If we further ponder the fact, that not only, as we have just seen, are life and death dependent upon the most trifling accidents, but that the existence of the organised being in general is an ephemeral one, that [pg 264] animal and plant arise to-day and pass away to-morrow, and birth and death follow in quick succession, while to the unorganised things which stand so much lower an incomparably longer duration is assured, and an infinite duration to the absolutely formless matter alone, to which, indeed, we attribute this a priori,—then, I think, the thought must follow of its own accord, even from the purely empirical, but objective and unprejudiced comprehension of such an order of things, that this is only a superficial phenomenon, that such a constant arising and passing away can by no means touch the root of things, but can only be relative, nay, only apparent, in which the true inner nature of that thing is not included, the nature which everywhere evades our glance and is thoroughly mysterious, but rather that this continues to exist undisturbed by it; although we can neither apprehend nor conceive the manner in which this happens, and must therefore think of it only generally as a kind of tour de passe-passe which took place there. For that, while what is most imperfect, the lowest, the unorganised, continues to exist unassailed, it is just the most perfect beings, the living creatures, with their infinitely complicated and inconceivably ingenious organisations, which constantly arise, new from the very foundation, and after a brief span of time absolutely pass into nothingness, to make room for other new ones like them coming into existence out of nothing—this is something so obviously absurd that it can never be the true order of things, but rather a mere veil which conceals this, or, more accurately, a phenomenon conditioned by the nature of our intellect. Nay, the whole being and not being itself of these individuals, in relation to which death and life are opposites, can only be relative. Thus the language of nature, in which it is given us as absolute, cannot be the true and ultimate expression of the nature of things and of the order of the world, but indeed only a patois du pays, i.e., something merely relatively true,—something to be understood [pg 265] cum grano salis, or, to speak properly, something conditioned by our intellect; I say, an immediate, intuitive conviction of the kind which I have tried to describe in words will press itself upon every one; i.e., certainly only upon every one whose mind is not of an utterly ordinary species, which is absolutely only capable of knowing the particular simply and solely as such, which is strictly limited to the knowledge of individuals, after the manner of the intellect of the brutes. Whoever, on the other hand, by means of a capacity of an only somewhat higher power, even just begins to see in the individual beings their universal, their Ideas, will also, to a certain extent, participate in that conviction, and that indeed as an immediate, and therefore certain, conviction. In fact, it is also only small, limited minds that fear death quite seriously as their annihilation, and persons of decidedly superior capacity are completely free from such terrors. Plato rightly bases the whole of philosophy upon the knowledge of the doctrine of Ideas, i.e., upon the perception of the universal in the particular. But the conviction here described, which proceeds directly from the comprehension of nature, must have been exceedingly vivid in those sublime authors of the Upanishads of the Vedas, who can scarcely be thought of as mere men, for it speaks to us so forcibly out of an innumerable number of their utterances that we must ascribe this immediate illumination of their mind to the fact that these wise men, standing nearer the origin of our race in time, comprehended the nature of things more clearly and profoundly than the already deteriorated race, ὁιοι νυν βροτοι εισιν, is able to do. But certainly their comprehension is assisted by the natural world of India, which is endowed with life in a very different degree from our northern world. However, thorough reflection, as pursued by Kant's great mind, leads by another path to the same result, for it teaches us that our intellect, in which that phenomenal world which changes so fast exhibits [pg 266] itself, does not comprehend the true ultimate nature of things, but merely its phenomenal manifestation, and indeed, as I add, because it is originally only destined to present the motives to our will, i.e., to be serviceable to it in the pursuit of its paltry ends.
Let us, however, carry our objective and unprejudiced consideration of nature still further. If I kill a living creature, whether a dog, a bird, a frog, or even only an insect, it is really inconceivable that this being, or rather the original force by virtue of which such a marvellous phenomenon exhibited itself just the moment before, in its full energy and love of life, should have been annihilated by my wicked or thoughtless act. And again, on the other hand, the millions of animals of every kind which come into existence every moment, in infinite variety, full of force and activity, can never, before the act of their generation, have been nothing at all, and have attained from nothing to an absolute beginning. If now in this way I see one of these withdraw itself from my sight, without me knowing where it goes, and another appear without me knowing whence it comes; if, moreover, both have the same form, the same nature, the same character, and only not the same matter, which yet during their existence they continually throw off and renew; then certainly the assumption, that that which vanishes and that which appears in its place are one and the same, which has only experienced a slight alteration, a renewal of the form of its existence, and that consequently death is for the species what sleep is for the individual; this assumption, I say, lies so close at hand that it is impossible not to light upon it, unless the mind, perverted in early youth by the imprinting of false views, hurries it out of the way, even from a distance, with superstitious fear. But the opposite assumption that the birth of an animal is an arising out of nothing, and accordingly that its death is its absolute annihilation, and this with the further addition that man, who has also originated out [pg 267] of nothing, has yet an individual, endless existence, and indeed a conscious existence, while the dog, the ape, the elephant, are annihilated by death, is really something against which the healthy mind revolts and which it must regard as absurd. If, as is sufficiently often repeated, the comparison of the results of a system with the utterances of the healthy mind is supposed to be a touchstone of its truth, I wish the adherents of the system which was handed down from Descartes to the pre-Kantian eclectics, nay, which even now is still the prevailing view of the great majority of cultured people in Europe, would apply this touchstone here.
Throughout and everywhere the true symbol of nature is the circle, because it is the schema or type of recurrence. This is, in fact, the most universal form in nature, which it carries out in everything, from the course of the stars down to the death and the genesis of organised beings, and by which alone, in the ceaseless stream of time, and its content, a permanent existence, i.e., a nature, becomes possible.
If in autumn we consider the little world of insects, and see how one prepares its bed to sleep the long, rigid winter-sleep; another spins its cocoon to pass the winter as a chrysalis, and awake in spring rejuvenated and perfected; and, finally, how most of them, intending themselves to rest in the arms of death, merely arrange with care the suitable place for their egg, in order to issue forth again from it some day renewed;—this is nature's great doctrine of immortality, which seeks to teach us that there is no radical difference between sleep and death, but the one endangers existence just as little as the other. The care with which the insect prepares a cell, or hole, or nest, deposits its egg in it, together with food for the larva that will come out of it in the following spring, and then quietly dies, is just like the care with which in the evening a man lays ready his clothes and his breakfast for the next morning, and then quietly goes to sleep; and at [pg 268] bottom it could not take place at all if it were not that the insect which dies in autumn is in itself, and according to its true nature, just as much identical with the one which is hatched out in the spring as the man who lies down to sleep is identical with the man who rises from it.
If now, after these considerations, we return to ourselves and our own species, then cast our glance forward far into the future, and seek to present to our minds the future generations, with the millions of their individuals in the strange form of their customs and pursuits, and then interpose with the question: Whence will all these come? Where are they now? Where is the fertile womb of that nothing, pregnant with worlds, which still conceals the coming races? Would not the smiling and true answer to this be, Where else should they be than there where alone the real always was and will be, in the present and its content?—thus with thee, the foolish questioner, who in this mistaking of his own nature is like the leaf upon the tree, which, fading in autumn and about to fall, complains at its destruction, and will not be consoled by looking forward to the fresh green which will clothe the tree in spring, but says lamenting, “I am not these! These are quite different leaves!” Oh, foolish leaf! Whither wilt thou? And whence should others come? Where is the nothing whose abyss thou fearest? Know thine own nature, that which is so filled with thirst for existence; recognise it in the inner, mysterious, germinating force of the tree, which, constantly one and the same in all generations of leaves, remains untouched by all arising and passing away. And now, οἱη περ φυλλων γενεη, τοιηδε και ανδρων (Qualis foliorum generatio, talis et hominum). Whether the fly which now buzzes round me goes to sleep in the evening, and buzzes again tomorrow, or dies in the evening, and in spring another fly buzzes which has sprung from its egg: that is in itself the same thing; but therefore the knowledge which exhibits this as two fundamentally different things is not [pg 269] unconditioned, but relative, a knowledge of the phenomenon, not of the thing in itself. In the morning the fly exists again; it also exists again in the spring. What distinguishes for it the winter from the night? In Burdach's “Physiology,” vol. i. § 275, we read, “Till ten o'clock in the morning no Cercaria ephemera (one of the infusoria) is to be seen (in the infusion), and at twelve the whole water swarms with them. In the evening they die, and the next morning they again appear anew.” So it was observed by Nitzsch six days running.
So everything lingers but a moment, and hastens on to death. The plant and the insect die at the end of the summer, the brute and the man after a few years: death reaps unweariedly. Yet notwithstanding this, nay, as if this were not so at all, everything is always there and in its place, just as if everything were imperishable. The plant always thrives and blooms, the insect hums, the brute and the man exist in unwasted youth, and the cherries that have already been enjoyed a thousand times we have again before us every summer. The nations also exist as immortal individuals, although sometimes their names change; even their action, what they do and suffer, is always the same; although history always pretends to relate something different: for it is like the kaleidoscope, which at every turn shows a new figure, while we really always have the same thing before our eyes. What then presses itself more irresistibly upon us than the thought that that arising and passing away does not concern the real nature of things, but this remains untouched by it, thus is imperishable, and therefore all and each that wills to exist actually exists continuously and without end. Accordingly at every given point of time all species of animals, from the gnat to the elephant, exist together complete. They have already renewed themselves many thousand times, and withal have remained the same. They know nothing of others like them, who have lived before them, [pg 270] or will live after them; it is the species which always lives, and in the consciousness of the imperishable nature of the species and their identity with it the individuals cheerfully exist. The will to live manifests itself in an endless present, because this is the form of the life of the species, which, therefore, never grows old, but remains always young. Death is for it what sleep is for the individual, or what winking is for the eye, by the absence of which the Indian gods are known, if they appear in human form. As through the entrance of night the world vanishes, but yet does not for a moment cease to exist, so man and brute apparently pass away through death, and yet their true nature continues, just as undisturbed by it. Let us now think of that alternation of death and birth as infinitely rapid vibrations, and we have before us the enduring objectification of the will, the permanent Ideas of being, fixed like the rainbow on the waterfall. This is temporal immortality. In consequence of this, notwithstanding thousands of years of death and decay, nothing has been lost, not an atom of the matter, still less anything of the inner being, that exhibits itself as nature. Therefore every moment we can cheerfully cry, “In spite of time, death, and decay, we are still all together!”
Perhaps we would have to except whoever had once said from the bottom of his heart, with regard to this game, “I want no more.” But this is not yet the place to speak of this.
But we have certainly to draw attention to the fact that the pain of birth and the bitterness of death are the two constant conditions under which the will to live maintains itself in its objectification, i.e., our inner nature, untouched by the course of time and the death of races, exists in an everlasting present, and enjoys the fruit of the assertion of the will to live. This is analogous to the fact that we can only be awake during the day on condition that we sleep during the night; indeed the latter is the [pg 271] commentary which nature offers us for the understanding of that difficult passage.[29]
For the substratum, or the content, πληρωμα, or the material of the present, is through all time really the same. The impossibility of knowing this identity directly is just time, a form and limitation of our intellect. That on account of it, for example, the future event is not yet, depends upon an illusion of which we become conscious when that event has come. That the essential form of our intellect introduces such an illusion explains and justifies itself from the fact that the intellect has come forth from the hands of nature by no means for the apprehension of the nature of things, but merely for the apprehension of motives, thus for the service of an individual and temporal phenomenon of will.[30]
Whoever comprehends the reflections which here occupy us will also understand the true meaning of the paradoxical doctrine of the Eleatics, that there is no arising and passing away, but the whole remains immovable: “Παρμενιδης και Μελισσος ανῃρουν γενεσιν και φθοραν, δια το νομιξειν το παν ακινητον” (Parmenides et Melissus ortum et interitum tollebant, quoniam nihil moveri putabant), Stob. Ecl., i. 21. Light is also thrown here upon the beautiful passage of Empedocles which Plutarch has preserved for us in the book, “Adversus Coloten,” c. 12:—