on the various "dwelling-places" of these "intelligent creatures." He speaks at length about the dependence of the "spiritual faculties " of the various Planet-inhabitants on the grosser or finer, heavier or lighter, matter as determined by the "distance of these abodes from the sun …" The inhabitants of Jupiter or Saturn belong to the "most exalted class of intelligent creatures. These at least have a different Time-idea from ours; they are not subject to death in the same degree that we are …" Man occupies a middle ground between these most excellent and the more imperfect grades of
laws of nature do not apply, hence where time and space do not separate individuals any more, and where separation and isolation resulting from time and space do not offer obstacles to influence of will or to communication of thought. … Here, be it said, that the true idea of actio in distans is that the space between the worker and the worked upon, whether full or empty, has no influence at all on the working; it is the same whether the distance be an inch or a billion of Uranus orbits." (p. 282.)
We commonly imagine that the reality of a spiritual world is overthrown when we have shown that such a world is only subjectively conditioned. But what weight can that argument have with one who knows from Kant's doctrine how strong a share of subjective conditions is involved in the appearance [to our senses] of the corporeal world; how for instance this world with the space in which it stands, the time in which it moves, and the causality in which the being of matter consists, according to its whole form therefore, is only a form of brain-functioning, according as the impressions are awakened by shock on the nerves of the sense organ." (p. 318.)
And this shock, which it is the main purpose of Schopenhauer in this essay to prove, may really occur from internal as from external causes. And therefore, as he says, "there remains left only the question as to the Ding an sich."
