THE ASSERTION AND DENIAL OF THE WILL. 371
in order to maintain himself in existence, that in it a perfectly adequate copy or repetition of the nature of the world under the form of the idea became possible: this is the comprehension of the Ideas, the pure mirror of the world, as we learnt in the Third Book. Thus in man the will can attain to full self-consciousness, to distinct and exhaustive knowledge of its own nature, as it mirrors itself in the whole world. We saw in the preceding book that art springs from the actual presence of this degree of knowledge; and at the end of our whole work it will further appear that, through the same knowledge, in that the will relates it to itself, a suppression and self-denial of the will in its most perfect manifestation is possible. So that the freedom which otherwise, as belonging to the thing-in-itself, can never show itself in the phenomenon, in such a case does also appear in it, and, by abolishing the nature which lies at the foundation of the phenomenon, while the latter itself still continues to exist in time, it brings about a contradiction of the phenomenon with itself, and in this way exhibits the phenomena of holiness and self-renunciation. But all this can only be fully understood at the end of this book. What has just been said merely affords a preliminary and general indication of how man is distinguished from all the other phenomena of will by the fact that freedom, i.e., independence of the principle of sufficient reason, which only belongs to the will as thing-in-itself, and contradicts the phenomenon, may yet possibly, in his case, appear in the phenomenon also, where, however, it necessarily exhibits itself as a contradiction of the phenomenon with itself. In this sense, not only the will in itself, but man also may certainly be called free, and thus distinguished from all other beings. But how this is to be understood can only become clear through all that is to follow, and for the present we must turn away from it altogether. For, in the first place, we must beware of the error that the action of the individual definite man is subject to no
