Retrospect and More General View

The continuance of the organised body, on the contrary, just depends upon continual movement and the constant reception of external influences. As soon as these are wanting and the movement in it stops it is dead, and thereby ceases to be organic, although the trace of the organism that has been still remains for a while.

Therefore the talk, which is so much affected in our own day, of the life of what is unorganised, indeed of the globe itself, and that it, and also the planetary system, is an organism, is entirely inadmissible. The predicate life belongs only to what is organised. Every organism, however, is throughout organised,[037] is so in all its parts; and nowhere are these, even in their smallest particles, composed by aggregation of what is unorganised. Thus if the earth were an organism, all mountains and rocks, and the whole interior of their mass, would necessarily be organised, and accordingly really nothing unorganised would exist; and therefore the whole conception of it would be wanting.

On the other hand, that the manifestation of a will is as little bound up with life and organisation as with knowledge, and that therefore the unorganised has also a will, the manifestations of which are all its fundamental qualities, which cannot be further explained,—this is an essential point in my doctrine; although the trace of such a thought is far seldomer found in writers who have preceded me than that of the will in plants, where, however, it is still unconscious.

In the forming of the crystal we see, as it were, a tendency towards an attempt at life, to which, however, it does not attain, because the fluidity of which, like a living thing, it is composed at the moment of that movement is not enclosed in a skin, as is always the case with the latter, and consequently it has neither vessels in which that movement could go on, nor does any- thing separate it from the external world. Therefore, rigidity at once seizes that momentary movement, of which only the trace remains as the crystal.

The thought that the will, which constitutes the basis of our own nature, is also the same will which shows itself even in the lowest unorganised phenomena, on account of which the conformity to law of both phenomena shows a perfect analogy, lies at the foundation of Goethe’s “Wahlverwandtschaften,” as the title indeed indicates, although he himself was unconscious of this.

Mechanics and astronomy specially show us how this will conducts itself so far as it appears at the lowest grade of its manifestation merely as gravity, rigidity, and inertia. Hydraulics [038] shows us the same thing where rigidity is wanting and the fluid material is now unrestrainedly surrendered to its predominating passion, gravity. In this sense hydraulics may be conceived as a characteristic sketch of water, for it presents to us the manifes- tations of will to which water is moved by gravity; these always correspond exactly to the external influences, for in the case of all non-individual existences there is no particular character in addition to the general one; thus they can easily be referred to fixed characteristics, which are called laws, and which are learned by experience of water. These laws accurately inform us how water will conduct itself under all different circumstances, on account of its gravity, the unconditioned mobility of its parts, and its want of elasticity.

Hydrostatics teaches how it is brought to rest through gravity; hydrodynamics, how it is set in motion; and the latter has also to take account of hindrances which adhesion opposes to the will of water: the two together constitute hydraulics. In the same way Chemistry teaches us how the will conducts itself when the inner qualities of materials obtain free play by being brought into a fluid state, and there appears that wonderful attraction and repulsion, separating and combining, leaving go of one to seize upon another, from which every precipitation originates, and the whole of which is denoted by “elective affinity” (an expression which is entirely borrowed from the conscious will). But Anatomy and Physiology allow us to see how the will conducts itself in order to bring about the phenomenon of life and sustain it for a while. Finally, the poet shows us how the will conducts itself under the influence of motives and reflection. He exhibits it therefore for the most part in the most perfect of its manifestations, in rational beings, whose character is individual, and whose conduct and suffering he brings before us in the Drama, the Epic, the Romance, &c.

The more correctly, the more strictly according to the laws of nature his characters are there presented, the greater is his fame;[039] hence Shakespeare stands at the top. The point of view which is here taken up corresponds at bottom to the spirit in which Goethe followed and loved the natural sciences, although he was not conscious of the matter in the abstract. Nay more, this not only appears from his writings, but is also known to me from his personal utterances.

If we consider the will, where no one denies it, in conscious beings, we find everywhere, as its fundamental effort, the self- preservation of every being: omnis natura vult esse conservatrix sui. But all manifestations of this fundamental effort may con- stantly be traced back to a seeking or pursuit and a shunning or fleeing from, according to the occasion. Now this also may be shown even at the lowest grades of nature, that is, of the objectification of the will, where the bodies still act only as bodies in general, thus are the subject-matter of mechanics, and are considered only with reference to the manifestations of im- penetrability, cohesion, rigidity, elasticity, and gravity. Here also the seeking shows itself as gravitation, and the shunning as the receiving of motion; and the movableness of bodies by pressure or impact, which constitutes the basis of mechanics, is at bottom a manifestation of the effort after self-preservation, which dwells in them also. For, since as bodies they are impenetrable, this is the sole means of preserving their cohesion, thus their contin- uance at any time. The body which is impelled or exposed to pressure would be crushed to pieces by the impelling or pressing body if it did not withdraw itself from its power by flight, in order to preserve its cohesion; and when flight is impossible for it this actually happens.

One may regard elastic bodies as the more courageous, which seek to repel the enemy, or at least to prevent him from pursuing further. Thus in the one secret which (besides gravity) is left by mechanics otherwise so clear, in the communicability of motion, we see a manifestation of the fundamental effort of the will in all its phenomena, the effort [040] after self-preservation, which shows itself even at the lowest grades as that which is essential.

In unorganised nature the will objectifies itself primarily in the universal forces, and only by means of these in the phenomena of the particular things which are called forth by causes. In § 26 of the first volume I have fully explained the relation between cause, force of nature, and will as thing in itself. One sees from that explanation that metaphysics never interrupts the course of physics, but only takes up the thread where physics leaves it, at the original forces in which all causal explanation has its limits. Only here does the metaphysical explanation from the will as the thing in itself begin. In the case of every physical phenomenon, of every change of material things, its cause is primarily to be looked for; and this cause is just such a particular change which has appeared immediately before it.

Then, however, the original force of nature is to be sought by virtue of which this cause was capable of acting. And first of all the will is to be recognised as the inner nature of this force in opposition to its manifestation. Yet the will shows itself just as directly in the fall of a stone as in the action of the man; the difference is only that its particular manifestation is in the one case called forth by a motive, in the other by a mechanically acting cause, for example, the taking away of what supported the stone; yet in both cases with equal necessity; and that in the one case it depends upon an individual character, in the other upon an universal force of nature. This identity of what is fundamentally essential is even made palpable to the senses. If, for instance, we carefully observe a body which has lost its equilibrium, and on account of its special form rolls back and forward for a long time till it finds its centre of gravity again, a certain appearance of life forces itself upon us, and we directly feel that something analogous to the foundation of life is also active here. This is certainly the universal force of nature, which, however, in itself identical with the will, becomes here, as[041] it were, the soul of a very brief quasi life. Thus what is identical in the two extremes of the manifestation of the will makes itself faintly known here even to direct perception, in that this raises a feeling in us that here also something entirely original, such as we only know in the acts of our own will, directly succeeded in manifesting itself.

We may attain to an intuitive knowledge of the existence and activity of the will in unorganised nature in quite a different and a sublime manner if we study the problem of the three heavenly bodies, and thus learn more accurately and specially the course of the moon round the earth. By the different combinations which the constant change of the position of these three heavenly bodies towards each other introduces, the course of the moon is now accelerated; now retarded, now it approaches the earth, and again recedes from it; and this again takes place differently in the perihelion of the earth from in its aphelion, all of which together introduces such irregularity into the moon’s course that it really obtains a capricious appearance; for, indeed, Kepler’s third law is no longer constantly valid, but in equal times it describes unequal areas. The consideration of this course is a small and separate chapter of celestial mechanics, which is distinguished in a sublime manner from terrestrial mechanics by the absence of all impact and pressure, thus of the vis a tergo which appears to us so intelligible, and indeed of the actually completed case, for besides vis inertiœ it knows no other moving and directing force, except only gravitation, that longing for union which proceeds from the very inner nature of bodies. If now we construct for ourselves in imagination the working of this given case in detail, we recognise distinctly and directly in the moving force here that which is given to us in self-consciousness as will. For the alter- ations in the course of the earth and the moon, according as one of them is by its position more or less exposed to the influence of the sun, are evidently analogous to the influence of newly appearing motives upon our wills, and to the modifications of [042] our action which result.

The following is an illustrative example of another kind. Liebig (Chemie in Anwendung auf Agrikultur, p. 501), says: “If we bring moist copper into air which contains carbonic acid, the affinity of the metal for the oxygen of the air will be increased by the contact with this acid to such a degree that the two will combine with each other; its surface will be coated with green carbonic oxide of copper. But now two bodies which have the capacity of combining, the moment they meet assume opposite electrical conditions. Therefore if we touch the copper with iron, by producing a special electrical state, the capacity of the copper to enter into combination with the oxygen is destroyed; even under the above conditions it remains bright.” The fact is well known and of technical use.

I quote it in order to say that here the will of the copper, laid claim to and occupied by the electrical opposition to iron, leaves unused the opportunity which presents itself for its chemical affinity for oxygen and carbonic acid.

Accordingly it conducts itself exactly as the will in a man who omits an action which he would otherwise feel himself moved to in order to perform another to which a stronger motive urges him.