a priori. He proceeds in the light of the supposed contradiction involved in any transcendent Thing-in-itself — an assumed background, as it were, hid behind the vision-world of experience, this phenomenon rising thus between the Thing and the mind, and so veiling it. Hence he proposes as the remedy the bringing of the Absolute within the veil of the phenomenon, and, so to speak, between it and the mind, to lie there as if an originative tissue, connecting the two as it begets them. In other words, he makes the Absolute, construed as his Unconscious, the immanent source of two concomitant streams of appearance: the one objective, the sensible world itself, the other subjective, the stream of the conscious perceptions of the world.[1] These two streams, as both flowing from the one Unconscious under identically corresponding conditions, are in incessant counterpart. Thus knowledge, though not a copy from natural objects, is an exact counter-image to them, engendered from a common source. Consciousness and Nature are both pure show (Schein). The world is an “objective apparition” (ein objectiver Schein), perception is a duplicate “subjective apparition” (ein subjectiver Schein) and both are exhaled from the depths of the Unconscious: phenomenal existence is thus doubled throughout. Space, Time, and the Causal Nexus are also duplicated, as well as the items they contain or connect.
- ↑ A reminiscence here of Spinoza, or of Spinoza hegelised.
