In endless space countless luminous spheres, round each of which some dozen smaller illuminated ones resolve, hot at the core and covered with a hard cold crust; on this crust a moldy film has produced living and knowing beings: this is empirical truth, the real, the world. Yet for a being who thinks, it is a precarious position to stand on one of those numberless spheres freely floating in boundless space, without knowing whence or whither, and to be only one of innumerable similar beings that throng, press, and toil restlessly and rapidly arising and passing away in beginningless and endless time. Here there is nothing permanent but matter alone, and the recurrence of the same varied organic forms by means of certain ways and channels that inevitably exist as they do. All that empirical science can teach is only the more precise nature and rule of these events. But at last the philosophy of modern times, especially through Berkley and Kant, has called to mind that all this is in the first instance is only phenomenon of the brain, and is encumbered by so many great and different subjective conditions that its supposed absolute reality vanishes, and leaves room for an entirely different world-order that lies at the root of that phenomenon, in other words, is related to it as is the thing-in-itself to the mere appearance. The world is my representation is, like the axioms of Euclid, a proposition which everyone must recognize as true as soon as he understands it.
Posted on: Fri, 15 Nov 2013 16:47:56 +0000
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