The World as Percept 71so, then philosophical understanding has dawned
upon them. It is then clear and evident that we
know no sun and no earth, but always only an eye
that sees a sun, a hand that feels the earth; that the
world around us is present only as a mental picture,
that is, only in relation to something that pictures it,
namely ourselves. If any truth may be asserteda
priori it is this one: for it expresses the one form of
all possible and conceivable experience that is
more universal than any other, than time, space,
and causality, for all of these presuppose it....^10
This whole proposition collapses in the face of the fact,
noted above, that the eye and hand are percepts no less
than the sun and the earth. And thus, in Schopenhauer’s
sense, and using his style of expression, we could answer:
My eye, which sees the sun, and my hand, which feels the
earth, are mental pictures in exactly the same way as the
sun and the earth are. With this insight and without further
ado, it is clear that I cancel out Schopenhauer’s proposi-
tion. For only my real eye and my real hand could have the
mental pictures of sun and earth as their modifications, but
my mental pictures of eye and hand could not. Yet critical
idealism can speak only of these mental pictures.
Critical idealism is completely unable to gain insight
into the relationship of percepts and mental pictures. It
- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), Die Welt als Wille und Vorts-
tellung [The World as Will and Representation]. Schopenhauer was
the most influential German philosopher between Hegel and
Nietzsche. See The Riddles of Philosophy, p. 192 ff.