ception first come into being through the application of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and that you yourself, there fore, derive the Object from the Subject, as, for instance, p. 73 of the "Fourfold Root" (2nd edition). How then can you maintain against Fichte that the Object is always presupposed by the Subject? I know of no way of solving this difficulty but the following: The Subject only presupposes in the Object what belongs to the thing in itself, what is inscrutable; but it creates itself the representation of the Object, i.e. that by which the thing in itself becomes phenomenon. For instance, when I see a tree, my Subject assumes the thing in itself of that tree; whereas the representation of it conversely presupposes the operation of my Subject, the transition from the effect (in my eye) to its cause."
To this Schopenhauer replied as follows on the 12th of July, 1852:—
"Your answers (to the objection in question) are not the right ones. Here there cannot yet be a question of the thing in itself, and the distinction between representation and object is inadmissible: the world is representation. The matter stands rather as follows—Fichte's derivation of the Non-Ego from the Ego, is quite abstract: A = A, ergo, I = I, and so forth. Taken in an abstract sense, the Object is at once posited with the Subject. For to be Subject means, to know; and to know means, to have representations. Object and representation are one and the same thing. In the "Fourfold Root," therefore, I have divided all objects or representations into four classes, within which the Principle of Sufficient Reason always reigns, though in each class under a different form; nevertheless, the Principle of Sufficient Reason always presupposes the class itself, and indeed, properly speaking, they coincide.[1] Now, in reality, the existence of the Subject of
- ↑ See "Die Welt a. W. u. V.," vol. ii. pp. 17-21, and vol. i. p. 39 of
