ON THE ORIGIN OF REASON 



543 



the subject or the I ; or, if he modifies Kant's 

 doctrines, he does so chiefly by simplifying them. 

 But he differs from Kant in his view of the ob- 

 ject, or the Non-I. Our only real knowledge, he 

 says, of anything really existing is our knowledge 

 of the I, which involves not only being, but con- 

 scious being, resisting, or, as he prefers to call it, 

 willing. Therefore, if we say that the Non-I ex- 

 ists, we say at the same time that it exists as 

 something willing, resisting, and, if not actually, 

 at least potentially, conscious. We know no other 

 kind of being, and therefore we cannot predicate 

 any other. As we, the I, are to others as the 

 Not-I, so the Not-I must be to us as the Not-I. 

 This is the bridge from Kant to Schopenhauer, 

 from death to life. As soon as we have arrived 

 on the opposite shore, as soon as we have recog- 

 nized in all Nature, in all that is not ourselves, 

 something like ourselves, Noire bids us welcome. 

 This is the threshold of his own philosophy. 



THE TWO ATTRIBUTES OF SUBSTANCE. 



The first question with him, after he has ar- 

 rived at his monads, is, What are their inherent 

 attributes ? He does not ask, What is intellect ? 

 or, What is matter ? but, What is essential in or- 

 der to explain the whole of the subjective and 

 objective evolution of the world ? Like Descartes, 

 like Spinoza, and like Leibnitz, he requires two 

 attributes only, but he defines them differently 

 from his predecessors, as motion and sensation. 

 Out of these materials he builds up his universe, 

 or rather, taking the universe as he finds it, he 

 traces it back through a long course of evolution, 

 to those simple beginnings. As Goethe said, "No 

 spirit without matter, no matter without spirit," 

 Noire" says, "No sensation without motion, no 

 motion without sensation." 



According to these two attributes, philosophy 

 has to deal with two streams of 

 evolution, the subjective and the 

 objective. Neither of them can 

 be said to be prior. On the one 

 hand it may be said that motion 

 precedes sensation, because mo- 

 tion causes vibration, and vi- 

 bration of the conscious self is sensation. I see, 

 I hear, I feel, I taste, I smell — all of these, trans- 

 lated into the highest and most general language, 

 mean, I vibrate, I am set in motion. But, on the 

 other hand, motion exists only where there is 

 sensation ; it presupposes sensation ; it means 

 something which is nothing except in relation to 

 something else, and that something else capable 

 of perceiving. The two streams of evolution 



UGHT.A 



HE A T. C 



SOUND. E 



run parallel, or, more correctly, the two are one 

 stream, looked at from the two opposite shores. 



SUBJECTIVE EVOLUTION. 



Taking the subjective aspect first, Noire shows 

 how sensation begins in its lowest form, as a mere 

 disturbance or irritation. But even that irrita- 

 tion presupposes something that reacts, some 

 force which is conservatrix sui, and it is that 

 power of reacting against foreign disturbance 

 which constitutes the beginning of real sensa- 

 tion. Sensation is, in fact, conscious motion or 

 reaction. 



We may define every kind of sensation as 

 conscious vibration, and we are able now to de- 

 termine the different kinds of sensation by the 

 number of vibrations acting within a given time 

 upon certain specially receptive organs. Let the 

 line A B represent the tuVu P ai 't °f a second ; let 

 each straight line ( | ) represent 4,000,000,000 

 vibrations, and each curved line (— ) one vibra- 

 tion. Then, disturbed and set to vibrate in uni- 

 son with these vibrations, the eye within this jifo a 

 part of a second would see red, the skin would 

 perceive about 31° of heat (Centigrade), and the 

 ear would hear the tone of e'"". l 



While one monon maintains itself against the 

 inroads of another, or in reality of an infinite 

 number of other mona, it vibrates. It asserts its 

 existence by vibration, i. e., by a constantly and 

 regularly repeated attempt to maintain itself 

 against foreign inroads. Vibration in the high- 

 est sense is the struggle between being and not 

 being. So far as for a moment one monon has to 

 yield, and as it were to surrender some of the 

 ground which belonged to itself, it recognizes in 

 the very act of yielding the existence of something 

 else, able to disturb, but unable to annihilate, so 

 that when we say of something that it exists, what 



we really mean is that for a moment it is where 

 we were before. 



And here we have the first glimmering of the 

 category of causality. It is by looking upon a 

 disturbance as caused, and by fixing that cause 

 outside ourselves, that we translate disturbance, 

 or irritation, or vibration, into the perception of an 

 object. The gradual change from the one to the 

 1 Noire, " Grundlcjjnug," p. 56. 



