Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/561

PRINCIPLE OF SUFFICIENT REASON. 539 Kantian theory, however, is capable of simplification, the various forms of cognition may be reduced to a single one,. to the category of causality or principle of sufficient reason — which was preferred by Kant himself— as ~the general expression of the regular connection of our representa- tions. This principle, in correspondence with the several classes of objects, or rather of representations — viz., pure (merely formal) intuitions, empirical (complete) intuitions, acts of will, abstract concepts — has four forms: it is the principium rationis esse?tdi, ratiojiis fiendi^ rationis agendi, rationis cognosccndi. The ratio essendi is the law which regulates the coexistence of the parts of space and the succession of the divisions of time. The ratio jicndi demands for every change of state another from which it regularly follows as from its cause, and a substance as its unchangeable substratum — matter. All changes take place necessarily, all that is real is material ; the law of causality Is valid for phenomena alone, not beyond them, and holds only for the states of substances, not for substances them- selves. In inorganic nature causes work mechanicall}', 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 dis- tinctions in the mode of action, not in the necessity of action. Man's actions follow as inevitably from his charac- ter and the motives which influence him as a clock strikes the hours; the freedom of the will is a chimera. Finally, the ratio cogfwscciidi 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 fhtuition of objects is common to both. In opposition to thecustom ary overestimation of this gift of mediate repres- entations, of language, and of reflection, Schopenhauer gives prominence to the fact that the reason is not a crea- tive faculty like the understanding, but only a receptive