Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 1.djvu/473

THE ASSERTION AND DENIAL OF THE WILL. 431 this other body itself, or else because it compels the powers of the other body to serve its own will, instead of the will which manifests itself in that other body. Thus if, from the will manifesting itself as another body, it withdraws the powers of this body, and so increases the power serving its own will beyond that of its own body, it consequently asserts its own will beyond its own body by means of the negation of the will appearing in another body. This breaking through the limits of the assertion of will of another has always been distinctly recognised, and its concept denoted by the word wrong. For both sides recognise the fact instantly, not, indeed, as we do here in distinct abstraction, but as feeling. He who suffers wrong feels the transgression into the sphere of the assertion of his own body, through the denial of it by another individual, as a direct and mental pain which is entirely separated and different from the accompanying physical suffering experienced from the act or the vexation at the loss. To the doer of wrong, on the other hand, the knowledge presents itself that he is in himself the same will which appears in that body also, and which asserts itself with such vehemence in the one phenomenon that, transgressing the limits of its own body and its powers, it extends to the denial of this very will in another phenomenon, and so, regarded as will in itself, it strives against itself by this vehemence and rends itself. Moreover, this knowledge presents itself to him instantly, not in abstracto, but as an obscure feeling; and this is called remorse, or, more accurately in this case, the feeling of wrong committed.

Wrong, the conception of which we have thus analysed in its most general and abstract form, expresses itself in the concrete most completely, peculiarly, and palpably in cannibalism. This is its most distinct and evident type, the terrible picture of the greatest conflict of the will with itself at the highest grade of its objectification, which is man. Next to this, it expresses itself most distinctly