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

The heart, this primum mobile of the animal life, has with perfect justice been chosen as the symbol, nay, the synonym, of the will, as the primary kernel of our phenomenon, and denotes this in opposition to the intellect, which is exactly identical with the head.

All that, in the widest sense, is matter of the will, as wish, passion, joy, grief, goodness, wickedness, also what we are wont to understand under " Gemiith," and what Homer expresses through (f)t\ov rjrop, is attributed to the heart.

Accordingly we say : He has a bad heart ; — his heart is in the thing ; — it comes from his heart ; — it cut him to the heart ; — it breaks his heart ; — his heart bleeds ; — the heart leaps for joy ; — who can see the heart of man ? — it is heart-rending, heart-crushing, heart-breaking, heartinspiring, heart - touching ; — he is good-hearted, hardhearted, heartless, stout-hearted, faint-hearted, &c. &c.

Quite specially, however, love affairs are called affairs of the heart, affaires de coeur ; because the sexual impulse is the focus of the will, and the selection with reference to it constitutes the chief concern of natural, human volition, the ground of which I shall show in a full chapter supplementary to the fourth book. Byron in " Don Juan," c. xl v.

34, is satirical about love being to women an affair of the head instead of an affair of the heart On the other hand, the head denotes everything that is matter of knowledge. Hence a man of head, a good head, a fine head, a bad head, to lose one's head, to keep one's head uppermost, &c. Heart and head signifies the whole man. But the head is always the second, the derived ; for it is not the centre but the highest efflorescence of the body.

When a hero dies his heart is embalmed, not his brain ; on the other hand, we like to preserve the skull of the poet, the artist, and the philosopher. So Raphael's skull was preserved in the Academia di S. Luca at Rome, though it has lately been proved not to be genuine ; in Stockholm in 1820 the skull of Descartes was sold by auction.1

1 The Times of 18th October 1845 ; from the Athenceum.

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A true feeling of the real relation between will, intellect, and life is also expressed in the Latin language. The intellect is mens, vov<i ; the will again is animus, which comes from anima, and this from ave/icov. Anima is the life itself, the breath, yfrvxn ', hut animus is the living principle, and also the will, the subject of inclinations, intentions, passions, emotions ; hence also est mihi animus, — fert animus, — for "I have a desire to," also animi causa, &c. ; it is the Greek Ov/ao?, the German f Gemiith," thus the heart but not the head. Animi perturbatio is an emotion ; mentis perturbatio would signify insanity. The predicate immortalis is attributed to animus, not to mens. All this is the rule gathered from the great majority of passages; though in the case of conceptions so nearly related it cannot but be that the words are sometimes interchanged. Under "^vyy the Greeks appear primarily and originally to have understood the vital force, the living principle, whereby at once arose the dim sense that it must be something metaphysical, which consequently would not be reached by death. Among other proofs of this are the investigations of the relation between vovs and yfrv^ij preserved by Stobseus {Eel, Lib. i. c. 51, §7, 8).

10. Upon what depends the identity of the person? Not upon the matter of the body ; it is different after a few years. Not upon its form, which changes as a whole and in all its parts ; all but the expression of the glance, by which, therefore, we still know a man even after many years ; which proves that in spite of all changes time produces in him something in him remains quite untouched by it. It is just this by which we recognise him even after the longest intervals of time, and find the former man entire. It is the same with ourselves, for, however old we become, we yet feel within that we are entirely the same as we were when we were young, nay, when we were still children. This, which unaltered always remains quite the same, and does not grow old along with us, is really the

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