fullest sense independent. It has an absolute authority or force, infinitely more sure than that of natural objects.

Note. The sun, moon, mountains, rivers, and all objects of nature doubtless exist. They not only have for consciousness the authority of existence in general, but have also a particular nature. This nature consciousness regards as valid, and in its varied relation and commerce with objects and their use comports itself accordingly. But the authority of the social laws is infinitely higher, because natural things represent reason only in a quite external and particular way, and hide it under the guise of contingency.

147. On the other hand, the various social forces are not something foreign to the subject. His spirit bears witness to them as to his own being. In them he feels that he is himself, and in them, too, he lives as in an element indistinguishable from himself. This relation is more direct and intuitive than even faith or trust.

Note. Faith and trust belong to the beginning of reflection, presupposing picture thought and such discernment as that to believe in a heathen religion is different from being a heathen. The relation, or rather identity without relation, in which the ethical principle is the actual life of self-consciousness, can indeed be transformed into a relation of faith and conviction. By further reflection, also, it may pass into an insight based on reasons, which originate in some particular end, interest, or regard, in fear or hope, or in historical presuppositions. But the adequate knowledge of these belongs to the conception arrived at through thought.

148. The individual may distinguish himself from these substantive ethical factors, regarding himself as subjective, as of himself undetermined, or as determined to some particular course of action. He stands to them as to his substantive reality, and they are duties binding upon his will.

Note. The ethical theory of duties in their objective character is not comprised under the empty principle of moral subjectivity, in which indeed, nothing is determined (§ 134), but is rightly taken up in the third part of our work, in which is found a systematic development of the sphere of ethical necessity. In

this present method of treatment, as distinguished from a theory of duties, the ethical factors are deduced as necessary relations. It is, then, needless to add, with regard to each of them, the remark that it is thus for men a duty. A theory of duties, so far as it is not a philosophic science, simply takes its material out of the relations at hand, and shows how it is connected with personal ideas, with widely prevalent principles and thoughts, with ends, impulses, and experiences. It may also adduce as reasons the consequences, which arise when each duty is referred to other ethical relations, as well as to general well-being and common opinion. But a theory of duties, which keeps to the logical settlement of its own inherent material, must be the development of the relations, which are made necessary through the idea of freedom, and are hence in their entire context actual. This is found only in the state.

149. A duty or obligation appears as a limitation merely of undetermined subjectivity and abstract freedom, or of the impulse of the natural will, or of the moral will which fixes upon its undetermined good capriciously. But in point of fact the individual finds in duty liberation. He is freed from subjection to mere natural impulse; he is freed from the dependence which he as subjective and particular felt towards moral permission and command; he is freed, also, from that indefinite subjectivity, which does not issue in the objective realization implied in action, but remains wrapped up in its own unreality. In duty the individual freely enters upon a liberty that is substantive.

Addition. Duty limits only the caprice of subjectivity, and comes into collision only with abstract good, with which subjectivity is so firmly allied. When men say we will to be free, they have in mind simply that abstract liberty, of which every definite organization in the state is regarded as a limitation. But duty is not a limitation of freedom, but only of the abstraction of freedom, that is to say, of servitude. In duty we reach the real essence, and gain positive freedom.

152. Substantive ethical reality attains its right, and this right receives its due, when the individual in his private will and con

science drops his self-assertion and antagonism to the ethical. His character, moulded by ethical principles, takes as its motive the unmoved universal, which is open on all its sides to actual rationality. He recognizes that his worth and the stability of his private ends are grounded upon the universal, and derive their reality from it. Subjectivity is the absolute form and the existing actuality of the substance. The difference between the subject and substance, as the object, end, and power of the subject, forthwith vanishes, like the difference between form and matter.

Note. Subjectivity, which is the foundation for the real existence of the conception of freedom (§ 106), is at the moral standpoint still distinguished from the conception. In ethics it is adequate to the conception, whose existence it is.

153. In that individuals belong to the ethical and social fabric they have a right to determine themselves subjectively and freely. Assurance of their freedom has its truth in the objectivity of ethical observance, in which they realize their own peculiar being and inner universality (§ 147).

Note. To a father seeking the best way to bring up his son, a Pythagorean, or some other thinker, replied, "Make him a citizen of a state which has good laws."

Addition. The attempts of speculative educators to withdraw people from their present social life and bring them up in the country, a proposal made by Rousseau in "Émile," have been vain, because no one can succeed in alienating man from the laws of the world. Although the education of young men must take place in solitude, we cannot believe that the odour of the world of spirits does not in the end penetrate their seclusion, or that the power of the spirit of the world is too feeble to take possession of even the remotest corner. Only when the individual is a citizen of a good state, does he receive his right.

154. The right of individuals to their particularity is contained. in the concrete ethical order, because it is in particularity that the social principle finds a visible outer manifestation.

155. Right and duty coincide in the identity of the universal and the particular wills. By virtue of the ethical fabric man has rights, so far as he has duties, and duties so far as he has rights.

In abstract right, on the contrary, I have the right and another person the corresponding duty; and in morals I resolve to consider as an objective duty only the right of my own knowledge and will and of my own well-being.

Addition. The slave can have no duties, but only the free man. If all rights were on one side and all duties on the other, the whole would be broken up. Identity is the only principle to which we must now adhere.

156. The ethical substance, as the union of self-consciousness with its conception, is the actual spirit of a family and a nation.

Addition. The ethical framework is not abstract like the good, but in a special sense real. Spirit has actuality, and the accidents or modes of this actuality are individuals. Hence as to the ethical there are only two possible views. Either we start from the substantive social system, or we proceed atomically and work up from a basis of individuality. This latter method, because it leads to mere juxtaposition, is void of spirit, since mind or spirit is not something individual, but the unity of individual and universal.

157. The conception of this idea exists only as spirit, as active self-knowledge and reality, since it objectifies itself by passing through the form of its elements. Hence it is,

A. The direct or natural ethical spirit, the family. This reality, losing its unity, passes over into dismemberment, and assumes the nature of the relative. It thus becomes

B. The civic community, an association of members or independent individuals in a formal universality. Such an association is occasioned by needs, and is preserved by the law, which secures one's person and property, and by an external system for private and common interests.

C. This external state goes back to, and finds its central principle in, the end and actuality of the substantive universal, and of the public life dedicated to the maintenance of the universal. This is the state-constitution.

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

(1788-1860)

THE WORLD AS WILL AND IDEA

Translated from the German by

R. B. HALDANE AND J. KEMP

BOOK IV. THE ASSERTION AND DENIAL OF THE WILL

8 57. AT every grade that is enlightened by knowledge, the will appears as an individual. The human individual finds himself as finite in infinite space and time, and consequently as a vanishing quantity compared with them. He is projected into them, and, on account of their unlimited nature, he has always a merely relative, never absolute when and where of his existence; for his place and duration are finite parts of what is infinite and boundless. His real existence is only in the present, whose unchecked flight into the past is a constant transition into death, a constant dying. For his past life, apart from its possible consequences for the present, and the testimony regarding the will that is expressed in it, is now entirely done with, dead, and no longer anything; and, therefore, it must be, as a matter of reason, indifferent to him whether the content of that past was pain or pleasure. But the present is always passing through his hands into the past; the future is quite uncertain and always short. Thus his existence, even when we consider only its formal side, is a constant hurrying of the present into the dead past, a constant dying. But if we look at it from the physical side, it is clear that, as our walking is admittedly merely a constantly prevented falling, the life of our body is only a constantly prevented dying, an ever-postponed death: finally, in the same way, the

* From Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Leipzig, 1819; 3. Aufl. 1850. Reprinted here from A. Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea, translated by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, London, Trübner & Co., 1885, vol. i.