3. Schopenhauer called his great work, _The World as Will and Idea_. [1] Leaving out Will for the moment, let us consider the world “as Idea.”
“‘The world is my idea;’ [2] this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as an idea, _i.e._ only in relation to something else, the consciousness which is himself. If any truth can be asserted _a priori_, it is this; for it is the expression of the most general form of all possible and thinkable experience: a form which is more general than time, space, or causality, for they all pre-suppose it.
“No truth, therefore, is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof than this, that all that exists for knowledge, and, therefore, this whole world, is only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver, in a word, idea. This is obviously true of the past and the future, as well as of the present, of what is farthest off, as of { 5} what is near; for it is true of time and space themselves, in which alone these distinctions arise. All that in any way belongs or can belong to the world is inevitably thus conditioned through the subject and exists only for the subject. The world is idea.”
The world, then, for each of us, exists in the medium of our mind. It is a sort of building, of which the materials are our ideas and perceptions.
4. So much for “idea.” What do we mean by “world”? A succession of images passing before us, or rather making up our consciousness, like a dream, is not a world. The term is very expressive; it is a favourite word in Shakespeare. When the courtier says —
“Hereafter, in a better world than this, I shall desire more love and knowledge of you,”
he does not mean, as I used to think, “in heaven”; he means in a better condition of social affairs. In “mad world, mad kings, mad composition,” the term means more especially the set of political and family connections within which extraordinary reversals of behaviour have just taken place. Often we use the expression, with a qualifying epithet, to indicate some particular sphere of connected action, “the ecclesiastical world,” “the political world,” and so forth. Always there seems to be implied the notion of a set of things or persons bound together by some common quality which enables them to act upon each other, and to constitute what is technically termed a “whole.” _The_ “world” _par excellence_, then, ought to mean the one connected set of things and persons which we all recognise { 6} and refer to as the same, and as including ourselves along with all who use the word in the same sense.