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. . . We can draw on Hume for the contrary view. In a footnote in his ‘Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,’ Hume says that people are prone to transfer descriptions of voluntary causation to the inanimate realm. And he makes it clear that he regards this as a bad mistake

“No animal can put external bodies in motion without the sentiment or a nisus or endeavour; and every animal has a sentiment or feeling from the stroke or blow of an external object, that is n motion. These sensations. . . we are apt to transfer to inanimate objects, and to suppose, that they have some such feelings, whenever they transfer or receive motion”

The absurdity of this assumption -- that, for example, a stone feels the exertion of breaking a window -- is probably the kind of absurdity many people are inclined to see in Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the world as a will: namely, a preposterous animalism. But Schopenhauer makes it clear that that is not his view. He is not concerned with the ‘feelings’ accompanying our actions, but with the immediacy with which we realize that a certain force is activated by certain circumstances. The claim is that what we witness here is essentially what happens everywhere, though not always witnessed by anybody, nor accompanied by any feelings. ~ Page 170

2 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.

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