Chapter XXIX: Introduction: To the Outlines of a System of Natural Philosophy; (4)

Although now one, then another instrument catches up a thought, yet the whole appears more like a Quartette of Pleyel than one of Beethoven’s—the overture is not thought out polyphonically. Many, however, do not know what Polyphonism is; it has been written about in many curious ways. The pupil will best learn to write music in a polyphonic manner, if, at the commencement, he invents at once a double-voiced movement, but in such a manner that one voice is not the subordinate of the other; both are equally necessary to represent the meaning of the thought he wishes to express.

In this manner he may or must continue in regard to the three or four-voiced movements likewise.

The addition of voices to a melody satisfactory in itself, be they ever so well flourished, cannot properly be called polyphonism.

Polyphonism, however, should be the ruling principle in all orchestral concert compositions, although in some points, for instance, in the second theme, homophony may take its place.

A well composed symphony or overture must not entertain the audience only, but every performing musician must feel that he is not an instrument or a machine, but a living and intelligent being.

The overture to Faustus so entirely ignores Polyphony, that it seems a virtual denial of its effectiveness and importance in orchestral composition.

Richard Wagner will never become a composer of instrumental music, but in his operas he has opened a new avenue, and his creations therein are something grand and sublime.

SCHOPENHAUER’S DOCTRINE OF THE WILL.
Translated from the German, by C. L. BERNAYS.

[We print below a condensed statement of the central doctrine of
Arthur Schopenhauer. It is translated from his work entitled “_Ueber
den Willen in der Natur_,” 2d ed., 1854, Frankfort—pp. 19-23, and
63. To those familiar with the kernel of speculative truth, it is
unnecessary to remark that the basis of the system herewith
presented is thoroughly speculative, and resembles in some respects
that of Leibnitz in the Monadology, printed in our last number. It
is only an attempt to solve all problems through self-determination,
and this in its immediate form as the will. Of course the
immediateness (i. e. lack of development or realization) of the
principle employed here, leads into difficulty, and renders it
impossible for him to see the close relation he stands in to other
great thinkers. Hence he uses very severe language when speaking of
other philosophers. If the Will is taken for the “Radical of the
Soul,” then other forms of self-determination, e. g. the grades of
knowing, will not be recognized as possessing substantiality, and
hence the theoretical mind will be subordinated to the practical;—a
result, again, which is the outcome of the Philosophy of Fichte. But
Leibnitz seizes a more general _aperçu_, and identifies
self-determination with cognition in its various stages; and hence
he rises to the great principle of Recognition as the form under
which all finitude is cancelled—all multiplicity preserved in the
unity of the Absolute.—EDITOR.]

The idea of a soul as a metaphysical being, in whose absolute simplicity will and intellect were an indissoluble unity, was a great and permanent impediment to all deeper insight into natural phenomena. The cardinal merit of my doctrine, and that which puts it in opposition to all the former philosophies, is the perfect separation of the will from the intellect. All former philosophers thought will to be inseparable from the intellect; the will was declared to be conditioned upon the intellect, or even to be a mere function of it, whilst the intellect was regarded as the fundamental principle of our spiritual existence. I am well aware that to the future alone belongs the recognition of this doctrine, but to the future philosophy the separation, or rather the decomposition of the soul into two heterogeneous elements, will have the same significance as the decomposition of water had to chemistry. Not the soul is the eternal and indestructible or the very principle of life in men, but what I might call the Radical of the soul, and that is the _Will_. The so-called soul is already a compound; it is the combination of will and the νοῦς, intellect. The intellect is the secondary, the _posterius_ in any organism, and, as a mere function of the brain, dependent upon the organism. The will, on the contrary, is primary, the _prius_ of the organism, and the organism consequently is conditioned by it. For the will is the very “thing in itself,” which in conception (that is, in the peculiar function of the brain) exhibits itself as an organic body. Only by virtue of the forms of cognition, that is, by virtue of that function of the brain—hence only in conception—one’s body is something extended and organic, not outside of it, or immediately in self-consciousness. Just as the various single acts of the body are nothing but the various acts of the will portrayed in the represented world, just so is the shape of this body as a totality the image of its will as a whole. In all organic functions of the body, therefore, just as in its external actions, the will is the “_agens_.” True physiology, on its height, shows the intellect to be the product of the physical organization, but true metaphysics show, that physical existence itself is the product, or rather the appearance, of a spiritual _agens_, to-wit, the will; nay, that matter itself is conditioned through conception, in which alone it exists. Perception and thought may well be explained by the nature of the organism; the will never can be; the contrary is true, namely, that every organism originates by and from the will. This I show as follows:

I therefore posit the will as the “thing in itself”—as something absolutely primitive; secondly, the simple visibility of the will, its objectivation as our body; and thirdly, the intellect as a mere function of a certain part of that body. That part (the brain) is the objectivated desire (or will) to know, which became represented: for the will, to reach its ends, needs the intellect. This function again pre-supposes the whole world as representation; it therefore pre-supposes also the body as an object, and even matter itself, so far as existing only in representation, for an objective world without a subject in whose intellect it stands, is, well considered, something altogether unthinkable. Hence intellect and matter (subject and object) only relatively exist for each other, and in that way constitute the apparent world.

Whenever the will acts on external matter, or whenever it is directed towards a known object, thus passing through the medium of knowledge, then all recognize that the _agens_, which here is in action, is the will, and they call it by that name. Yet, that is will not less which acts in the inner process that precedes those external actions as their condition, which create and preserve the organic life and its substrate; and secretion, digestion, and the circulation of the blood, are its work also. But just because the will was recognized only while leaving the individual from which it started, and directing itself to the external world, which precisely for that purpose now appears as perception, the intellect was regarded as its essential condition, as its sole element, and as the very substance out of which it was made, and thereby the very worst _hysteron proteron_ was committed that ever happened.

Before all, one should know how to discriminate between will and arbitrariness (_Wille und Willkühr_), and one should understand that the first can exist without the second. Will is called arbitrariness where it is lighted by intellect, and whenever motives or conceptions are its moving causes; or, objectively speaking, whenever external causes which produce an act are mediated by a brain. The motive may be defined as an external irritation, by whose influence an image is formed in the brain, and under the mediation of which the will accomplishes its effect, that is, an external act of the body. With the human species the place of that image may be occupied by a concept, which being formed from images of a similar kind, by omitting the differences, is no longer intuitive, but only marked and fixed by words. Hence as the action of motives is altogether independent of any contact, they therefore can measure their respective forces upon the will, on each other, and thereby permit a certain choice. With the animals, that choice is confined to the narrow horizon of what is visibly projected before them; among men it has the wide range of the _thinkable_, or of its concepts, as its sphere. Those movements, therefore, which result from motives, and not from causes, as in the inorganic world, nor from mere irritation, as with the plants, are called arbitrary movements. These motives pre-suppose knowledge, the medium of the motives, through which in this case causality is effected, irrespective of their absolute necessity in any other respect. Physiologically, the difference between irritation and motive may be described thus: Irritation excites a reaction _immediately_, the reaction issuing from the same part upon which the irritation had acted; whilst a motive is an irritation, which must make a circuit through the brain, where first an image is formed, and that image then originates the ensuing reaction, which now is called an act of the free will. Hence the difference between free and unfree movements does not concern the essential and primary, which in both is the will, but only the secondary, that is, the way in which the will is aroused; to-wit, whether it shows itself in consequence of some real cause, or of an irritation, or of a motive, that is, of a cause that had to pass through the organ of the intellect.

Free will or arbitrariness is only possible in the consciousness of men. It differs from the consciousness of animals in this, that it contains not only present and tangible representations, but abstract concepts, which, independent of the differences of time, act simultaneously and side by side, permitting thereby conviction or a conflict of motives; this, in the strictest sense of the word, is called free will. Yet this very free will or choice consists only in the victory of the stronger motive over a weaker in a given individual character, by which the ensuing action was determined, just as one impulse is overpowered by a stronger counter impulse, whereby the effect nevertheless appears with the same necessity as the movement of a stone that has received an impulse. The great thinkers of all times agree in this decidedly; while, on the contrary, the vulgar will little understand the great truth, that the mark of our liberty is not to be found in our single acts, but in our existence itself, and in its very essence. Whenever one has succeeded to discriminate will from free will, or the arbitrary, and to consider the latter as a peculiar species of the former, then there is no more room for any difficulty in discovering the will also in occurrences wherein intelligence cannot be traced.

* * * * *

The will is the original. It has created the world, but not through the medium of an intellect either outside or inside of the world, for we know of the intellect only through the mediation of the animal world, the very last in creation. The will itself, the unintentional will which is discovered in everything, is the creator of the world. The animals, therefore, are organized in accordance with their mode of living, and their mode of living is not shaped in conformity with their organs; the structure of any animal is the result of its will to be what it is. Nature, which never lies, tells us the same in its _naïve_ way; it lets any being just kindle the first spark of its life on one of his equals, and then lets it finish itself before our eyes. The form and the movement it takes from its own self, the substance from outside. This is called growth and development. Thus even empirically do all beings stand before us as their own work; but the language of nature is too simple, and therefore but few understand it.

Cognition, since all motives are dependent on it, is the essential characteristic of the animal kingdom. When animal life ceases, cognition ceases also; and arrived at that point, we can comprehend the medium by which the influences from the external world on the movements of other beings are effected only by analogy, whilst the will, which we have recognized as the basis and as the very kernel of all beings, always and everywhere remains the same. On the low stage of the vegetable world, and of the vegetative life in the animal organizations, it is _irritation_, and in the inorganic world it is the mechanical relation in general which appears as the substitute or as the analogue of the intellect. We cannot say that the plants perceive the light and the sun, but we see that they are differently affected by the presence or absence of the sun, and that they turn themselves towards it; and though in fact that movement mostly coincides with their growth, like the rotation of the moon with its revolution, that movement nevertheless exists, and the direction of the growth of a plant is just in the same way determined and systematically modified as an action is by a motive. Inasmuch, therefore, as a plant has its wants, though not of the kind which require a sensorium or an intellect, something analogous must take their place to enable the will to seize at least a supply offered to it, if not to go in quest of it. This is the susceptibility for irritation, which differs from the intellect, in that the motive and subsequent act of volition are clearly separated from each other, and the clearer, the more perfect the intellect is; whilst at the mere susceptibility for an irritation, the feeling of the irritation and the resulting volition can no longer be discriminated. In the inorganic world, finally, even the susceptibility for irritation, whose analogy with the intellect cannot be mistaken, ceases, and there remains nothing but the varied reaction of the bodies against the various influences. This reaction is the substitute for the intellect. Whenever the reaction of a body differs from another, the influence also must be different, creating a different affection, which even in its dullness yet shows a remote analogy with the intellect. If, for instance, the water in an embankment finds an issue and eagerly precipitates itself through it, it certainly does not perceive the break, just as the acid does not perceive the alkali, for which it leaves the metal; yet we must confess that what in all these bodies has effected such sudden changes, has a certain resemblance with that which moves ourselves whenever we act in consequence of an unexpected motive. We therefore see that the intellect appears as the medium of our motives, that is, as the medium of causality in regard to intellectual beings, as that which receives the change from the external world, and which must be followed by a change in ourselves, as the mediator between both. On this narrow line, balances the whole world as representation, i. e. that whole extensive world in space and time, which as such cannot be anywhere else but in our brain, just as dreams; for the periods of their duration stand on the very same basis. Whatever to the animals and to man is given by his intellect as a medium of the motives, the same is given to the plants by their susceptibility for irritation, and to inorganic bodies by their reaction on the various causes, which in fact only differ in respect to the degree of volition; for, just in consequence of the fact, that in proportion to their wants the susceptibility for external impressions was raised to such a degree in the animals that a brain and a system of nerves had to develop itself, did consciousness, moreover, originate as a function of this brain, and in this consciousness the whole objective world, whose forms (time, space and causality) are the rules for the exercise of this function. We therefore discover that the intellect is calculated only for the subjective, merely to be a servant of the will, appearing only “_per accidens_” as a condition of animal life, where motives take the place of irritation. The picture of the external world, which at this stage enters into the forms of time and space, is but the background on which motives represent themselves as ends; it is also the condition of the connection of the external objects in regard to space and causality, but yet is nothing else but the mediation and the tie between the motive and the will. What a leap would it be to take this picture to be the true, ultimate essence of things,—this image of the world, which originates accidentally in the intellect as a function of animal brains, whereby the means to their ends are shown them, and their ways on this planet cleared up! What a temerity to take this image and the connection of its parts to be the absolute rule of the world, the relations of the things in themselves—and to suppose that all that could just as well exist independently of our brain! And yet this supposition is the very ground on which all the dogmatical systems previous to Kant were based, for it is the implicit pre-supposition of their Ontology, Cosmology, Theology, and of all their Eternal Verities.

By this realistic examination we have gained very unexpectedly the _objective_ point of view of Kant’s immortal discovery, arriving by our empirical, physiological way to the same point whence Kant started with his transcendental criticism. Kant made the subjective his basis, positing consciousness; but from its _à priori_ nature he comes to the result, that all that happens in it can be nothing else but representation. We, on the contrary, starting from the objective, have discovered what are the ends and the origin of the intellect, and to what class of phenomena it belongs. We discover in _our_ way, that the intellect is limited to mere representations, and that what is exhibited in it is conditioned by the subject, that is, a _mundane phenomenon_, and that just in the same way the order and the connection of all external things is conditioned by the subject, and is never a knowledge of what they are in themselves, and how they may be connected with each other. We, in our way, like Kant in his, have discovered that the world as representation, balances on that narrow line between the external cause (motive) and the produced effect (act of will) of intelligent (animal) beings, where the clear discrimination of the two commences. _Ita res accendent lumina rebus._

Our objective stand-point is realistic, and therefore conditioned, inasmuch as starting from natural beings as posited, we have abstracted from the circumstance that their objective existence presupposes an intellect, in which they find themselves as representations; but Kant’s subjective and idealistic stand-point is equally conditioned, inasmuch as it starts from the intellect, which itself is conditioned by nature, in consequence of whose development up to the animal world it only comes into existence. Holding fast to this, our _realistic-objective_ stand-point, Kant’s doctrine may be characterized thus: after Locke had abstracted the _rôle_ of the senses, under the name of “secondary properties,” for the purpose of distinguishing things in themselves from things as they appear, Kant, with far greater profundity, abstracted the _rôle_ of the brain functions [conceptions of the understanding]—a less considerable _rôle_ than that of the senses—and thus abstracted as belonging to the subjective all that Locke had included under the head of primary properties. I, on the other hand, have merely shown why all stands thus in relation, by exhibiting the position which the intellect assumes in the System of Nature when we start realistically from the objective as a datum, and take the WILL, of which alone we are immediately conscious, as the true που στῶ of all metaphysics—as the essence of which all else is only the phenomenon.