VIII. Reactionary World Conceptions

Did not Kant teach this, too? Is not the perceptible world only a world of appearances for him also? To be sure, the sage from Koenigsberg did not attribute this eternal reality to the ideas, but with respect to the perception of the reality spread out in space and time, Schopenhauer thought Plato and Kant to be in complete agreement. Soon he also accepted this view as an irrevocable truth. He argued, “I have a knowledge of the things insofar as I see, hear, feel them, etc., that is to say, insofar as I have them as a thought picture in my mind's eye. An object then can be there for me only by being represented to my mind as a thought image. Heaven, earth, etc., are therefore my mind's imaginations, for the “thing in itself' that corresponds to them has become my mind's object only by taking on the character of a thought representation.”