THE ASSERTION AND DENIAL OF THE WILL. 529
for it is a combination of words; it is an example of the unthinkable, which is necessary in logic in order to prove the laws of thought. Therefore if for this end such an example is sought, we will stick to the nonsense as the positive which we are in search of, and pass over the sense as the negative. Thus every nihil negativum, if subordinated to a higher concept, will appear as a mere nihil privativum or relative nothing, which can, moreover, always exchange signs with what it negatives, so that that would then be thought as negation, and it itself as assertion. This also agrees with the result of the difficult dialectical investigation of the meaning of nothing which Plato gives in the "Sophist" (pp. 277-287): (
Greek characters) (Cum enim ostenderemus, alterius ipsius naturam esse perque omnia entia divisam atque dispersam in vicem ; tunc partem ejus oppositam ei, quod cujusque ens est, esse ipsum revera non ens asseruimus).
That which is generally received as positive, which we call the real, and the negation of which the concept nothing in its most general significance expresses, is just the world as idea, which I have shown to be the objectivity and mirror of the will. Moreover, we ourselves are just this will and this world, and to them belongs the idea in general, as one aspect of them. The form of the idea is space and time, therefore for this point of view all that is real must be in some place and at some time. Denial, abolition, conversion of the will, is also the abolition and the vanishing of the world, its mirror. If we no longer perceive it in this mirror, we ask in vain where it has gone, and then, because it has no longer any where and when, complain that it has vanished into nothing.
A reversed point of view, if it were possible for us,
