Download (PDF, 23.58MB) - Plurality Press

PHYSIOLOGY OF PLANTS. 295
representation that is to say, the whole corporeal world,
stretched out in Space and Time, which as such can
never exist anywhere but in the brain any more than
dreams, which, as long as they last, exist in the same way.
What the intellect does for animals and for man, as the
mediator of motives, susceptibility for stimuli does for
plants, and susceptibility for every sort of cause for in
organic bodies : and strictly speaking, all this differs merely
in degree. For, exclusively as a consequence of this suscep
tibility to outward impressions having enhanced itself in
animals proportionately to their requirements till it has
reached the point where a nervous system and a brain be
come necessary, does consciousness arise as a function of that
brain, and in it the objective world, whose forms (Time,
Space, Causality) are the way in which that function is per
formed. Therefore we find the intellect originally laid out
entirely with a view to subjectivity, destined merely to serve
the purposes of the will, consequently as something quite
secondary and subordinate ; nay, in a sense, as something
which appears only per accidens ; as a condition of the action
of mere motives, instead of stimuli, which has become neces
sary in the higher degree of animal existence. The image
of the world in Space and Time, which thus arises, is only
the map 1
on which the motives present themselves as
ends. It also conditions the spacial and causal connection
in which the objects perceived stand to one another ; never
theless it is only the mediating link between the motive
and the act of volition. Now, to take such an image as
this of the world, arising in this manner, accidentally, in
the intellect, i.e. in the cerebral function of animal beings,
through the means to their ends being represented and the
path of these ephemera on their planet being thus illumined
to take this image, we say, this mere cerebral phenome
non, for the true, ultimate essence of things (thing in itself),
1 Plan.