Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 1.djvu/486

444 THE WORLD AS WILL. bk. iv. and rendered ineffective by external might, and the actually committed wrong, are to it quite the same, and it condemns him who so wills as unjust at its tribunal. On the other hand, will and disposition, merely as such, do not concern the state at all, but only the deed (whether it is merely attempted or carried out), on account of its correlative, the suffering on the part of another. Thus for the state the deed, the event, is the only real; the disposition, the intention, is only investigated so far as the significance of the deed becomes known through it. Therefore the state will forbid no one to carry about in his thought murder and poison against another, so long as it knows certainly that the fear of the sword and the wheel will always restrain the effects of that will The state has also by no means to eradicate the foolish purpose, the inclination to wrong-doing, the wicked disposition; but merely always to place beside every possible motive for doing a wrong a more powerful motive for leaving it undone in the inevitable punishment that will ensue. Therefore the criminal code is as complete a register as possible of motives against every criminal action that can possibly be imagined — both in abstracto, in order to make any case that occurs an application in concreto. Politics or legislation will therefore for this end borrow from that chapter of ethics which is the doctrine of right, and which, besides the inner significance of right and wrong, determines the exact limits between them. Yet it will only do so for the purpose of making use of its reverse side, and regarding all the limits which ethics lays down as not to be transgressed, if we are to avoid doing wrong, from the other side, as the limits which we must not allow others to transgress if we do not wish to suffer wrong, and from which we have therefore a right to drive others back. Therefore these limits are, as much as possible, from the passive side, barricaded by laws. It is evident that as an historian has very wittily been called an inverted prophet, the professor of