of substances, not for substances themselves.  In inorganic nature causes work mechanically, in organic nature as stimuli (in which the reaction is not equal to the action), and in animated nature as motives.  A motive is a conscious (but not therefore a free) cause; the law of motivation is the ratio agendi.  This serial order, “mechanical cause, stimulus, and motive,” denotes only distinctions in the mode of action, not in the necessity of action.  Man’s actions follow as inevitably from his character and the motives which influence him as a clock strikes the hours; the freedom of the will is a chimera.  Finally, the ratio cognoscendi determines that a judgment must have a sufficient ground in order to be true.  Judgment or the connection of concepts is the chief activity of the reason, which, as the faculty of abstract thought and the organ of science, constitutes the difference between man and the brute, while the possession of the understanding with its intuition of objects is common to both.  In opposition to the customary overestimation of this gift of mediate representations, of language, and of reflection, Schopenhauer gives prominence to the fact that the reason is not a creative faculty like the understanding, but only a receptive power, that it clarifies and transforms the content furnished by intuition without increasing it by new representations.

Objective cognition is confined within the circle of our representations; all that is knowable is phenomenon.  Space, time, and causality spread out like a triple veil between us and the per se of things, and prevent a vision of the true nature of the world.  There is one point, however, at which we know more than mere phenomena, where of these three disturbing media only one, time-form, separates us from the thing in itself.  This point is the consciousness of ourselves.

On the one hand, I appear to myself as body.  My body is a temporal, spatial, material object, an object like all others, and with them subject to the laws of objectivity.  But besides this objective cognition, I have, further, an immediate consciousness of myself, through which I apprehend my true being—­I know myself as willing.  My will is more than a mere representation, it is the original element in me, the truly real which appears to me as body.  The will is related to the intellect as the primary to the secondary, as substance to accident; it is related to the body as the inner to the outer, as reality to phenomenon.  The act of will is followed at once and inevitably by the movement of the body willed, nay, the two are one and the same, only given in different ways:  will is the body seen from within, body the will seen from without, the will become visible, objectified.  After the analogy of ourselves, again, who appear to ourselves as material objects but in truth are will, all existence is to be judged.  The universe is the mac-anthropos; the knowledge of our own essence, the key to the knowledge of the