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

many parts, this myth yet reigns as the universal belief of lEe people, and has the most decided influence upon fife to-day, as four thousand years ago. Therefore Pytha- ^ras and Plato have seized with admiration on that ne plus ultra oj^ mythical representation, received it from fEHuT or E^pt, honoured it,.,made use. of it, audL we know hot how far, even believed it. We, on the contrary, nqiy sehcTfEe" Brahmans English clergymen and evangefical linen-weavers to set them right out of sympathy, and to^how them that they are created out of nothing, and ought thankfully to rejoice in the fact. But it is just the same as if we fired a buUet £^^st a cliff Tm India duf religionh will never take root The ancientp. 461 wisdom of the human race will not be displaced by what happened in Galilee, ‘On the contraryfln^an philosoj^i^ streams back to Europe, and will produce a fundameiilfl change in 0^ knowledge^urWou^tr^

564. From our exposition of eternal justice, which is not mythical but philosophical, we will now proceed to the kindred investigation of the ethical significance of conduct and of conscience, which is the merely felt knowledge of that significance. But first I wish at this point to draw attention to two peculiarities of human nature, that might help to make clear how the nature of that eternal justice, and the unity and identity of the will in all its phenomena upon which it rests, is known to every one, at least as an obscure feeling.

When a bad deed has been done, it affords satisfaction not only to the sufferer, who for the most part feels the desire of revenge, but also to the perfectly indifferent spectator, to see that he who caused another pain suffers himself a like measure of pain ; and this quite independently of the end which we have shown the state has in view in punishment, and which is the foundation of penal law. It seems to me that what expresses itself here is nothing but the consciousness of that eternal justice, which is, nevertheless, at once misunderstood and falsified by the unenlightened mind, for, involved in the princijpium individtuciionis, it produces an amphiboly of the concepts and demands from the phenomenon what only belongs to the tiling in itself. It does not see how far in themselves the offender an^ the offended, qre . one, and that it is the same being which, not recognising itself in its own manifestation, bears both the pain and llie^gunt, ’b'urit desires rather to see the pain also in the particular Tn3mduiJ~t^whom the guilt belongs. There* fore, most persons would demand that a man who had a very high degree of wickedness which might yet occui in many others, only not matched with other qualities such as are found in him. a man who also far surpassed

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THE WORLD AS WILL.

BK. IV.

others by extraordinary intellectual powers, and who inflicted unspeakable sufferings upon millions of others — for example, as a conqueror, — most persons, I say, would demand that such a man should at some time and in some place expiate all these sufferings by a like amount of pain ; for they do not recognise how in themselves the inflicted of suSermg'and the sufferers are one, and that it is the same wiff l;Tii^j^__w}uch the T^er~exist and live which also appears in the former, and just through him attains to a distinct revi^atlon oF itF nature, and which likewise suffers bqth^ jn the qppr^sed and^TKe oppressor ; and indeed in the latter in a greater measure^ as the consciousness has attained a higTier Hefflee^dT e[eames^3'"~anff distinctness and the will has greater vehemence.

But that the deeper knowledge, which is no longer involved in the principium individuationis, from which all virtue and nobleness proceed, no longer retains the disposition which demands requital, is shown by the Christian ethics, which absolutely forbids all requital of evil with evil, and allows eternal justice to proceed in the sphere of the thing-in-itself, which is different from that of the phenomenon. (“ Vengeance is mine ; I wiU repay, saith the Lord,” — Eom. xii. 1 9.)