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60 THE FOURFOLD ROOT. [CHAP. IV.
slight variation, still in itself always subjective and, as
such therefore, incapable of containing anything objective,
anything like perception. For sensation is and remains a
process within the organism and is limited, as such, to the
region within the skin ; it cannot therefore contain any
thing which lies beyond that region, or, in other words,
anything that is outside us. A sensation may be pleasant
Or unpleasant which betokens a relation to the Will
but -nothing objective can ever lie in any sensation* In
the organs of the senses, sensation is heightened by the con
fluence of the nerve-extremities, and can easily be excited
from without on account of their extensive distribution
and the delicacy of the envelope which encloses them ;
it is
besides specially susceptible to particular influences, such
as light, sound, smell ; notwithstanding which it is and re
mains mere sensation, like all others within our body,
consequently something essentially subjective, of whose
changesWe only become immediately conscious in the form
Of the inner sense, Time : that is, successively. It is only
when the Understanding begins to act a function, not of
single, delicate nerve-extremities, but of that mysterious,
complicated structure weighing from five to ten pounds,
called the brain only when it begins to apply its sole form,
the causal law, that a powerful transformation takes place,
by which subjective sensation becomes objective perception. Ir
For, in virtue of its own peculiar form, therefore a priori,
i.e. before all experience (since there could have been none
till then), the Understanding conceives the given corporeal
sensation as an effect (a word which the Understanding
alone comprehends), which effect, as such, necessarily
implies a cause. Simultaneously it summons to its assis
tance Space, the form of the outer sense, lying likewise
ready in the intellect (i.e. the brain), in order to remove
that cause beyond the organism ; for it is by this that the
external world first arises, Space alone rendering it pos-