Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 1.djvu/483

THE ASSERTION AND DENIAL OF THE WILL. 441 not existing outside positive law, and we can never show him through external experience what does not belong to such experience. Hobbes himself characterises his completely empirical method of thought very remarkably by the fact that in his book "De Principiis Geometrarum" he denies all pure mathematics properly so called, and obstinately maintains that the point has extension and the line has breadth, and we can never show him a point without extension or a line without breadth. Thus we can just as little impart to him the a priori nature of mathematics as the a priori nature of right, because he shuts himself out from all knowledge which is not empirical.

The pure doctrine of right is thus a chapter of ethics, and is directly related only to action, not to suffering; for only the former is the expression of will, and this alone is considered by ethics. Suffering is mere occurrence. Ethics can only have regard to suffering indirectly, merely to show that what takes place merely to avoid suffering wrong is itself no infliction of wrong. The working out of this chapter of ethics would contain the precise definition of the limits to which an individual may go in the assertion of the will already objectified in his body without denying the same will as it appears in another individual; and also the actions which transgress these limits, which consequently are wrong, and therefore in their turn may be warded off without wrong. Thus our own action always remains the point of view of the investigation.

But the suffering of wrong appears as an event in outward experience, and in it is manifested, as we have said, more distinctly than anywhere else, the phenomenon of the conflict of the will to live with itself, arising from the multiplicity of individuals and from egoism, both of which are conditioned through the principium individuationis, which is the form of the world as idea for the knowledge of the individual We also saw above that a very large