The World as Will and Idea, Vol. I — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp

The given point of view, and the method of treatment announced, are themselves sufficient to indicate that in tliis ethical book no precepts, no doctrine of duty must be looked for; still less will a general moral principle be given, an universal receipt, as it were, for the production of all the virtues.

Neither shall we talk of an “ ahsolute ought” for this contains a contradiction, as is explained in the Appendix ; nor yet of a “ law of freedom f which is in the same position. In general, we shall not speak at all of “ ought,” for this is how one speaks to children and to nations still in their childhood, but not to those who have appropriated all the culture of a fullrunp. 351 2grown age. It is a palpable contradiction to call the will free, and yet to prescribe laws for it according to which it ought to will. " Ought to will ! ” — wooden iron But it follows from the point of view of our system that the win is not only free, but almighty. From it proceeds not only its action, but also its world ; and as the wUl is, so does its action and its world become. Both are the self-knowledge of the will and nothing more.

The will determines itself, and at the same time both its action and its world ; for besides it there is nothing, and these are the will itself. Only thus is the will truly autonomous, and from every other point of view it is heteronomous. Our philosophical endeavours can only extend to exhibiting and explaining the action of men in its inner nature and content, the various and even opposite maxims, whose living expression it is.

This we shall do in connection with the preceding portion of our work, and in precisely the same way as we have hitherto explained the other phenomena of the world, and have sought to bring their inmost nature to distinct abstract knowledge. Our philosophy will maintain the same immamncy in the case of action, as in all that we have hitherto considered.

Notwithstanding Kant’s great doctrine, it will not attempt to use the forms of the phenomenon, the universal expression of which is the principle of sufficient reason, as a leaping-pole to jump over the phenomenon itself, which alone gives meaning to these forms, and land in the boundless sphere of empty fictions.

But this actual world of experience, in which we are, and which is in us, remains both the material and the limits of our consideration : a world which is so rich in content that even the most searching investigation of which the human mind is capable could not exhaust it.

Since then the real world of experience will never fail to afford material and reality to our ethical investigations, any more than to those we have already conducted, nothing will be less needful than to take refuge in ne gative conceptions 3void of content, and then somehow or other make even ourselves believe that we are saying something when we speak with lifted eyebrows of “absolutes,” “infinites,” “ supersensibles,” and whatever other mere negations of this sort there may be {ovBev ean, r) to Tr)<} <7T€pr)a‘e<a<} ofofia, fiera a/MvBpa^ emvoiai — nihil est, nisi negationis nomen, cum obscura notione. — Jul. or.

5), instead of which it would be shorter to say at once cloud-cuckoo-town {vecjieXoKOKKtjyta) : we shall not require to serve up covered empty dishes of this kind. Finally, we shall not in this book, any more than in those which have preceded it, narrate histories and give tliera out as philosophy.

For we are of opinion that whoever supposes that the inner nature of the world can in any way, however plausibly disguised, be historically comprehended, is infinitely far from a philosophical knowledge of the world.

Yet this is what is supposed whenever a “ becoming,” or a “ having become,” or an “ about to become ” enters into a theory of the nature of the world, whenever an earlier or a later has the least place in it ; and in this way a beginning and an end of the world, and the path it pursues between them, is, either openly or disguisedly, both sought for and found, and the individual who philosophises even recognises his own position on that path.

Such historical philosophising in most cases produces a cosmogony which admits of many varieties, or else a system of emanations, a doctrine of successive disengagements from one being; or, finally, driven in despair from fruitless efforts upon these paths to the last path of all, it takes refuge in the converse doctrine of a constant becoming, springing up, arising, coming to light out of darkness, out of the hidden ground source or groundlessness, or whatever other nonsense of this sort there may be, which is most shortly disposed of with the remark that at the present moment a whole eternity, i.e., an endless time, has already passed, so that everything that can or ought to become must have already done so. For all such historical philosophy, whatTHEp. 353