commentary which nature offers us for the understanding of that difficult passage.[1]
For the substratum, or the content, (
Greek characters), or the material of the present, is through all time really the same. The impossibility of knowing this identity directly is just time, a form and limitation of our intellect. That on account of it, for example, the future event is not yet, depends upon an illusion of which we become conscious when that event has come. That the essential form of our intellect introduces such an illusion explains and justifies itself from the fact that the intellect has come forth from the hands of nature by no means for the apprehension of the nature of things, but merely for the apprehension of motives, thus for the service of an individual and temporal phenomenon of will.[2]
Whoever comprehends the reflections which here occupy us will also understand the true meaning of the paradoxical doctrine of the Eleatics, that there is no arising and passing away, but the whole remains immovable: "(Greek characters)" (Parmenides et Melissus ortum et interitum tollebant, guoniam nihil moveri putabant), Stob. Ecl., i. 21. Light is also thrown here upon the beautiful passage of Empedocles which Plutarch has preserved for us in the book, "Adversus Coloten,"
c. 12: –
- ↑ The suspension of the animal functions is sleep, that of the organic functions is death.
- ↑ There is only one present, and this is always: for it is the sole form of actual existence. One must attain to the insight that the past is not in itself different from the present, but only in our apprehension, which has time as its form, on account of which alone the present exhibits itself as different from the past. To assist this insight, imagine all the events and scenes of human life, bad and good, fortunate and unfortunate, pleasing and terrible as they successively present themselves in the course of time and difference of places, in the most checkered multifariousness and variety, as at once and together, and always present in the Nunc stans, while it is only apparently that now this and now that is; then what the objectification of the will to live really means will be understood. Our pleasure also in genre painting depends principally upon the fact that it fixes the fleeting scenes of life. The dogma of metempsychosis has proceeded from the feeling of the truth which has just been expressed.
