Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/29

knowing is not an abstract existence. The Subject does not exist for itself and independently, as if it had dropped from the sky; it appears as the instrument of some individual phenomenon of the Will (animal, human being), whose purposes it is destined to serve, and which thereby now receives a consciousness, on the one hand, of itself, on the other hand, of everything else. The question next arises, as to how or out of what elements the representation of the outer world is brought about within this consciousness. This I have already answered in my "Theory of Colours" and also in my chief work,^[1] but most thoroughly and exhaustively of all in the Second Edition of the "Fourfold Root," § 21, where it is shown, that all those elements are of subjective origin; wherefore attention is especially drawn to the great difference between all this and Fichte's humbug. For the whole of my exposition is but the full carrying out of Kant's Transcendental Idealism."^[2]

I have thought it advisable to give this passage of his letter, as being relevant to the matter in question. As to the division in chapters and paragraphs, it is the same in this new edition as in the last. By comparing each single

the second edition. (The passages referred to by Schopenhauer in the second edition are in the third edition vol. ii. pp. 18-21, and vol. i. p. 40).

1. Die Welt a. W. u. V., vol. i. p. 22 et seqq., and vol. ii. chap. ii. of the second edition; vol. i. p. 22, § 6, and vol. ii. chap. ii. of the third edition.
2. The passage I have quoted above from Schopenhauer's letter is also to be found among the letters published in my book, "Arthur Schopenhauer. Von ihm, über ihn, u. s. w.," p. 541 et seqq., and it results from this, as well as from several other letters which likewise deal with important and knotty points in his philosophy, that this correspondence may perhaps not be quite so worthless and unimportant as many—among them Gwinner, in his pamphlet, "Schopenhauer und seine Freunde" (Leipzig, 1863)—represent it to be. This pamphlet of Gwinner's, by the way, has met with the treatment it deserves in the Preface to the collection, "Aus Arthur Schopenhauer's handschriftlichen Aphorismen und Nachlass. Abhandlungen, Anmerkungen, Fragmente," (Leipzig, 1864).