P. 182, last 1.—Many cures are only seemingly sympathetic, inasmuch as remedies are applied whose medicinal effect is not known, either merely by the parties concerned or even by the faculty of medicine of the day. Such co-operating causes are excluded in sympathetic cures by mere conjuration. The best accredited and most striking effects of conjuration may well consist in the stopping of bleedings (contraction of the veins and capillaries by the nervous agitation of the charmed person) and in the assuaging of pain caused by burns.
P. 200, 1. 35.—Comp. Ernst Häckers “Anthropogenic, oder Entwickelungsgeschichte des Menschen,” Leipzig, Engelmann, 1876.
P. 202.—With regard to the critical objection that in this chapter the clues afforded by Darwinism with respect to the origin of purposive adaptations in organisms are left unnoticed, the following is to be observed. Darwinism, even if it were right in all its assertions, offers at the most an explanation why the fertilised ovum brings with it this or that constitution for its ontogenetic course of development; this individual development itself, however, it does not discuss at all, but assumes it as a physiologically given fact, that such an organism unfolds from such a germ. There is in this, however, nothing but a lack of philosophical wonderment, an incapacity to apprehend the problem. For all phylogenetic development is compounded of a series of ontogenetic developments, and therefore the former can never explain the latter but rather presupposes it, although it is correct that a definite individual development is conditioned in the mode and manner of its course by the phylogenetic development which has preceded it. But the first question always is to comprehend how an individual development is at all possible; and this problem is altogether independent of the explanation of phylogenetic evolution, which is indeed only compounded of individual developments, as the building of bricks or the plant of cells. Wherefore, also, an independent investigation of the problem of individual organic development is philosophically as much authorised as demanded, quite apart from the question whether Darwinism is right.
Undoubtedly this inquiry must be completed by testing the solution which Darwinism offers of the problem of phylogenetic evolution. This is done in Chap. x. C., and still more thoroughly in my memoir, “Truth and Error in Darwinism.” The result is that all Darwin’s principles of explanation are only tenable and available for any sort of explanation of natural phenomena on the foundation of a tacitly presupposed but openly rejected “organising principle.” At bottom this is nothing more than the confirmation of the a priori and self-evident proposition regressively gained by criticism, that all phylogenetic development is only compounded of a series of ontogenetic processes of evolution, and that the ontogenetic development as such is accordingly not explicable from a phylogenetic evolution, but only by an organising principle which guides and secures the purposive (isolated and correlative) variation and transmission.
P. 200, 1. 21.—Without question it may be very attractive to analyse psychologically, to classify, and to investigate in their causal relations all the numerous veils and disguises in which the longing after sexual union conceals itself according to the character and the circumstances (as has also been frequently attempted, especially by the French); but even if such a psychology of love succeeded in giving an intelligent account of the whole inexhaustible variety of the forms which love can assume, yet nothing would be thereby gained for the understanding of love so long as the fundamental problem were not made perfectly precise and satisfactorily solved. This fundamental problem of love must, however, of course, turn on that which is not diverse but common, and this common element in the apparently heterogeneous expressions of the one passion is manifestly nothing else but the longing for sexual union. What is problematical in this point is, however, this: how the corporeal or mental, æsthetic or emotional, pleasure which one finds in a person can lead to the altogether heterogeneous wish for sexual union with the same, and can increase this wish to a passion? This, and nothing else, is the fundamental problem of love; and whoever does not perceive the problem, or whoever does not find anything at all wonderful or problematical therein, will least of all be enabled to solve it, and all the psychological studies of such a one concerning love can only be a more or less clever prattle on side issues. We can only hope for a solution of the problem when the essence of sexual love has been rightly apprehended as the longing veiled by more or fewer accessories for sexual union with a particular individual.
P. 242, last 1.—Comp, here A. Taubert, “Der Pessimismus und seine Gegner,” Berlin, C. Duncker, 1873, No. 4, “Die Liebe.”
P. 249, 1. 2.—The usual division into sensuous and intellectual feelings and impulses is doubtless warranted, if thereby the different nature and worth of the spheres is sought to be indicated to which the particular feelings and impulses are related through the ideas with which they are connected, but it becomes an unauthorised distinction when it imports more than this qualitative difference of the particular spheres of representation, and is employed to impeach the homogeneity of the will in itself and its satisfaction or non-satisfaction. (Comp. here Goring, “System of Crit. Phil.,” part i. chap. vi., “The division of the impulses and feelings into sensuous and intellectual,” p. 107 ff.; also chap. iv., “The falsity of the distinction between lower and higher will,” p. 78–87.)
P. 249, 1. 15.—The more opposition this proposition has encountered, which is so simple, but appears so surprising and almost paradoxical to thinkers unaccustomed to abstracting from the simply concomitant representations of feelings, the more do I rejoice that on this point I can appeal to no less an authority than Kant. He says in the “Crit. of Pract. Reason” (Werke, viii. 131): “The representations of objects may be ever so heterogeneous; they may be ideas of the understanding, even of the reason, in contrast to ideas of sense; yet the feeling of pleasure by whose instrumentality they properly come to be the determining ground of the will (the expected agreeableness, satisfaction, which incites to the production of the object) is not only of the same kind, inasmuch as it can always only be empirically known, but also in that it affects one and the same vital energy, which is manifested in the faculty of desire, and in this respect can differ in nothing but degree from every other determining ground” (that is, from every feeling called forth by another determining reason). “How otherwise should we be able to institute a quantitative comparison between two determining grounds altogether different in their intellectual clothing, so as to give the preference to that one which most affects the faculty of desire?”
P. 250, note, last 1.—That desire is more original than the state of feeling whose production is desired is shown in numerous cases when violent desire already enters into consciousness in the stage of tormenting unrest, whilst its content or its aim is still completely unconscious. Maudsley says in his “Phys. of Mind,” p. 355–356: “In the child, as in the idiot, we frequently witness a vague restlessness, evincing an undefined want of or desire for something of which itself is unconscious, but which, when obtained, presently produces quiet and satisfaction: the organic life speaks out with an as yet inarticulate utterance. Most striking and instructive is that example of the evolution of organic life into consciousness which is observed at the time of puberty, when new organs come into action and exert their physiological influence upon the brain; vague and ill-understood desires give rise to obscure impulses that have no defined” (rather: conscious) “aim, and produce a restlessness which, when misapplied, is often mischievous. The amorous appetite thus first declares its existence. But to prove how clearly antecedent to individual experience it is, and how little it is indebted to the consciousness which is a natural subsequent development, it is only necessary to reflect that even in man the desire sometimes attains to a knowledge of its aim, and to a sort of satisfaction, in dreams, before it does so in real life. … These simple reflections might of themselves suffice to teach psychologists, if they would condescend to them, how far more fundamental than any conscious mental state is the unconscious mental or cereb
ral life.”
The relation of will and feeling and the reasons for the assumption that the latter is to be conceived as a consequence of the former, and not conversely, is discussed by Goring, together with a refutation of the contrary opinions, in his “System of Crit. Phil.,” vol. i. pp. 50, 60–65, and 89–95. (Comp, also in the same, chap. v., “The separation of the emotional faculty.”)
P. 276, 1. 3.—In dreams this creative activity is well known to us all. We all possess it, as our dreams prove; but its degree is usually so low that it cannot assert itself in the waking state against the twofold competition of the impressions of perception and of the abstract associations of thought. Accordingly the study of the creations of dream-fancies affords a serviceable preparation and excellent aid to the comprehension of the creations of artistic fancy, although the difference between a thoughtless dreaming and a sober creative fancy must not be overlooked. I refer for these things to the memoir of Johannes Volkelt, “Die Traum-Phantasie” (Stuttgart, 1875), which combines in an equal degree critical sobriety and speculative penetration, and works up everything hitherto achieved in this department (comp, in particular, No. 15, “The Unconscious in Dream-Fancy”).
P. 280, note.—What Schiller thought of the Unconscious in artistic production in a scientific form appears from his letter to Goethe on the 27th March 1801. He there says: “A few days ago I attacked Schelling for an assertion in his ‘Transcendental Philosophy’ that ‘in Nature a primal Unconscious is to be elevated to consciousness; in Art, on the contrary, the procession is from consciousness to the unconscious.’ It is true he is dealing here only with the contrast between the products of Nature and of Art, and so far he is quite right. I fear, however, that ‘Messieurs les Idealistes’ are so absorbed in their IDEAS as to take all too little notice of experience, and as experience shows the poet likewise begins with the Unconscious, nay, may think himself lucky if he only gets so far through the clearest consciousness of his operations as to re-discover undimmed in his completed labour the first obscure whole-idea of his work. Without such an obscure but powerful whole-idea, which is antecedent to everything technical, no poetic work can come into being, and poetry, methinks, just consists in this, in being able to utter and impart that Unconscious, i.e., to translate it into an object. The non-poet may just as well as the poet be affected by a poetic idea, but he cannot body it forth; he cannot represent it with the force of necessity; just as the non-poet as well as the bard may produce a product consciously and with necessity, but such a work does not take its rise in the Unconscious, and does not end there. It remains only a work of reflection. The Unconscious, combined with reflection, makes the poetic artist.” The “obscure whole-idea” is not to be confused with the unconscious idea, but is already a conscious reflexion of the latter, and not even the first which emerges in consciousness, but is brought about by a vague moody sensation. Schiller was well aware of this also, and expresses it in his letter to Goethe of the 18th March 1796: “In me the feeling is at first without definite and clear object; this is formed only later. A certain musical word comes first, and with me the poetical idea only follows this.” He writes to Körner on the 1st December 1788: “Ye critics, or however ye may be called, be abashed or tremble in presence of the instantaneous transitory frenzy which is found in all true creators, and whose longer or shorter duration distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer. Hence your lamentations over infertility, because ye too early reject and too strictly select (soil, from among the ideas streaming in pêle-mêle).” But not merely the beginning, but also the continuation of artistic production appears to him conditioned by the Unconscious, and at the close of the twentieth of his letters on the æsthetic education of mankind he declares “that the mind in the æsthetic condition certainly acts freely, and free in the highest degree from all compulsion, but by no means free from laws, and that this æsthetic freedom is only distinguished from logical necessity in thought, and from moral necessity in volition, through the laws according to which the mind proceeds not being represented, and because they meet with no resistance, not appearing as necessitation.” Whoever in this way draws his poetical ideas from unconscious inspiration, and artistically shapes them according to laws acting unconsciously in him, is a genius. “When the genius has by his products furnished the rule, science can collect these rules, compare them, and try whether they are to be brought under one more general, and finally under a single principle. But since it proceeds from experience, it has only the limited authority of empirical science. It can merely lead to a rational imitation of given cases, but never to a positive extension. All progress in art must come from genius, criticism merely leads to faultlessness” (Letter to Körner of the 3d February 1794). These unambiguous testimonies to the truth of the Unconscious are the more valuable as they spring from the self-observation of a great poet, who did not, like Goethe, for instance, draw without effort from the fountain of the Unconscious, but earnestly strove after clearness and thoughtfulness, and wrestled with the artistic form in earnest critical labour, which might not unnaturally have tended to the over-estimate of his reflective industry.
P. 314, 1. 29.—It is in ethno-psychological respects extremely characteristic that the treatment of geometry among the Greeks aims at a rigorous discursive mode of proof, and sedulously ignores the most obvious intuitive demonstrations; whereas that of the Hindoos, in spite of an endowment for arithmetic far surpassing the Greeks, is yet entirely based on direct intuition, and is usually confined to an artificial construction in support of intuition, to which the one word “see!” is appended. The Greeks always aim at strictly proving the smallest step in thought, and often employ ingenious trains of discursive reasoning in proof of the simplest proposition, in order not to be obliged to have recourse to direct intuition, which does not rank with them as proof. Accordingly they have constructed an imposing system of geometry, which at the same time contains a methodical guide to the solution of all problems not admitting of direct treatment. Among the Hindoos, on the other hand, every proof of a geometrical proposition is a happy flash of intelligence, and the various propositions are placed in juxtaposition without any connection; therefore, in spite of their luxuriant fancy and intuitional power, and in spite of their achievements in arithmetic and algebra, far out-stripping those of the Greeks, they never got far in geometry, and have attained only a very imperfect insight into its elements. It must, however, be styled wonderful that Schopenhauer, who had no knowledge of these historical facts, was led by his peculiar kinship with the Indian mind to make demands in reference to the treatment of geometry which must be termed a reawakening of the Indian mode of thought. As our whole modern mathematics has grown out of a synthesis of the Euclidian geometry with the Arabian algebra borrowed from the Hindoos, so at the present time the necessity of taking account in geometry of the Indian element of intuition is becoming more and more recognised on the part of pedagogical science. But although much may thereby be rendered simpler, easier, and clearer, yet the proposal of Schopenhauer to base geometry altogether upon intuition is essentially impracticable, and discursive proof will always have to go hand in hand with this to control intuition.
P. 315.—As an example of what has been said with respect to the Indian mode of treating geometry, we may give the Indian proof of the Pythagorean theorem, of which the figure of Schopenhauer is only a special case. This proof depends on the circumstance that the square of the hypothenuse as well as the sum of the squares of the other sides is equal to a third magnitude, namely, the quadrupled triangle plus the square on the difference of the other two sides.
As in the equilateral triangle the latter is equal to zero, the general proof takes the form of that for the equilateral triangle (comp. Hankel, “Zur Geschichto der Mathematik im Alterthum und Mittelalter,” Leipzig, 1874, p. 209). Without doubt this oldest of all the numerous proofs which have been subsequently attempted is by far the best, because it is the most evident, simple, and instructive. But that it rest
s on immediate intuition will hardly be asserted by any one speaking precisely, since the equality of the two magnitudes in question which is to be proved must always be first concluded from their perceived equality with a third, which latter, moreover, is differently presented to intuition in the two figures, and is only identical in conception.
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