THE OBJECTIFICATION OF THE WILL. 141
the body. The parts of the body must, therefore, completely correspond to the principal desires through which the will manifests itself; they must be the visible expression of these desires. Teeth, throat, and bowels are objectified hunger; the organs of generation are objectified sexual desire; the grasping hand, the hurrying feet, correspond to the more indirect desires of the will which they express. As the human form generally corresponds to the human will generally, so the individual bodily structure corresponds to the individually modified will, the character of the individual, and therefore it is throughout and in all its parts characteristic and full of expression. It is very remarkable that Parmenides already gave expression to this in the following verses, quoted by Aristotle (Metaph. iii 5): —
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Greek characters)
(Ut enim cuique complexio membrorum flexibilium se habet, ita mens hominibus adest: idem namque est, quod sapit, membrorum natura hominibus, et omnibus et omni: quod enim plus est, intelligentia est.)[1]
§ 21. Whoever has now gained from all these expositions a knowledge in abtracto, and therefore clear and certain, of what every one knows directly in concreto, i.e., as feeling, a knowledge that his will is the real inner nature of his phenomenal being, which manifests itself to him as idea, both in his actions and in their permanent substratum, his body, and that his will is that which is most immediate in his consciousness, though it has not as such completely passed into the form of idea in which object and subject stand over against each other, but makes
1 Cf. Ch. xx. of the Supplement, and also in my work, "Ueber den Willen in der Natur," the chapters on Physiology and Comparative Anatomy, where the subject I have only touched upon here is fully discussed.
- ↑ 1
