<p>In infinite space, countless glowing spheres, around each of which revolve some dozen smaller illuminated spheres, hot at the core and covered by a congealed cold crust on which a moldy film has given rise to living and cognizant beings: this is empirical truth, reality, the world.</p><p>Nevertheless, it is an unfortunate predicament for a thinking being to be standing on one of these countless spheres, free-floating in boundless space, not knowing where he has come from or where he is going, and being only one of innumerable similar beings who press, drive, and torment themselves, restlessly and rapidly arising and passing away in a time without beginning and end. Amidst this, nothing persists but matter and the continual recurrence of the same varied organic forms, by means of certain paths and canals that just happen to be there. All that empirical science can teach is the more precise constitution and regularity of these events. – But at long last the philosophy of the modern age has realized, in particular through Berkeley and Kant, that all of this is actually in the first instance only a phenomenon of the brain, and is laden with such considerable, numerous, and varied subjective conditions that its supposed absolute reality vanishes and makes room for an entirely different world order in which that brain phenomenon is grounded, i.e., would relate to it as the thing in itself relates to the mere phenomenon.</p>

Arthur Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Presentation PDF

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