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

there and in liealth ; but yet, in the inmost consciousness, no sensual gratification is desired ; and although the whole body is only the visible expression of the will to live, yet the motives which correspond to this will no longer act ; indeed, the dissolution of the body, the end of the individual, and in this way the greatest check to the natural will, is welcome and desired.

Now, the contradiction between our assertions of the necessity of the determination of the will by motives, in accordance with the character, on the one hand, and of the possibility of the entire suppression of the will whereby the motives become powerless, on the other hand, is only the repetition in the reflection of philosophy of this real contradiction which arises from the direct encroachment of the freedom of the will-in-itself, wliich knows no necessity, into the sphere of the necessity of its manifestation.

But the key to the solution of these contradictions lies in the fact that the state in which the character is withdrawn from the power of motives does not proceed directly from the will, but I'rom a changed form of knowledge. So long as the knowledge is merely that which is involved in the prirwipmm individiuitionis and exclusively follows the principle of sufficient reason, the strength of the motives is irresistible.

But when the principium irulividuationis is seen through, when the Ideas, and indeed the inner nature of the thingin-itself, as the same will in all, are directly recognised, and from this knowledge an universal quieter of volition arises, then the particular motives become ineffective, because the kind of knowledge which corresponds to them is obscured and thrown into the background by quite another kind.

Therefore the character can never partially change, but must, with the consistency of a law of Nature, carry out in the particular the will which it manifests as a whole. But this whole, the character itself, may be completely suppressed or abolished through the change of knowledge referred to above. It is this

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THE WORLD AS WILL.

BK. IV.

suppression or abolition which Asmus, as quoted above, marvels at and denotes the "catholic, transcendental change ; ” and in the Christian Church it has very aptly been called the Tiew lirth, and the knowledge from which it springs, the work of grace. Therefore it is not a question of a change, but of an entire suppression of the character; and hence it arises that, however different the characters which experience the suppression may have been before it, after it they show a great similarity in their conduct, though every one still speaks very differently according to his conceptions and dogmas.

In this sense, then, the old philosophical doctrine of the freedom of the will, which has constantly been contested and constantly maintained, is not without ground, and the dogma of the Church of the work of grace and the new birth is not without meaning and significance. But we now unexpectedly see both united in one, and we can also now understand in what sense the excellent Malebranche could say, “Za l^ert6 est un mystere,” and was right. For precisely what the Christian mystics call the work of grace and the new birth, is for us the single direct expression of the freedom, of the will. It only appears if the will, having attained to a knowledge of its own real nature, receives from this a quieter, by means of which the motives are deprived of their effect, which belongs to the province of another kind of knowledge, the objects of which are merely phenomena. The possibility of the freedom which thus expresses itself is the greatest prerogative of man, which is for ever wanting to the brute, because the condition of it is the deliberation of reason, which enables him to survey the whole of life independent of the impression of the present. The brute is entirely without the possibility of freedom, as, indeed, it is without the possibility of a proper or deliberate choice following upon a completed conflict of motives, which for this purpose would have to be abstract ideas. Therefore with the same necessity with whichp. 533 the stone falls to the earth, the hungry wolf buries its fangs in the flesh of its prey, without the possibility of the knowledge that it is itself the destroyed as well as the destroyer. Necessity is the kingdom, of naiure ; freedom, is the kingdom of grace.