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

eagerly seized upon. Indeed, if fate will show ita whole nialice, even ffis refuge is denied to the sufferer, and, in the hands oF enraged eh~emie371ie may remain exposed to terrible and sloyTtoitufes" wiffibut^rim^^ In vain the sufferer then calls on his gods for help ; he remains exposed to 155" fate without grace. But th5 irremedi» ableness 5 only the mirror of the invincible nature of h5 wiU, of which his person 5 the objectivity.

As little ta an external power jcan ^ange or suppress th5 will, so little can a foreign power deliver it from tlie"nuseriea ^ich proceed from the life which 5 the phendmenal appearance of that will. In the principal matter, as in everything else, a man is always thrown back upon himselE T5 vain ~does he make to himself gods in order to get from them by prayers and Sattery what can only be accompUshed by h5 own will-power.

The Old Testament made the worldTand man Qle work of a god, but the New Testament saw that, in order to teach that holiness and salvation from the sorrows of this world can only come from the world itself, it was necessary that this god should become man. It is and remains the will of inan upon which everything depends for him.

Fana^ tics, mjtto:a....sain,ta,Qf- every faith and name, haye voluntarily and gladly endured every torture, because in them the will to live iiaiT suppressed_itself ; and then even the slow~(Iestruction of its phenomenon was welcome to them. But I do not wish to anticipate the later exposition.

For the rest, I cannot here avoid the statement that, to me, optimism, when it is not merely the thoughtless talk of such as harbour nothing but words under their low foreheads, appears not merely as an absurd, but also as a really ^'g^g</ wajr of thinking, as a bitter mockery of the unspeakable suffering of humanity.

Let no one think that Christianity is favourable to optimism ; for, on the contrary, in the Gtospels world and evil are used aa almost synonymioug,?

^ Of. Oh. xlvi. of Supplement

p. 421

§ 60. We have now completed the two expositions it was necessary to insert ; the exposition of the freedom of the will in itself together with the necessity of its phenomenon, and the exposition of its lot in the world which reflects its own nature, and upon the knowledge of which it has to assert or deny itself. Therefore we can now proceed to bring out more clearly the nature of this assertion and denial itself, which was referred to and explained in a merely general way abova This we shall do by exhibiting the conduct in which alone it finds its expression, and considering it in its inner significance.

The assertion of the will is the continuous willing itself, undisturbed by any knowledge, as it fills the life of man in general. For even the body of a man is the objectivity of the will, as it appears at this grade and in this individual And thus his willing which develops itself in time is, as it were, a paraphrase of his body, an elucidation of the significance of the whole and its parts ; it is another way of exhibiting the same thing-in-itself, of which the body is already the phenomenon. Therefore, instead of saying assertion of the will, we may say assertion of the body. The fundamental theme or subject of all the multifarious acts of will is tlie satisfaction of the wants which are inseparable from the existence of the body in health, they already have their expression in it, and may be refened to the maintenance of the individual and the propagation of the species. But indirectly the most different kinds of motives obtain in this way power over the will, and bring about the most multifarious acts of wilL Each of these is only an example, an instance, of the will which here manifests itself generally. Of what nature this example may be, what form the motive may have and impart to it, is not essential ; the important point here is that something is willed in general and the degree of intensity with which it is so willed. The will can only become visible in the motives, as the eye only manifests its power of seeing in the light

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THE WORLD AS WILL.

BK. IV.