[1] He died September 21st.
[2] It should be noticed that this "essential part of the question," a few lines before, is said to have been passed over altogether (omisso enim eo, quod potissimum postulabatur).
[3] Any one who cares to see how this Judgment, the Danish Royal Society of Sciences, Hegel, Fichte, and "Professors of Philosophy" in general, are all pulverised together under our sage's withering wrath and trenchant irony, should read his Introduction to each Edition.
[4] Incidentally (Chapter III.), duties towards ourselves, properly so called, are shown to be non-existent from the Schopenhauerian standpoint. Cf. the definition of Duty in Part III., Chapter VI.
[5] Schopenhauer treated this subject exhaustively in his Essay on "The Freedom of the Will," which, written immediately before, and more fortunate than, the present treatise, was awarded the prize by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences in January, 1839.
[6] If, as above suggested, Malice be taken as a form of Egoism, we may simplify as follows:—
| Egoism. | Compassion. |
| (a) Lower power: seen in | (a) Lower power: seen in |
| selfishness, covetousness, etc. | justice. |
| (b) Higher power: seen in | (d) Higher power: seen in |
| malice, cruelty, etc. | loving-kindness. |
Egoism (not in its higher power) may be simultaneously operative with Compassion in every possible proportion.
[7] V. Also the Neue Paralipomena, chap. vii.; Zur Ethik, § 248, where Schopenhauer calls this "the hardest of all problems." On the one hand, we have the metaphysical unity of the Will, as Thing in itself, which, as the Intelligible Character, is present, whole and undivided, in all phaenomena, in every individual; on the other hand, we find, as a fact of experience, the widest possible difference in the Empirical Character, no less of animals than of men. That is to say, "difference" must be predicated of the Thing in itself! It is obvious that we here touch a contradiction, which, for the rest, lies at the root of the Schopenhauerian doctrine of the Will.
[8] The reader will remember the fine poetic presentment of this view of things, which Goethe with intuitive perception gives in the Faust, Part I., where the Erdgeist says: