Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/408

 to please the world. With me it is different: I have seen what pleases the world, and therefore shall not swerve a step from the path of truth in order to please it. Thus in this point also my system varies from all the others and stands by itself. But when all the others have completed their demonstrations to the song of the best of worlds, quite at the last, at the background of the system, like a tardy avenger of the monster, like a spirit from the tomb, like the statue in Don Juan, there comes the question as to the origin of evil, of the monstrous, nameless evil, of the awful, heartrending misery in the world:—and here they are speechless, or can only find words, empty, sonorous words, with which to settle this heavy reckoning. On the other hand, a system, in whose basis already the existence of evil is interwoven with the existence of the world, need not fear that apparition any more than a vaccinated child need fear the smallpox. Now this is the case when freedom is placed in the esse instead of in the operari and sin, evil and the world then proceed from that esse.—Moreover it is fair to let me, as a serious man, only speak of things which I really know and only make use of words to which I attach a quite definite meaning; since this alone can be communicated with security to others, and Vauvenargues is quite right in saying: "la clarté est la bonne foi des philosophes." Therefore if I use the words 'Will, Will to live,' this is no mere ens rationis, no hypostasis set up by me, nor is it a term of vague, uncertain meaning; on the contrary, I refer him, who asks what it is, to his own inner self, where he will find it entire, nay, in colossal dimensions, as a true ens realissimum. I have accordingly not explained the world out of the unknown, but rather out of that which is better known than anything, and known to us moreover in quite a different way from all the rest. As to the paradoxical character finally, with which the ascetic