On the Suffering of the World by Arthur Schopenhauer

Author:Arthur Schopenhauer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781913462048
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2020-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

If a painter wanted to join a human head to the neck of a horse.16

It is always bad if we are not allowed to be thoroughly original and to carve out of the whole wood. Brahmanism and Buddhism, on the other hand, quite consistently with a continued existence after death, have an existence before birth, and the purpose of this life is to atone for the guilt of that previous existence. The following passage from Colebrooke’s History of Indian Philosophy in the Transactions of the Asiatic London Society, vol. I, p. 577, shows also how clearly conscious they are of the necessary consistency in this: “Against the system of the Bhagavatas, which is but partially heretical, the objection upon which the chief stress is laid by Vyasa is, that the soul would not be eternal, if it were a production, and consequently had a beginning.”17 Further, in Upham’s Doctrine of Buddhism, p. 110, it is said: “The lot in hell of impious persons called Deitty is the most severe: these are they who, discrediting the evidence of Buddha, adhere to the heretical doctrine, that all living beings had their beginning in the mother’s womb, and will have their end in death.”18

The person who conceives their existence as merely accidental, must certainly be afraid of losing it through death. On the other hand the person who sees, even only in a general way, that their existence rests on some original necessity, will not believe that this necessity, which has produced so wonderful a thing, is limited to such a brief span of time, but that it is active at all times. But whoever reflects that up till now, when they exist, an infinite time, and thus an infinity of changes, has run its course, but yet notwithstanding this they exist, will recognize their existence as a necessary one. Therefore, the entire possibility of all states and conditions has exhausted itself already without being able to eliminate one’s existence. If ever a person could not be, they would already not be now. For the infinity of the time that has already elapsed, with the exhausted possibility of its events in it, guarantees that what exists necessarily exists. Consequently, everyone has to conceive themselves as a necessary being, in other words, as a being whose existence would follow from its true and exhaustive definition, if only we had this. Actually in this train of thought is to be found the only immanent proof of the imperishability of our real inner nature, that is to say, the only proof that keeps within the sphere of empirical data. Existence must be inherent in this inner nature, since it shows itself to be independent of all states or conditions that can possibly be brought about through the causal chain; for these states have already done what they could, and yet our existence has remained just as unshaken thereby, as the ray of light is by the hurricane that it cuts through. If from its own resources

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