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

The desire of revenge is closely related to wickedness. It recompenses evil with evil, not with reference to the future, which is the character of punishment, but merely on accoimt of what has happened, what is past, as such, thus disinterestedly, not as a means, but as an end, in order to revel in the torment which the avenger himself hasp. 471 inflicted on the offender. What distinguishes revenge from pure wickedness, and to some extent excuses it, is an appearance of justice. For if the same act, which is now revenge, were to be done legally, that is, according to a previously determined and known rule, and in a society which had sanctioned this rule, it would be punishment, and thus justice.

Besides the suffering which has been described, and which is inseparable from wickedness, because it springs from the same root, excessive vehemence of will, another specific pain quite different from this is connected with wickedness, which is felt in the case of every bad action, whether it be merely injustice proceeding from egoism or pure wickedness, and according to the length of its duration is called the sting of conscience or remorse. Now, whoever remembers and has present in his mind the content of the preceding portion of this Fourth Book, and especially the truth explained at the beginning of it, that life itself is always assured to the will to live, as its mere copy or mirror, and also the exposition of eternal justice, will find that the sting of conscience can have no other meaning than the following, ie., its content, abstractly expressed, is what follows, in which two parts are distinguished, which again, however, entirely coincide, and must be thought as completely united.

However closely the veil of MayS. may envelop the mind of the bad man, i.e., however firmly he may be involved in the principium individuationis, according to which he regards his person as absolutely different and separated by a wide gulf from all others, a knowledge to which he clings with all his might, as it alone suits and supports his egoism, so that knowledge is almost sdways corrupted by will, yet there arises in the inmost depths of his consciousness the secret presentiment that such an order of things is only phenomenal, and that their real constitution is quite different. He has a dim foreboding that, however much time and space may separate

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him from other individuals and the innumerable miseries which they suffer, and even suffer through him, and may represent them as quite foreign to him, yet in themselves, and apart from the idea and its forms, it is the one will to live appearing in them all, which here failing to recognise itself, turns its weapons against itself, and, by seeking increased happiness in one of its phenomena, imposes the greatest suffering upon another.

He dimly sees that he, the bad man, is himself this whole will ; that consequently he is not only the inflicter of pain but also the endurer of it, from whose suffering he is only separated and exempted by an illusive dream, the form of which is space and time, wlrich, however, vanishes away ; that he must in reality pay for the pleasure with the pain, and that all suffering which he only knows as possible really concerns him as the will to live, inasmuch as the possible and actual, the near and the distant in time and space, are only different for the knowledge of the individual, only by means of the ‘prineipium individuMionis, not in themselvea This is the truth which mythically, i.e., adapted to the principle of sufficient reason, and so translated into the form of the phenomenal, is expressed in the transmigration of souls.

Yet it has its purest expression, free from all foreign admixture, in that obscurely felt yet inconsolable misery called remorse.

But this springs also from a second immediate knowledge, which is closely bound to the first — the knowledge of the strength with which the will to live asserts itself in the wicked individual, which extends far beyond his own individual phenomenon, to the absolute denial of the same will appearing in other individuals.

Consequently the inward horror of the wicked man at his own deed, which he himself tries to conceal, contains, besides that presentment of the nothingness, the mere illusiveness of the prineipium individuationis, and of the distinction established by it between him and others i also the knowledge of the