Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 1.djvu/482

440 THE WORLD AS WILL. bk. iv. same time he is conscious that without doing wrong he might ward off that denial by every means unless he lacks the power. This purely moral significance is the only one which right and wrong have for men as men, not as members of the State, and which consequently remains even when man is in a state of nature without any positive law. It constitutes the basis and the content of all that has on this account been named natural law, though it is better called moral law, for its validity does not extend to suffering, to the external reality, but only to the action of man and the self-knowledge of his individual will which grows up in him from his action, and which is called conscience. It cannot, however, in a state of nature, assert itself in all cases, and outwardly upon other individuals, and prevent might from reigning instead of right. In a state of nature it depends upon every one merely to see that in every case he does no wrong, but by no means to see that in every case he suffers no wrong, for this depends on the accident of his outward power. Therefore the concepts right and wrong, even in a state of nature, are certainly valid and by no means conventional, but there they are valid merely as moral concepts, for the self-knowledge of one's own will in each. They are a fixed point in the scale of the very different degrees of strength with which the will to live asserts itself in human individuals, like the freezing-point on the thermometer; the point at which the assertion of one's own will becomes the denial of the will of another, i.e., specifies through wrong-doing the degree of its intensity, combined with the degree in which knowledge is involved in the principium individuationis (which is the form of all knowledge that is subject to the will). But whoever wants to set aside the purely moral consideration of human action, or denies it, and wishes to regard conduct merely in its outward effects and their consequences, may certainly, with Hobbes, explain right and wrong as conventional definitions arbitrarily assumed, and therefore