History of Modern Philosophy · Chapter 37%part II. From Kant to the Present Time.% (16)
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[Footnote 1: On the Herbartian psychology, cf. Ribot, German Psychology of To-day, English Translation by Baldwin, 1886, pp. 24-67; and G.F. Stout, Mind, vols. xiii.-xiv.—TR.]
The soul is one of these reals which, unchangeable in themselves, enter into various relations with others, and conserve themselves against the latter. In its simple what as unknowable as the rest, it is yet familiar to us in its self-conservations. In the absence of a more fitting expression for the totality of psychical phenomena we call these representations, the phenomenal manifoldness of which is due to the variety of the disturbances and exists for the observer alone. In itself, without a plurality of dispositions and impulses, the soul is originally not a representative force, but first becomes such under certain circumstances, viz., when it is stimulated to self-conservation by other beings. The sum of the reals which stand in immediate relation to the soul is called its body; this, an aggregate of simple beings, furnishes the intermediate link of causal relation between the soul and the external world. The soul has its (movable) seat in the brain. In opposition to the physiological treatment of psychology, Herbart remarks that psychology throws much more light on physiology than she can ever receive from it.
The simplest representations are the sensations, which, amid all their variety, still group themselves into definite classes (odors, sounds, colors). They serve us as symbols of the disturbing reals, but they are not images of things, nor effects of these, but products of the soul itself: the generation of sensations is the soul's peculiar way of guarding itself against threatened disturbances. Every representation once come into being disappears again from consciousness, it is true, but not from the soul. It persists, unites with others, and stands with them in a relation of interaction—in both cases according to definite laws. These original representations are the only ones which the soul produces by its own activity; all other psychical phenomena, feeling, desire, will, attention, memory, judgment, the whole wealth of inner events, result of themselves from the interplay of the primary representations under law. Representation (more exactly sensation) is alone original; space, time, the categories, which Kant makes a priori, are all acquired, i.e., like all the higher mental life, they are the results of a psychical mechanism, results whose production needs no renewed exertion on the part of the soul itself. It has been a very harmful error in psychology hitherto to ascribe each particular mental activity to a special faculty of the soul having a similar name, instead of deriving it from combinations of simple representations. Abstract, empty class ideas have been treated as real forces, in the belief that thus the single concrete acts had been "explained."
There is no bitterer foe of the faculty theory than Herbart. His campaign against it, if not victorious, was yet salutary, and the motives of his hostility, up to a certain point, entirely justified. Nothing is more useless than the assurance that what the soul actually does, that it must also have the power to do. Who disputes this? A faculty explains nothing so long as the laws under which its functions and its relations to other faculties remain unexplained. But although the faculty idea serves no positive end, it cannot be entirely discarded. It marks the boundary where our ability to reduce one class of psychical phenomena to another ceases. Herbart's polemic has no force against the moderate and necessary use of this idea, no matter how much it was in place in view of the impropriety of a superfluous multiplication of the faculties of the soul. The realization of the ideal of psychology, the reduction of the complex phenomena of mental life to the smallest possible number of simple elements, is limited by the heterogeneity of the original phenomena, knowing, feeling, willing, which wholly resists derivation from the combination of sensations. That which blinded Herbart to these limitations was that tendency toward unity, which, as a metaphysician and moral philosopher, he had all too willfully suppressed, and which now took revenge for this infringement of its rights by misleading the psychologist to an exaggeration which had important consequences. Nevertheless his unsuccessful attempt remains interesting and worthy of gratitude.
The discovery of the laws which govern the interaction of the psychical elements is the task of a statics and a mechanics of representations. The former investigates the equilibrium or the settled final state; the latter, the change, i.e. the movements of representations. These names of themselves betray Herbart's conviction that mathematics can and must be applied to psychology. The bright hopes, however, which Herbart formed for the attempt at a mathematical psychology, were fulfilled neither in his own endeavors nor in those of his pupils, although, as Lotze remarks, it would be asserting too much to say that the most general formulas which he set up contradict experience.—The unity of the soul forces representations to act on one another. Disparate representations, those, that is, which belong to different representative series, as the visual image of a rose and the auditory image of the word rose, or as the sensations yellow, hard, round, ringing, connected in the concept gold piece, enter into complications [complexes]. Homogeneous representations (the memory image and the perceptual image of a black poodle) fuse into a single representation. Opposed representations (red and blue) arrest one another when they are in consciousness together. The connection and graded fusion of representations is the basis of their retention and reproduction, as well as of the formation of continuous series of representations. The reproduction is in part immediate, a free rising of the representation by its own power as soon as the hindrances give way; in part mediate, a coming up through the help of others. On the arrest of partially or totally opposed representations Herbart bases his psychological calculus. Let there be given simultaneously in consciousness three opposed representations of different intensities, the strongest to be called a, the weakest c, the intermediate one b. What happens? They arrest one another, i.e. a part of each is forced to sink below the threshold of consciousness.[1]
What is the amount of the arrest? As much as all the weaker representations together come to—the sum of arrest or the sum of that which becomes unconscious (as it were the burden to be divided) is equal to the sum of all the representations with the exception of the strongest (hence = b + c), and is divided among the individual representations in the inverse ratio of their strength, consequently in such a way that the strongest (the one which most actively and successfully resists arrest) has the least, and the weakest the most, of it to bear. It may thus come to pass that a representation is entirely driven out of consciousness by two stronger ones, while it is impossible for this to happen to it from a single one, no matter how superior it be. The simplest case of all is when two equally strong representations are present, in which case each is reduced to the half of its original intensity. The sum of that which remains in consciousness is always equal to the greatest representation.
[Footnote 1: By their mutual pressure representations are transformed into a mere tendency to represent, which again becomes actual representation when the arrest ceases. The parts of a representation transformed into a tendency, and the residua remaining unobscured, are not pieces cut off, but the quantity denotes merely a degree of obscuration in the whole representation, or rather in the representation which actually takes place.]
As soon as a representation reaches the zero point of consciousness, or as soon as a new representation (sensation) comes in, the others begin at once to rise or sink. The Mechanics seeks to investigate the laws of these movements of representations; but we may the more readily pass over its complicated calculations since their precise formulas can never more than very roughly represent the true state of the case, which simply rebels against precision. The rock on which every immanent use of mathematics in psychology must strike, is the impossibility of exactly measuring one representation by another. We may, indeed, declare one stronger than another on the basis of the immediate impression of feeling, but we cannot say how much stronger it is, nor with reason assert that it is twice or half as intense. Herbart's mathematical psychology was wrecked by this insurmountable difficulty. The demand for exactness which it raised, but which it was unable to satisfy with the means at its disposal, has recently been renewed, and has led to assured results in psycho-physics, which works on a different basis and with ingenious methods of measurement.
Herbart endeavors, as we have seen, to deduce the various mental activities from the play of representations, Feeling and desire are not something beside representations, are not special faculties of the soul, but results of the relations of representations, changing states of representations arrested and working upward against hindrances. A representation which has been forced out of consciousness persists as a tendency or effort to represent, and as such exerts a pressure on the conscious representations. If a representation is suspended between counteracting forces a feeling results; desire is the rise of a representation in the face of hindrances, aversion is hesitation in sinking. If the effort is accompanied by the idea that its goal is attainable, it is termed will. The character of a man depends on the fact that definite masses of representations have become dominant, and by their strength and persistence hold opposing representations in check or suppress them. The longer the dominant mass of representations exercises its power, the firmer becomes the habit of acting in a certain way, the more fixed the will. Herbart's intellectualistic denial of self-dependence to the practical capacities of the soul leads him logically to determinism. Volition depends on insight, is determined by representations; freedom signifies nothing but the fact that the will can be determined by motives. If the individual decisions of man were undetermined he would have no character; if the character were free in the choice between two actions, then, along with the noblest resolve, there would remain the possibility of an opposite decision; freedom of choice would make pure chance the doer of our deeds. Pedagogics, above all, must reject the idea of an undetermined freedom; education, along with imputation, correction, and punishment, would be a meaningless word, if no determining influence on the will of the pupil were possible.—This last objection overlooks the fact that the pedagogical influence is always mediate, and can do no more than, by disciplining the impulses of the pupil and by supplying him with aids against immoral inclinations, to lighten his moral task. We can work on the motives only, never directly on the will itself. Otherwise it would be inexplicable that even the best pedagogical skill proves powerless in the case of many individuals.
Herbart's psychology was preceded by a philosophy of nature, which construes matter from attraction and repulsion, and declares an actio in distans impossible. The intermediate link between physics and psychology is formed by the science of organic life (physiology or biology); and with this natural theology is connected by the following principles: The purposiveness which we notice with admiration in men and the higher animals compels us, since it can neither come from chance nor be explained on natural grounds alone, to assume as its author a supreme artificer, an intelligence which works by ends. It is true, indeed, that the existence of the Deity is not demonstrated by the teleological argument; this is only an hypothesis, but one as highly probable as the assumption that the human bodies by which we are surrounded are inhabited by human souls—a fact which we can only assume, not perceive nor prove. The assurance of faith is different from that of logic and experience, but not inferior to it. Religion is based on humility and grateful reverence, which is favored, not injured, by the immeasurable sublimity of its object, the incompleteness of our idea of the Supreme Being, and the knowledge of our ignorance. If faith rests, on the one hand, on the teleological view of nature, it is, on the other, connected with moral need, and exercises, in addition, aesthetic influences. By comforting the suffering, setting right the erring, reclaiming and pacifying the sinner, warning, strengthening, and encouraging the morally sound, religion brings the spirit into a new and better land, shows it a higher order of things, the order of providence, which, amid all the mistakes of men, still furthers the good. The religious spirit always includes an ethical element, and the bond of the Church holds men together even where the state is destroyed. Indispensable theoretically as a supplement to our knowledge, and practically because of the moral imperfection of men, who need it to humble, warn, comfort, and lift them up, religion is, nevertheless, in its origin independent of knowledge and moral will. Faith is older than science and morals: the doctrine of religion did not wait for astronomy and cosmology, nor the erection of temples for ethics. Before the development of the moral concepts religion already existed in the form of wonder without a special object, of a gloomy awe which ascribed every sudden inner excitement to the impulse of an invisible power. Since a speculative knowledge of the nature of God is impossible, the only task which remains for metaphysics is the removal of improper determinations from that which tradition and phantasy have to say on the subject. We are to conceive God as personal, extramundane, and omnipotent, as the creator, not of the reals themselves, but of their purposive coexistence (Zusammen). In order, however, to rise from the idea of the original, most real, and most powerful being to that of the most excellent being we need the practical Ideas, without which the former would remain an indifferent theoretical concept. Man can pray only to a wise, holy, perfect, just, and good God.
This, in essential outline, is the content of the scattered observations on the philosophy of religion given by Herbart. Drobisch (Fundamental Doctrines of the Philosophy of Religion, 1840), from the standpoint of religious criticism and with a renewal of the moral argument, and Taute (1840-52) and Flügel (Miracles and the Possibility of a Knowledge of God, 1869) with an apologetic tendency and one toward a belief in miracles, have, among others, endeavored to make up for the lack of a detailed treatment of this discipline by Herbart—from which, moreover, much of value could hardly have been expected in view of the jejuneness of his metaphysical conceptions and the insufficiency of his appreciation of evil.
It remains only to glance at Herbart's Aesthetics. The beautiful is distinguished from the agreeable and the desirable, which, like it, are the objects of preference and rejection, by the facts, first, that it arouses an involuntary and disinterested judgment of approval; and second, that it is a predicate which is ascribed to the object or is objective. To these is added, thirdly, that while desire seeks for that which is to come, taste possesses in the present that which it judges.
That which pleases or displeases is always the form, never the matter; and further, is always a relation, for that which is entirely simple is indifferent. As in music we have succeeded in discovering the simplest relations, which please immediately and absolutely—we know not why—so this must be attempted in all branches of the theory of art. The most important among them, that which treats of moral beauty, moral philosophy, has therefore to inquire concerning the simplest relations of will, which call forth moral approval or disapproval (independently of the interest of the spectator), to inquire concerning the practical Ideas or pattern-concepts, in accordance with which moral taste, involuntarily and with unconditional evidence, judges concerning the worth or unworth of (actually happening or merely represented) volitions. Herbart enumerates five such primary Ideas or fundamental judgments of conscience.
(1) The Idea of inner freedom compares the will with the judgment, the conviction, the conscience of the agent himself. The agreement of his desire with his own judgment, with the precept of his taste, pleases, lack of agreement displeases. Since the power to determine the will according to one's own insight of itself establishes only an empty consistency and loyalty to conviction, and may also subserve immoral craft, the first Idea waits for its content from the four following.
(2) The Idea of perfection has reference to the quantitative relations of the manifold strivings of a subject, in intensity, extension, and concentration. The strong is pleasing in contrast with the weak, the greater (more extended, richer) in contrast with the smaller, the collected in contrast with the scattered; in other words, in the individual desires it is energy which pleases, in their sum variety, in the system co-operation. While the first two Ideas have compared the will of the individual man with itself, the remaining ones consider its relation to the will of other rational beings, the third to a merely represented will, and the last two to an actual one.
(3) According to the Idea of benevolence or goodness, which gives the most immediate and definite criterion of the worth of the disposition, the will pleases if it is in harmony with the (represented) will of another, i.e., makes the satisfaction of the latter its aim.
(4) The Idea of right is based on the fact that strife displeases. If several wills come together at one point without ill-will (in claiming a thing), the parties ought to submit themselves to right as a rule for the avoidance of strife.
(5) In retribution and equity, also, the original element is displeasure, displeasure in an unrequited act as a disturbance of equilibrium. This last Idea demands that no deed of good or evil remain unanswered; that in reward, thanks, and punishment, a quantum of good and evil equal to that of which he has been the cause return upon the agent. The one-sided deed of good or ill is a disturbance, the removal of which demands a corresponding requital.
Herbart warns us against the attempt to derive the five original Ideas (which scientific analysis alone separates, for in life we always judge according to all of them together) from a single higher Idea, maintaining that the demand for a common principle of morals is a prejudice. From the union of several beings into one person proceed five other pattern-concepts, the derived or social Ideas of the ethical institutions in which the primary Ideas are realized. These correspond to the primary Ideas in the reverse order: The system of rewards, which regulates punishment; the legal society, which hinders strife; the system of administration, aimed at the greatest possible good of all; the system of culture, aimed at the development of the greatest possible power and virtuosity; finally, as the highest, and that which unites the others in itself, society as a person, which, when it is provided with the necessary power, is termed the state.
If we combine the totality of the original Ideas into the unity of the person the concept of virtue arises. If we reflect on the limitations which oppose the full realization of the ideal of virtue, we gain the concepts of law and duty. An ethics, like that of Kant, which exclusively emphasizes the imperative or obligatory character of the good, is one-sided; it considers morality only in arrest, a mistake which goes with its false doctrine of freedom. On the other hand, it was a great merit in Kant that he first made clear the unconditional validity of moral judgment, independent of all eudemonism. Politics and pedagogics are branches of the theory of virtue. The end of education is development in virtue, and, as a means to this, the arousing of varied interests and the production of a stable character.
In conclusion, we may sum up the points in which Herbart shows himself a follower of Kant—he calls himself a "Kantian of the year 1828." His practical philosophy takes from Kant its independence of theoretical philosophy, the disinterested character of aesthetic judgment, the absoluteness of ethical values, the non-empirical origin of the moral concepts: "The fundamental ethical relations are not drawn from experience." His metaphysics owes to Kant the critical treatment of the experience-concepts (its task is to make experience comprehensible), in which the leading idea in the Kantian doctrine of the antinomies, the inevitableness of contradictions, is generalized, extended to all the fundamental concepts of experience, and, as it were, transferred from the Dialectic to the Analytic; it owes to him, further, the conception of being as absolute position, and, finally, the dualism of phenomena and things in themselves. Herbart (with Schopenhauer) considers the renewal of the Platonic distinction between seeming and being the chief service of the great critical philosopher, and finds his greatest mistake in the a priori character ascribed to the forms of cognition. In the doctrine of the pure intuitions and the categories, and the Critique of Judgment, he rejects, and with full consciousness, just those parts of Kant on which the Fichtean school had built further. Finally, Herbart's method of thought, his impersonality, the at times anxious caution of his inquiry, and the neatness of his conceptions, are somewhat akin to Kant's, only that he lacked the gift of combination to a much greater degree than his great predecessor on the Königsberg rostrum. His remarkable acuteness is busier in loosening than in binding; it is more happy in the discovery of contradictions than in their resolution. Therefore he does not belong to the kings who have decided the fate of philosophy for long periods of time; he stands to one side, though it is true he is the most important figure among these who occupy such a position.
The first to give his adherence to Herbart in essential positions, and so to furnish occasion for the formation of an Herbartian school, was Drobisch (born 1802), in two critiques which appeared in 1828 and 1830. Besides Drobisch, from whom we have valuable discussions of Logic (1836, 5th ed., 1887) and Empirical Psychology (1842), and an interesting essay on Moral Statistics and the Freedom of the Will (1867), L. Strümpell (born 1812; The Principal Points in Herbart's Metaphysics Critically Examined, 1840), is a professor in Leipsic. The organ of the school, the Zeitschrift für exakte Philosophie, now edited by Flügel (the first volume, 1860, contained a survey of the literature of the school), was at first issued by T. Ziller, the pedagogical thinker, and Allihn. The Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, from 1859, edited by M. Lazarus (born 1824; The Life of the Soul, 3 vols., 1856 seq., 3d ed., 1883 seq.) and H. Steinthal (born 1823; The Origin of Language, 4th ed., 1888; Sketch of the Science of Language, part i. 2d ed., 1881; General Ethics, 1885) of Berlin, also belongs to the Herbartian movement. Distinguished service has been done in psychology by Nahlowsky (The Life of Feeling, 1862, 2d. ed., 1884), Theodor Waitz in Marburg (1821-84; Foundation of Psychology, 1846; Text-book of Psychology, 1849), and Volkmann in Prague (1822-77; Text-book of Psychology, 3d. ed., by Cornelius, 1884 and 1885); while Friedrich Exner (died 1853) was formerly much spoken of as an opponent of the Hegelian psychology (1843-44). Robert Zimmermann in Vienna (born 1824) represents an extreme formalistic tendency in aesthetics (History of Aesthetics, 1858; General Esthetics as Science of Form, 1865; further, a series of thorough essays on subjects in the history of philosophy). Among historians of philosophy Thilo has given a rather one-sided representation of the Herbartian standpoint. The school's philosophers of religion have been mentioned above (p. 532). Beneke, whom we have joined with Fries on account of his anthropological standpoint, stands about midway between Herbart and Schopenhauer. He shares in the former's interest in psychology, in the latter's foundation of metaphysical knowledge on inner experience, and in the dislike felt by both for Hegel; while, on the other hand, he differs from Herbart in his empirical method, and from Schopenhauer in the priority ascribed to representation over effort.
%3. Pessimism: Schopenhauer.%
Schopenhauer is in all respects the antipodes of Herbart. If in Herbart philosophy breaks up into a number of distinct special inquiries, Schopenhauer has but one fundamental thought to communicate, in the carrying out of which, as he is convinced, each part implies the whole and is implied by the whole. The former operates with sober concepts where the latter follows the lead of gifted intuition. The one is cool, thorough, cautious, methodical to the point of pedantry; the other is passionate, ingenious, unmethodical to the point of capricious dilettantism. In the one case, philosophy is as far as possible exact science, in which the person of the thinker entirely retires behind the substance of the inquiry; in the other, philosophy consists in a sum of artistic conceptions, which derive their content and value chiefly from the individuality of the author. The history of philosophy has no other system to show which to the same degree expresses and reflects the personality of the philosopher as Schopenhauer's. This personality, notwithstanding its limitations and its whims, was important enough to give interest to Schopenhauer's views, even apart from the relative truth which they contain.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was the son of a merchant in Dantzic and his wife Johanna, née Trosiener, who subsequently became known as a novelist. His early training was gained from foreign travel, but after the death of his father he exchanged the mercantile career, which he had begun at his father's request, for that of a scholar, studying under G.E. Schulze in Göttingen, and under Fichte at Berlin. In 1813 he gained his doctor's degree in Jena with a dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Then he moved from Weimar, the residence of his mother, where he had associated considerably with Goethe and had been introduced to Indian philosophy by Fr. Mayer, to Dresden (1814-18). In the latter place he wrote the essay On Sight and Colors (1816; subsequently published by the author in Latin), and his chief work, The World as Will and Idea (1819; new edition, with a second volume, 1844). After the completion of the latter he began his first Italian journey, while his second tour fell in the interval between his two quite unsuccessful attempts (in Berlin 1820 and 1825) to propagate his philosophy from the professor's desk. From 1831 until his death he lived in learned retirement in Frankfort-on-the-Main. Here he composed the opuscule On Will in Nature, 1836, the prize treatises On the Freedom of the Human Will and On the Foundation of Ethics (together, The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics, 1841), and the collection of minor treatises Parerga and Paralipomena, 2 vols., 1851 (including an essay "On Religion"). J. Frauenstädt has published a considerable amount of posthumous material (among other things the translation, B. Gracians Handorakel der Weltklugheit); the Collected Works (6 vols., 1873-74, 2d ed., 1877, with a biographical notice); Lichtstrahlen aus Schopenhauers Werken, 1861, 5th ed. 1885; and a Schopenhauer Lexicon, 2 vols., 1871.[1]
[Footnote 1: From the remaining Schopenhauer literature (F. Laban has published a chronological survey of it, 1880) we may call attention to the critiques of the first edition of the chief work by Herbart and Beneke, and that of the second edition by Fortlage (Jenaische Litteratur Zeitung, 1845, Nos. 146-151); J.E. Erdmann Herbart und Schopenhauer, eine Antithese (Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 1851); Wilh. Gwinner, Schopenhauers Leben, 1878 (the second edition of Schopenhauer aus persönlichem Umgang dargestellt, 1862); Fr. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer als Erzieher (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, Stück iii., 1874); O. Busch, A. Schopenhauer, 2d. ed., 1878; K. Peters, Schopenhauer als Philosoph und Schriftsteller, 1880; R. Koeber, Die Philosophie A. Schopenhauers, 1888. [The English reader may be referred to Haldane and Kemp's translation of The World as Will and Idea, 3 vols., 1883-86; the translation of The Fourfold Root and the Will in Nature in Bohn's Philosophical Library, 1889; Saunders's translations from the Parerga and Paralipomena, 1889 seq.; Helen Zimmern's Arthur Schopenhauer, his Life and his Philosophy, 1876; W. Wallace's Schopenhauer, Great Writers Series, 1890 (with a bibliography by Anderson, including references to numerous magazine articles, etc.); Sully's Pessimism, 2d ed., 1882, chap. iv.; and Royce's Spirit of Modern Philosophy, chap, viii., 1892.—TR.]]
In regard to subjective idealism Schopenhauer confesses himself a thoroughgoing Kantian. That sensations are merely states in us has long been known; Kant opened the eyes of the world to the fact that the forms of knowledge are also the property of the subject. I know things only as they appear to me, as I represent them in virtue of the constitution of my intellect; the world is my idea. The 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 representations. 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 essendi, rationis fiendi, rationis agendi, rationis cognoscendi. 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 fiendi 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 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.