena, a collection of essays and observations. Only in the 1850s did serious interest in Schopenhauer's philosophy begin, with a favourable review appearing in an English journal, and a few European universities offering courses on his work.

§157

As far as I can tell, it is only the monotheistic, which is to say, Jewish religions whose confessors regard suicide as a crime. This is all the more notable since neither in the Old nor the New Testament can we find any kind of prohibition or even a mere firm disapproval of it, which is why the teachers of religion have to base their taboo against suicide on their own philosophical grounds. Meanwhile, these grounds are so shaky that they seek to compensate for the lack of strength of their arguments by the strength of expression of their horror, hence through verbal abuse. And so we have to hear that suicide is the greatest cowardice, or is only possible in madness, and further absurdities of this kind; or even the totally senseless phrase that suicide is ‘wrong’, even though quite obviously there is nothing in the world to which everyone has such an indisputable right as his own person and life. (Cf. §121.) Suicide, as mentioned, is even counted as a crime, and so it carries with it an ignominious burial and confiscation of one's estate, which is why the jury almost always renders a verdict of insanity. Let us try for the time being to allow our moral feelings to decide on this matter, and compare the impression on us of the news that an acquaintance has committed a crime, say murder, cruelty, fraud or theft, with the news of his voluntary death. Whereas the former occasions lively indignation, supreme resentment, and calls for punishment or revenge, the latter arouses sorrow and compassion often mixed with a certain admiration for his courage, rather than the moral disapproval which accompanies a bad action. Who has not had acquaintances, friends, relatives who have voluntarily departed this world? And everyone is supposed to think of them with revulsion, as criminals? I say no and no again! On the contrary, I am of the opinion that just once the clergy should be called to account, to explain by what mandate they label as criminal the deed of those many human beings whom we honoured and loved, and deny an honest burial to those who depart this world voluntarily. From their pulpits and in their writings they do this, without being able to cite any biblical authority, indeed without having any kind of valid philosophical arguments.

§27

In philosophy every method that is allegedly without assumption is hot air, since something must always be regarded as given in order to proceed from it. This in fact is stated in the Archimedean ‘Give me a foothold!’, which is the ineluctable condition of all human activity, even of philosophizing, because we can float about in the ether neither physically nor mentally. But such a point of departure in philosophizing, such a thing taken as given for the moment, must subsequently be compensated and justified. This then will be either something subjective, such as perhaps self-consciousness, representation, the subject, the will; or something objective, such as that which manifests itself in the consciousness of other things, perhaps the real world, external objects, nature, material, atoms, even a god, even a merely arbitrarily concocted concept such as substance, the Absolute, or whatever it might be. Thus in order to reconcile the arbitrariness committed here and to rectify the assumptions, one must subsequently change the standpoint and switch over to the opposite one, from which one now deduces what was originally taken as given in a supplemental philosophical argument. ‘Thus one thing sheds light on another.’

If for example one proceeds from the subjective, as did Berkeley, Locke and Kant, in whom this way of looking at things reached its peak, then, even though this way has the greatest advantage due to the actual immediacy of the subjective, one will nevertheless obtain a partly one-sided, partly not quite justified philosophy. This will result unless one supplements the philosophy by in turn taking as the point of departure what is deduced in it as given and hence, from the opposite standpoint, deduces the subjective from the objective, as previously the objective from the subjective. I believe I provided this supplement to Kantian philosophy, in the main, in chapter 22 of the second volume of my major work and in On Will in Nature under the heading ‘Physiology of Plants’; where proceeding from external nature I deduce the intellect.

If on the other hand one proceeds from the objective and at the same time takes quite a bit as given, such as matter along with the forces manifesting in it, then soon one has the whole of nature, insofar as such a way of looking at things yields pure naturalism, which I have more accurately called absolute physics.

§103

As the indifference of my contemporaries could in no way shake my conviction in the truth and importance of my theory of colour, I twice edited and published it, in German in the year 1816 and in Latin in the year 1830 in the third volume of J. Radius’ Scriptores ophthalmologici minores. Nevertheless, the complete lack of response leaves me with little hope at my advanced age of experiencing a second edition of these essays, and so I shall set forth here the few ideas that I still have to add to the subject.

Whoever undertakes to discover the cause for a given effect will, if he approaches his work thoughtfully, begin by thoroughly investigating the effect itself, since the data for discovery of the cause can only be collected from it, and it alone provides the direction and the guiding thread to the discovery of the cause. Yet none of those who proposed theories of colour before me did this. Not only did Newton go in search of the cause without having any precise knowledge of the effect to be explained, but also his predecessors did it in this manner. Even Goethe, who to be sure investigated and discussed the effect, the given phenomenon, and so the sensation in the eye far more than others, did not yet go far enough in this, since otherwise he would have had to arrive at my truths, which are the root of all theory of colour and contain the grounds of his own. And so I cannot except him when I say that all before me, from the most ancient to recent times, were concerned only with researching which modifications either the surface of a body or light would have to undergo, whether through analysis into its components or through turbidity or other darkening, in order to show colour, i.e., in order to stimulate in our eye that characteristic and specific sensation that cannot be defined at all but only detected by the senses. Instead, obviously the methodical and correct way is first of all to turn to this sensation in order to see whether one could find out what is taking place in it physiologically according to its closer nature and the conformity to law of its phenomena.