>>19230138Suns and moons without an eye that sees them, and an understanding that knows them, may indeed be spoken of in words, but for the idea, these words are absolutely meaningless. On the other hand, the law of causality and the treatment and investigation of nature which is based upon it, lead us necessarily to the conclusion that, in time, each more highly organized state of matter has succeeded a cruder state: so that the lower animals existed before men, fishes before land animals, plants before fishes, and the unorganized before all that is organized; that, consequently, the original mass had to pass through a long series of changes before the first eye could be opened. And yet, the existence of this whole world remains ever dependent upon the first eye that opened, even if it were that of an insect. For such an eye is a necessary condition of the possibility of knowledge, and the whole world exists only in and for knowledge, and without it is not even thinkable.
The Sun and Moon are entirely ideas, and as such demands the knowing subject as the supporter of their existence. Nothing in the universe has a sufficient cause of its existence generally, but only a cause of existence just here and just now. That a moon exhibits now gravity, now rigidity, now electricity, now chemical qualities, depends upon causes, upon impressions upon it from without, and is to be explained from these. But these qualities themselves, and thus the whole inner nature of the moon which consists in them, and therefore manifests itself in all the ways referred to; thus, in general, that the moon, is such as it is, that it exists generally--all this, I say, has no ground. It is the visible appearance of the groundless will.
