But my philosophy is the only one which confers upon ethics its complete and whole rights; for only if the true nature of man is his own will, and consequently he is, in the strictest sense, his own work, are his deeds really entirely his and to be ascribed to him. On the other hand, whenever he has another origin, or is the work of a being different from himself, all his guilt falls back upon this origin, or originator. For operari sequitur esse.
To connect the force which produces the phenomenon of the world, and consequently determines its nature, with the morality of the disposition or character, and thus to establish a moral order of the world as the foundation of the physical,—this has been since Socrates the problem of philosophy. Theism solved it in a childish manner, which could not satisfy mature humanity. Therefore pantheism opposed itself to it whenever it ventured to do so, and showed that nature bears in itself the power by virtue of which it appears. With this, however, ethics had necessarily to be given up. Spinoza, indeed, attempts here and there to preserve it by means of sophistry, but for the most part gives it up altogether, and, with a boldness which excites astonishment and repugnance, explains the distinction between right and wrong, and in general between good and evil, as merely conventional, thus in itself empty (for example, Eth. iv., prop. 37, schol. 2). After having met with unmerited neglect for more than a hundred years, Spinoza has, in general, become too much esteemed in this century through the reaction caused by the swing of the pendulum of opinion. All pantheism must ultimately be overthrown by the inevitable demands of ethics, and then by the evil and suffering of the world. If the world is a theophany, then all that man, or even [pg 404] the brute, does is equally divine and excellent; nothing can be censurable, and nothing more praiseworthy than the rest: thus there is no ethics. Hence, in consequence of the revived Spinozism of our own day, thus of pantheism, the treatment of ethics has sunk so low and become so shallow that it has been made a mere instruction as to the proper life of a citizen and a member of a family, in which the ultimate end of human existence is supposed to consist: thus in methodical, complete, smug, and comfortable philistinism. Pantheism, indeed, has only led to such shallow vulgarisms through the fact that (by a shameful misuse of the e quovis ligno fit Mercurius) a common mind, Hegel, has, by the well-known means, been falsely stamped as a great philosopher, and a herd of his disciples, at first suborned, afterwards only stupid, received his weighty words. Such outrages on the human mind do not remain unpunished: the seed has sprouted. In the same spirit it was then asserted that ethics should have for its material not the conduct of individuals, but that of nations, that this alone was a theme worthy of it. Nothing can be more perverse than this view, which rests on the most vulgar realism. For in every individual appears the whole undivided will to live, the thing in itself, and the microcosm is like the macrocosm. The masses have no more content than each individual. Ethics is concerned not with actions and their results, but with willing, and willing itself takes place only in the individual. Not the fate of nations, which exists only in the phenomenon, but that of the individual is decided morally. Nations are really mere abstractions; individuals alone actually exist. Thus, then, is pantheism related to ethics. But the evil and misery of the world are not in accord even with theism; hence it sought assistance from all kinds of evasions, theodicies, which yet were irretrievably overthrown by the arguments of Hume and Voltaire. Pantheism, however, is completely untenable in the presence of that bad side of the world. Only when the world is [pg 405] regarded entirely from without and from the physical side alone, and nothing else is kept in view but the constant restorative order, and the comparative imperishableness of the whole which is thereby introduced, is it perhaps possible to explain it as a god, yet always only symbolically. But if one enters within, thus considers also the subjective and moral side, with its preponderance of want, suffering, and misery, of dissension, wickedness, madness, and perversity, then one soon becomes conscious with horror that the last thing imaginable one has before one is a theophany. I, however, have shown, and especially in my work “Ueber den Willen in der Natur” have proved, that the force which works and acts in nature is identical with the will in us. Thereby the moral order of the world is brought into direct connection with the force which produces the phenomenon of the world. For the phenomenon of the will must exactly correspond to its nature. Upon this depends the exposition of eternal justice given in §§ 63 and 64 of the first volume, and the world, although subsisting by its own power, receives throughout a moral tendency. Accordingly the problem which has been discussed from the time of Socrates is now for the first time really solved, and the demand of thinking reason directed to morality is satisfied. Yet I have never professed to propound a philosophy which leaves no questions unanswered. In this sense philosophy is really impossible: it would be the science of omniscience. But est quadam prodire tenus, si non datur ultra: there is a limit to which reflection can penetrate and can so far lighten the night of our existence, although the horizon always remains dark. My doctrine reaches this limit in the will to live, which in its own manifestation asserts or denies itself. To wish, however, to go beyond this is, in my eyes, like wishing to fly beyond the atmosphere. We must stop there; even although new problems arise out of those which have been solved. Besides this, however, we must refer to the fact that the validity of [pg 406] the principle of sufficient reason is limited to the phenomenon; this was the theme of my first essay on that principle, which was published as early as 1813.
I now go on to supplement particular points, and shall begin by supporting, with two passages from classical poetry, my explanation of weeping given in § 67 of the first volume, 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 in all his many sorrows is never represented as weeping, bursts into tears, when, still unknown, he hears his early heroic life and deeds sung by the bard Demodocus in the palace of the Phæacian king, for this remembrance of the brilliant period of his life contrasts with his present wretchedness. Thus not this itself directly, but the objective consideration of it, the picture of his present summoned up by his past, calls forth his tears; he feels sympathy with himself. Euripides makes the innocently condemned Hypolytus, bemoaning his own fate, express the same feeling:
“Φευ ειθ᾽ ην εμαυτον προσβλεπειν εναντιον
στανθ᾽, ὡς εδακρυς᾽, ὁια πασχομεν κακα” (1084).
(Heu, si liceret mihi, me ipsum extrinsecus spectare, quantopere deflerem mala, quæ patior.)
Finally, as a proof of my explanation, an anecdote may be given here which I take from the English journal The Herald of the 16th July 1836. A client, when he had heard his case set forth by his counsel in court, burst into a flood of tears, and cried, “I never knew I had suffered half so much till I heard it here to-day.”
I have shown in § 55 of the first volume how, notwithstanding the unalterable nature of the character, i.e., of the special fundamental will of a man, a real moral repentance is yet possible. I wish, however, to add the following explanation, which I must preface by a few definitions. Inclination is every strong susceptibility of the will for motives of a certain kind. Passion is an inclination so strong that [pg 407] the motives which excite it exercise a power over the will, which is stronger than that of every possible motive that can oppose them; thus its mastery over the will becomes absolute, and consequently with reference to it the will is passive or suffering. It must, however, be remarked here that passions seldom reach the degree at which they fully answer to the definition, but rather bear their name as mere approximations to it: therefore there are then still counter-motives which are able at least to restrict their effect, if only they appear distinctly in consciousness. The emotion is just as irresistible, but yet only a passing excitement of the will, by a motive which receives its power, not from a deeply rooted inclination, but merely from the fact that, appearing suddenly, it excludes for the moment the counter-effect of all other motives, for it consists of an idea, which completely obscures all others by its excessive vividness, or, as it were, conceals them entirely by its too close proximity, so that they cannot enter consciousness and act on the will, whereby, therefore, the capacity for reflection, and with it intellectual freedom, is to a certain extent abolished. Accordingly the emotion is related to the passion as delirium to madness.
Moral repentance is now conditioned by the fact that before the act the inclination to it did not leave the intellect free scope, because it did not allow it to contemplate clearly and fully the counter-motives, but rather turned it ever anew to the motives in its own favour. But now, after the act has been performed, these motives are, by this itself, neutralised, and consequently have become ineffective. Now reality brings before the intellect the counter-motives as the consequences of the act which have already appeared; and the intellect now knows that they would have been the stronger if it had only adequately contemplated and weighed them. Thus the man becomes conscious that he has done what was really not in accordance with his will. This knowledge is repentance, for he has not acted with full intellectual freedom; for all the [pg 408] motives did not attain to efficiency. What excluded the motives opposed to the action was in the case of the hasty action the emotion, and in the case of the deliberate action the passion. It has also often depended upon the circumstance that his reason certainly presented to him the counter-motives in the abstract, but was not supported by a sufficiently strong imagination to present to him their whole content and true significance in images. Examples of what has been said are the cases in which revenge, jealousy, or avarice have led to murder. After it is committed they are extinguished, and now justice, sympathy, the remembrance of former friendship, raise their voices and say all that they would have said before if they had been allowed to speak. Then enters the bitter repentance, which says, “If it were not done it would never happen.” An incomparable representation of this is afforded by the old Scottish ballad, which has also been translated by Herder, “Edward, Edward.” In an analogous manner, the neglect of one's own good may occasion an egotistical repentance. For example, when an otherwise unadvisable marriage is concluded in consequence of passionate love, which now is extinguished just by the marriage, and for the first time the counter-motives of personal interest, lost independence, &c., &c., come into consciousness, and speak as they would have spoken before if they had been allowed utterance. All such actions accordingly spring from a relative weakness of intellect, because it lets itself be mastered by the will, just where its function as the presenter of motives ought to have been inexorably fulfilled, without allowing itself to be disturbed by the will. The vehemence of the will is here only indirectly the cause, in that it interferes with the intellect, and thereby prepares for itself repentance. The reasonableness of the character σωφροσυνη, which is opposed to passionateness, really consists in this, that the will never overpowers the intellect to such an extent as to prevent it from correctly exercising its function of the distinct, full, and clear exposition of the [pg 409] motives in the abstract for the reason, in the concrete for the imagination. Now this may just as well depend upon the moderation and mildness of the will as upon the strength of the intellect. All that is required is that the latter should be relatively strong enough for the will that is present, thus that the two should stand in a suitable relation to each other.
The following explanations have still to be added to the fundamental characteristics of the philosophy of law expounded in § 62 of the first volume, and also in my prize essay on the foundation of morals, § 17.