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xxiv EDITOR S PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
ception first come into being through the application of the
Principle of Sufficient Eeason, and that you yourself, there
fore, derive the Object from the Subject, as, for instance,
"
"
p. 73 of the Fourfold Root (2nd edition). How then can
you maintain against Fichte that the Object is always pre
supposed by the Subject ? I know of no way of solving
this difficulty but the following: The Subject only pre
supposes in the Object what belongs to the thing in itself,
but it creates itself the representation of
what is inscrutable ;
the Object, i.e. that by which the thing in itself becomes
phenomenon. For instance, when I see a tree, my Subject
assumes the thing in itself of that tree ; whereas the repre
sentation of it conversely presupposes the operation of my
Subject, the transition from the effect (in my eye) to its
cause."
To this Schopenhauer replied as follows on the 12th of
1852 :
July,
" Your answers (to the objection in question) are not the
right ones. Here there cannot yet be a question of the
thing in itself, and the distinction between representation
and object is inadmissible : the world is representation.
The matter stands rather as follows Fichte s derivation
of the Non-Ego from the Ego, is quite abstract : A = A,
ergo, 1 = 1, and so forth. Taken in an abstract sense, the
Object is at once posited with the Subject. For to be
Subject means, to know; and to know means, to have
representations. Object and representation are one and
the same thing. In the
"
Fourfold Root," therefore, I
have divided all objects or representations into four classes,
within which the Principle of Sufficient Reason always
never
reigns, though in each class under a different form ;
theless, the Principle of Sufficient Eeason always presup
poses the class itself, and indeed, properly speaking, they co
incide. 1
Now, in reality, the existence of the Subject of
See
"
Die Welt a. W. u. vol. ii.
V.," pp. 17-21, and vol. i. p. 39 of