Here is the great gap which results in these supplements from the fact that I have already dealt with morality in the narrower sense in the two essays published under the title Die Grundprobleme der Ethik. As I have said, I assume an acquaintance with these, in order to avoid needless repetitions. Hence there remains for me only a small gleaning of isolated reflections that could not be discussed in those essays where the contents were, in the main, prescribed by the Academies, and least of all those that require a higher point of view than the one common to all, at which I was compelled to stop in those essays. Accordingly, it will not surprise the reader to find these reflections here in a very fragmentary collection. This has been continued again in chapters 8 and 9 of the second volume of the Parerga.
Moral investigations are incomparably more important than physical, and in general than all others; this follows from the fact that they almost immediately concern the thing-in-itself, namely that phenomenon of it in which, directly discovered by the light of knowledge, it reveals its true nature as will. Physical truths, on the other hand, remain entirely within the sphere of the representation, i.e., of the phenomenon, and show merely how the lowest phenomena of the will manifest themselves in the representation in conformity to law. Moreover, consideration of the world from the physical angle, however far and successfully it may be pursued, remains in its results without consolation for us; only on the moral side is consolation to be found, since here the depths of our own inner nature are disclosed for consideration.
My philosophy, however, is the only one that grants to morality its complete and entire rights; for only if the true nature of man is his own will, consequently only if he is, in the strictest sense, his own work, are his deeds actually entirely his and attributable to him. On the other hand, as soon as he has another origin, or is the work of a being different from himself, all his guilt falls back on to this origin or originator. For operari sequitur esse. [2]
Since Socrates, the problem of philosophy has been to connect the force which produces the phenomenon of the world and in consequence determines its nature, with the morality of the disposition or character, and thus to demonstrate a moral world-order as the basis of the physical. Theism achieved this in a childlike manner which was unable to satisfy mature mankind. Therefore pantheism opposed itself to theism, as soon as it ventured to do so, and demonstrated that nature carries within herself the power by virtue of which she appears. With this, however, ethics was bound to be lost. It is true that here and there Spinoza attempts to save it by sophisms, but he often gives it up altogether, and with an audacity that excites astonishment and indignation he declares the difference between right and wrong, and in general between good and evil, to be merely conventional, and therefore in itself hollow and empty (e.g., Ethics, IV, prop. 37, schol. 2). After Spinoza had met with unmerited neglect for more than a hundred years, he has been again overrated in this century through the reaction caused by the swing of the pendulum of opinion. All pantheism must ultimately be shipwrecked on the inescapable demands of ethics, and then on the evil and suffering of the world. If the world is a theophany, then everything done by man, and even by the animal, is equally divine and excellent; nothing can be more censurable and nothing more praiseworthy than anything else; hence there is no ethics. Therefore, in consequence of the renewed Spinozism of our day, and thus of pantheism, the treatment of ethics has sunk so low and bas become so shallow, that there has been made from it a mere set of instructions for a proper public and family life, in which the ultimate aim of human existence was supposed to consist, that is, in methodical, perfect, smug, and comfortable Philistinism. Pantheism, of course, has led to such shallow absurdities only by the fact that (by a shameful misuse of the e quovis ligno fit Mercurius) [3] Hegel, a man with a common mind, has been falsely stamped by the well-known means as a great philosopher, and a herd of his disciples, at first suborned but afterwards merely stupid, got the big words. Such outrages on the human mind do not remain unpunished; the seed has sprung up. In the same spirit, it was then asserted that ethics ought to have for its material not the conduct of individuals, but that of masses of people, and that this alone was a theme worthy of it. Nothing can be more preposterous than this view, which rests on the shallowest realism. For in every individual the whole undivided will-to-live, the being-in-itself, appears, and the microcosm is like the macrocosm. The masses have no more substance than has any individual. In ethics the question is not one of action and result, but of willing, and willing itself occurs only in the individual. What is decided morally is not the fate of nations, which exists only in the phenomenon, but that of the individual. Nations are in reality mere abstractions; only individuals actually exist. Hence in this way is pantheism related to ethics. The evils and misery of the world, however, are not in accord even with theism; and so it tried to help itself by all kinds of shifts, evasions, and theodicies which nevertheless succumbed irretrievably to the arguments of Hume and Voltaire. But pantheism is wholly untenable in face of that evil side of the world. Thus, only when we consider the world entirely from without and solely from the physical side, and keep in view nothing but the order of things which always renews itself, and thereby the comparative imperishableness of the whole, is it perhaps feasible to declare the world to be a God, yet always only symbolically. But if we enter within, and therefore take in addition the subjective and the moral side, with its preponderance of want, suffering, and misery, of dissension, wickedness, infamy, and absurdity, we soon become aware with horror that we have before us anything but a theophany. But I have shown, and have proved especially in my work On the Will in Nature, that the force working and operating in nature is identical with the will in ourselves. In this way, the moral world-order actually enters into direct connexion with the force that produces the phenomenon of the world. For the phenomenal appearance of the will must correspond exactly to its mode of existence. On this rests the explanation of eternal justice, which is given in §§ 63, 64 of volume 1; and, although it continues to exist by its own power, the world receives throughout a moral tendency. Consequently, the problem raised since the time of Socrates is now actually solved for the first time, and the demand of our thinking reason, that is directed to what is moral, is satisfied. But I have never professed to propound a philosophy that would leave no questions unanswered. In this sense, philosophy is actually impossible; it would be the science of omniscience. But est quadam prodire tenus, si non datur ultra; [4] there is a limit up to which reflection can penetrate, and so far illuminate the night of our existence, although the horizon always remains dark. This limit is reached by my doctrine in the will-to-live that affirms or denies itself in its own phenomenon. To want to go beyond this is, in my view, like wanting to fly beyond the atmosphere. We must stop here, although new problems arise from those that are solved. Moreover, we must refer to the fact that the validity of the principle of sufficient reason or ground is limited to the phenomenon; this was the theme of my first essay on that principle, published as early as 1813.
I now go on to supplement particular observations, and will begin by supporting with a couple of passages from classical poetry my explanation of weeping, given in § 67 of volume 1, namely that it springs from sympathy, the object of which is one's own self. At the end of the eighth book of the Odyssey, Ulysses, who is never represented as weeping in spite of his many sufferings, bursts into tears, when, still unknown, he hears his previous heroic life and deeds chanted by the bard Demodocus at the court of the Phaeacian king, since the remembrance of the brilliant period of his life contrasts with his present wretchedness. Hence not this wretchedness itself directly, but the objective consideration of it, the picture of his present plight brought into prominence by the past, provokes his tears; he feels sympathy for himself. Euripides makes Hippolytus, innocently condemned and bemoaning his own fate, express the same feeling:
(1084)
Heu, si liceret mihi, me ipsum extrinsecus spectare, quantopere
deflerem mala, quae patior. [5]
Finally, as proof of my explanation, there may be cited here an anecdote that I take from the English paper The Herald of 16 July, 1836. A client, after listening to the presentation of his case in court by his counsel, burst into tears, and exclaimed: "I never thought I had suffered half so much till I listened to it here today!"
I have of course shown in § 55 of the first volume how, in spite of the unalterability of character, in other words of the real, fundamental willing of man, an actual moral repentance is yet possible. However, I will add the following explanation, which I must preface with one or two definitions. Inclination is any strong susceptibility of the will to motives of a certain kind. Passion is an inclination so strong, that the motives that excite it exercise a power over the will which is stronger than that of any possible motive acting against them. Its mastery over the will thus becomes absolute; consequently, the attitude of the will towards it is passive, an attitude of suffering. Here, however, it is to be observed that passions seldom reach the degree in which they correspond to the definition completely; on the contrary, they bear their name as mere approximations to this degree; and so there are then counter-motives that are able at least to restrict their effect, if only they distinctly enter consciousness. The emotion is a stirring of the will, just as irresistible yet only temporary, by a motive that does not obtain its power through a deep-rooted inclination. On the contrary, such a motive gets its power merely by suddenly appearing and excluding for the moment the counter-effect of all other motives, since it consists in a representation which wholly obscures the others by its excessive vividness, or entirely conceals them, as it were, by its too close proximity, so that they cannot enter consciousness and act on the will. Hence in this way, the capacity for reflection, and with it intellectual freedom, [6] are to a certain extent abolished. Accordingly, the emotion is related to the passion as the fancy of an overwrought brain is to madness.
A moral repentance is now conditioned by the fact that, before the deed, the inclination thereto did not leave the intellect free scope, since it did not allow it to contemplate clearly and completely the motives opposing the deed, but rather directed it again and again to motives urging the deed. But now, when the deed is done, these motives are neutralized by this deed itself, and have consequently become ineffective. Now reality brings the opposing motives before the intellect as consequences of the deed which have already taken place, and the intellect then knows that they would have been the stronger, if only it had properly contemplated and carefully weighed them. The man, therefore, becomes aware of having done what was not really in accordance with his will; this knowledge is repentance. For he has not acted with full intellectual freedom, since not all the motives attained to effectiveness. What excluded the motives opposed to the deed was, in the case of the hasty deed, the emotion, and in the case of the deliberate deed, the passion. Often it is also due to the fact that the man's faculty of reason presented the counter-motives to him in the abstract, it is true, but was not supported by an imagination strong enough to present to him their whole content and true significance in pictures or images. Examples of what has been said are the cases in which thirst for revenge, jealousy, and avarice lead to murder. After the murder is committed, these are extinguished, and then justice, sympathy, the remembrance of former friendship raise their voice, and say all that they would have said earlier had they been allowed to have their say. Then bitter repentance appears and says: "If it had not happened already, it would never happen." A unique presentation of this is afforded by the famous old Scottish ballad Edward, Edward!, which has been translated by Herder. In an analogous way, the neglect of one's own wellbeing can bring about an egotistical repentance. For example, when an otherwise inadvisable marriage is contracted in consequence of a passionate love that by such marriage is then extinguished, whereupon the counter-motives of personal interest, lost independence, and so on only then enter consciousness, and speak as they would have spoken previously had they been allowed to have their say. Accordingly, all such actions spring ultimately from a relative weakness of the intellect, in so far as this intellect allows itself to be mastered by the will, when it should have inexorably fulfilled its function of presenting motives, without allowing itself to be disturbed by the will. Here the vehemence of the will is only indirectly the cause, in so far as it interferes with the intellect, and thereby prepares repentance for itself. The reasonableness of the character, , which is opposed to passionateness, really consists in the will's never overpowering the intellect to such an extent as to prevent it from correctly exercising its function of presenting motives distinctly, completely, and clearly, in the abstract for our faculty of reason, and in the concrete for our imagination. This can rest just as well on the moderation and mildness of the will as on the strength of the intellect. All that is required is that the intellect be relatively strong enough for the existing will, hence that the two stand in a suitable relation to each other.
The following explanations have still to be added to the characteristics of jurisprudence, discussed in § 62 of volume 1, as well as in § 17 of the essay On the Basis of Morality.
Those who deny with Spinoza that there is a right apart from the State, confuse the means of enforcing the right with the right itself. The right, of course, is assured protection only in the State, but it itself exists independently of the State. For by force it can be merely suppressed, never abolished. Accordingly, the State is nothing more than an institution of protection, rendered necessary by the manifold attacks to which man is exposed, and which he is not able to ward off as an individual, but only in alliance with others. Accordingly, the aims of the State are:
(1) First of all protection directed outwards, which may become necessary against inanimate forces of nature or wild beasts as well as against man, and consequently against other nations; although this case is the most frequent and important, for man's worst enemy is man: homo homini lupus. [7] Since, in consequence of this aim, nations lay down the principle in words, though not in deeds, of always wishing to maintain only a defensive, never an aggressive, attitude to one another, they recognize international law. At bottom, this is nothing but natural right in the only sphere of practical efficacy left to it, namely between nation and nation, where it alone must reign, because its stronger son, positive law, cannot assert itself, since that requires a judge and executive. Accordingly, international law consists in a certain degree of morality in the dealings of nations with one another, the maintenance of which is a matter of honour for mankind. Public opinion is the tribunal of cases based on this law.
(2) Protection directed inwards, that is, protection of the members of a State against one another, and consequently the safeguarding of private right, by means of the maintenance of an honest and fair state of things. This consists in the protection of each individual by the concentrated forces of all, from which there results a phenomenon as though all were honest, that is to say, just, as if no one wanted to injure anyone else.
But, as is usual in things human, the removal of one evil generally opens the way to a fresh one; thus the granting of this twofold protection brings about the need for a third, namely:
(3) Protection against the protector, in other words, against him, or those, to whom society has handed over the management of the protection; and thus guarantee of public right. This seems most completely attainable by dividing and separating from one another the threefold unity of the protective power, the legislature, the judicature, and the executive, so that each is managed by others, and independently of the rest. The great value, in fact the fundamental idea, of monarchy seems to me to lie in the fact that, because men remain men, one must be placed so high, and be given so much power, wealth, security, and absolute inviolability, that for himself there is nothing left to desire, to hope, or to fear. In this way, the egoism that dwells in him, as in everyone, is annihilated, as it were, by neutralization; and, just as if he were not a human being, he is now enabled to practise justice, and to have in view no longer his own welfare, but only that of the public. This is the origin of the seemingly superhuman character which everywhere accompanies the dignity of royalty, and distinguishes it so entirely from mere presidency. Therefore it must also be hereditary, not subject to election, so that no one may be able to see in the king his own equal, and also so that the king can provide for his descendants only by caring for the welfare of the State, as such welfare is absolutely identical with that of his own family.
If other aims besides that of protection, here discussed, are ascribed to the State, this can easily endanger its true aim.
According to my explanation, the right of property arises only through the manufacture or working up of things. This truth has often been stated already; and it finds a noteworthy confirmation in that it is maintained even in a practical regard, in a statement of the American ex-president, Quincy Adams, which is to be found in the Quarterly Review for 1840, No. 130, and also in French in the Bibliotheque universelle de Geneve, July 1840, No. 55. I repeat it here: "There are moralists who have questioned the right of the Europeans to intrude upon the possessions of the aboriginals in any case, and under any limitations whatsoever; but have they maturely considered the whole subject? The Indian right of possession itself stands, with regard to the greatest part of the country, upon a questionable foundation. Their cultivated fields, their constructed habitations, a space of ample sufficiency for their subsistence, and whatever they had annexed of themselves by personal labour, was undoubtedly by the laws of nature theirs. But what is the right of a huntsman to the forest of a thousand miles over which he has accidentally ranged in quest of prey?" and so on. In just the same way, those who in our own day saw themselves impelled to combat communism with arguments (for example, the Archbishop of Paris in a pastoral letter of June 1851), have always advanced the argument that property is the fruit of one's own labour, is only, so to speak, embodied work. This shows once more that the right of property is to be established only by work applied to things, since only in this respect does it meet with free recognition, and assert itself morally.
A proof of an entirely different kind in support of the same truth is afforded by the moral fact that, while the law punishes poaching just as severely as, and in many countries even more severely than, it punishes theft, civil honour, which through theft is irretrievably lost, is yet not really forfeited by poaching, but in so far as the poacher has not made himself guilty of anything else, he is of course burdened with a stigma, yet not regarded as dishonest and shunned by all, as is the thief. For the principles of a citizen's honour rest on moral and not on merely positive right; game, however, is not an object of treatment or elaboration, and so is not an object of morally valid possession. The right to it is therefore entirely positive, and is not morally recognized.
According to my view, the basis of criminal law should be the principle that it is not the person, but only the deed that is punished, so that it may not recur. The criminal is merely the subject in which the deed is punished, so that the power to deter may be retained by the law in consequence of which the punishment takes place. This is the meaning of the expression "he is forfeit to the law." According to Kant's explanation, amounting to a jus talionis, it is not the deed but the person who is punished. The penitentiary system also tries to punish not so much the deed as the person, so that he may change for the better. In this way it sets aside the real aim of punishment, determent from the deed, in order to achieve the very problematical aim of improvement. But it is always a doubtful thing to try to secure two different ends by one means; how much more so when the two ends are in any sense opposite. Education is a benefit, punishment is supposed to be an evil; the penitentiary prison is supposed to achieve both. Moreover, however large may be the share that brutality and ignorance, in conjunction with external distress, have in many crimes, we must not regard them as the principal cause of these, since innumerable persons living under the same hard conditions and in entirely similar circumstances do not commit any crimes. The principal matter, therefore, reverts to the personal, moral character, but, as I have explained in the essay On the Freedom of the Will, this character is absolutely unalterable. Therefore, real moral reform is not at all possible, but only determent from the deed. Moreover, correction of knowledge and the awakening of a desire to work may of course be attained; it will be seen how far this can be effective. Besides this, it is clear from the aim of punishment, which I advance in the text, that, where possible, the apparent suffering of the punishment should exceed the actual; but solitary confinement achieves the reverse. Its great severity has no witnesses, and is by no means anticipated by anyone who has not yet experienced it; hence it does not deter. It threatens the person, tempted to crime by want and misery, with the opposite pole of human wretchedness, boredom; but as Goethe rightly observes:
If real affliction is our lot,
Then do we wish for boredom.
Therefore the prospect of it will deter him as little as will the sight of the palatial prisons that are built by honest persons for rogues. If it is desired, however, to regard these penitentiary prisons as educational institutions, it is to be regretted that admission to them is obtained only by crimes, instead of which the prisons should have preceded these.
That punishment should bear a correct proportion to the crime, as Beccaria taught, does not rest on its being an expiation thereof, but on the fact that the pledge must be appropriate to the value of that for which it answers. Therefore everyone is justified in demanding as a pledge the life of another, as a guarantee for the security of his own, but not for the security of his property, for which the freedom and so forth of another is sufficient pledge. For safeguarding the lives of the citizens, capital punishment is therefore absolutely necessary. Those who would like to abolish it should be given the answer: "First remove murder from the world, and then capital punishment ought to follow." It should be inflicted even for the definite attempt at murder, just as for murder itself; for the law's desire is to punish the deed, not to avenge the result. In general, the injury to be prevented provides the correct measure for the punishment to be threatened, but this is not given by the moral worthlessness of the forbidden action. Therefore the law can rightly impose penal servitude for letting a flower-pot fall from a window, or hard labour for smoking in a wood during summer, and yet permit this in winter. But to inflict the punishment of death for shooting an aurochs, as is done in Poland, is too much, for the preservation of the species of the aurochs must not be purchased with human life. In determining the measure of the punishment along with the magnitude of the injury to be prevented, we take into consideration the strength of the motives prompting us to the forbidden action. Quite a different standard would apply to punishment, if expiation, retaliation, jus talionis, were its true purpose. But the criminal code should be nothing but a register of counter-motives to possible criminal actions. Each of these counter-motives must therefore decidedly outweigh the motives that lead to these actions, and indeed the more so, the greater the injury that would spring from the action to be guarded against, the stronger the temptation to it, and the more difficult the conviction of the evil-doer; always on the correct assumption that the will is not free, but determinable by motives, otherwise it could not be got at at all. So much for jurisprudence.
In my essay On the Freedom of the Will (pp. 50 seqq.; second ed., pp. 48 seqq.), I have demonstrated the original and unalterable nature of the innate character, from which the moral content of the course of life proceeds. It is well established as a fact; but, in order to grasp problems in their full extent, it is sometimes necessary to contrast opposites sharply. Therefore let us picture in these how incredibly great is the innate difference between one person and another in a moral and intellectual respect. Here magnanimity and wisdom; there wickedness and stupidity. In one goodness of heart shines from his eyes, or the stamp of genius is enthroned on his countenance. The base and mean physiognomy of another is the stamp of moral turpitude and intellectual dulness, unmistakably and indelibly impressed by the hand of nature herself; he looks as though he ought to be ashamed of his existence. And the inner being actually corresponds to this outer appearance. We cannot possibly assume that such differences, which transform the man's whole being, which are not to be abolished by anything, and which further determine his course of life in conflict with the circumstances, could exist without guilt or merit on the part of those affected by them, and that they were the mere work of chance. It is at once evident from this that man must be in a certain sense his own work. But on the other hand we can show empirically the origin of those differences in the character and disposition of the parents; moreover, the coming together and connexion of these parents were obviously the work of the most accidental circumstances. By such considerations we are then forcibly referred to the difference between the phenomenon and the being-in-itself of things, a difference that alone can contain the solution to this problem. The thing-in-itself is revealed only by means of the forms of the phenomenon; therefore, what proceeds from the thing-in-itself must nevertheless appear in those forms, and so also in the bond of causality. Accordingly it will present itself to us here as a mysterious guidance of things incomprehensible to us, the mere tool of which would be the external empirical connexion. But all that happens in this empirical connexion is produced by causes, and so is determined necessarily and from outside, whereas its true ground lies in the inner nature of the real essence that thus appears. Here, of course, we can see the solution to the problem only from a distance, and, by reflecting on it, we fall into an abyss of thought, as Hamlet rightly says, "Thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls." In the essay "On the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual" in the first volume of the Parerga, I have expounded my ideas on this mysterious guidance of things, a guidance indeed which is to be conceived only figuratively.
In § 14 of my essay On the Basis of Morality is to be found a discussion on egoism according to its nature; and the following attempt to discover its root is to be regarded as supplementary to that discussion. Nature flatly contradicts herself, according as she speaks from the particular or the universal, from inside or outside, from the centre or the periphery. Thus nature has her centre in every individual, for each one is the entire will-to-live. Therefore, even if this individual is only an insect or a worm, nature herself speaks out of it as follows: "I alone am all in all; in my maintenance is everything involved; the rest may perish, it is really nothing." Thus nature speaks from the particular standpoint, from that of self-consciousness, and to this is due the egoism of every living thing. On the other hand, from the universal standpoint, from that of the consciousness of other things, and thus from that of objective knowledge, for the moment looking away from the individual to whom knowledge adheres, -- hence from outside, from the periphery, nature speaks thus: "The individual is nothing and less than nothing. I destroy millions of individuals every day for sport and pastime; I abandon their fate to chance, to the most capricious and wanton of my children, who harasses them at his pleasure. Every day I produce millions of new individuals without any diminution of my productive power; just as little as the power of a mirror is exhausted by the number of the sun's images that it casts one after another on the wall. The individual is nothing." Only he who really knows how to reconcile and eliminate this obvious contradiction of nature has a true answer to the question concerning the perishableness or imperishableness of his own self. I believe I have given an adequate introduction to such knowledge in the first four chapters of this fourth book of supplements. The above remarks may be further illustrated in the following manner. By looking inwards, every individual recognizes in his inner being, which is his will, the thing-in-itself, and hence that which alone is everywhere real. Accordingly, he conceives himself as the kernel and centre of the world, and considers himself infinitely important. On the other hand, if he looks outwards, he is then in the province of the representation, of the mere phenomenon, where he sees himself as an individual among an infinite number of other individuals, and consequently as something extremely insignificant, in fact quite infinitesimal. Accordingly every individual, even the most insignificant, every I, seen from within, is all in all; seen from without, on the other hand, he is nothing, or at any rate as good as nothing. To this, therefore, is due the great difference between what each one necessarily is in his own eyes, and what he is in the eyes of others, consequently egoism, with which everyone reproaches everyone else.
In consequence of this egoism, the most fundamental of all our errors is that, with reference to one another, we are not-I. On the other hand, to be just, noble, and benevolent is nothing but to translate my metaphysics into actions. To say that time and space are mere forms of our knowledge, not determinations of things-in-themselves, is the same as saying that the teaching of metempsychosis, namely that "One day you will be born again as the man whom you now injure, and will suffer the same injury," is identical with the frequently mentioned formula of the Brahmans, Tat tvam asi, "This thou art." All genuine virtue proceeds from the immediate and intuitive knowledge of the metaphysical identity of all beings, as I have often shown, especially in § 22 of the essay On the Basis of Morality. But it is not on this account the result of a special preeminence of intellect; on the contrary, even the feeblest intellect is sufficient to see through the principium individuationis, which is the main point here. Accordingly, the most excellent character can be found even with a weak understanding; moreover, the excitement of our sympathy is not accompanied by any exertion of our intellect. On the contrary, it seems that the required penetration of the principium individuationis would be present in everyone, if his will were not opposed to it. By virtue of the will's immediate, mysterious, and despotic influence over the intellect, it prevents this penetration from arising, so that ultimately all guilt falls back on to the will, as is also in conformity with the fact.
The doctrine of metempsychosis, previously touched on, deviates from the truth merely by transferring to the future what is already now. Thus it represents my true inner being-in-itself as existing in others only after my death, whereas the truth is that it already lives in them now, and death abolishes merely the illusion by reason of which I am not aware of this; just as the innumerable hosts of stars always shine above our heads, but become visible only when the one sun near the earth has set. From this point of view, however much my individual existence, like that sun, outshines everything for me, at bottom it appears only as an obstacle which stands between me and the knowledge of the true extent of my being. And because in his knowledge every individual succumbs to this obstacle, it is simply individuation that keeps the will-to-live in error as to its own true nature; it is the Maya of Brahmanism. Death is a refutation of this error and abolishes it. I believe that, at the moment of dying, we become aware that a mere illusion has limited our existence to our person. Even empirical traces of this may be seen in many states or conditions akin to death through abolition of the concentration of consciousness in the brain, and of these states magnetic sleep is the most conspicuous. When this sleep reaches the higher degrees, our existence shows itself in it through various symptoms, beyond our persons and in other beings, most strikingly by direct participation in the thoughts of another individual, and ultimately even by the ability to know the absent, the distant, and also the future, that is, by a kind of omnipresence.
On this metaphysical identity of the will as thing-in-itself rest in general three phenomena, in spite of the infinite multiplicity of its appearances, and these three can be brought under the common concept of sympathy: (1) sympathy or compassion, which is, as I have shown, the basis of justice and philanthropy, caritas; (2) sexual love, with capricious selection, amor, which is the life of the species, asserting its precedence over that of individuals; (3) magic, to which also belong animal magnetism and sympathetic cures. Accordingly, sympathy is to be defined as the empirical appearance of the will's metaphysical identity, through the physical multiplicity of its phenomena. In this way a connexion shows itself; and this is entirely different from that which is brought about by the forms of the phenomenon, and which we comprehend under the principle of sufficient reason.
_______________
Notes:
1. This chapter refers to §§ 55, 62, 67 of volume 1.
2. "What we do follows from what we are." [Tr.]
3. "Out of any piece of wood a god may be carved." [Tr.]
4. "There is a limit up to which one can go, even if one cannot go beyond it." [Tr.]
5. "Ah, if it were granted to me to see myself as I stand there and weep
over my distress." [Tr.]
6. This is discussed in the appendix to my essay On the Freedom of the Will.
7. "Man is a wolf to man." [Tr.]