Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 1.djvu/488

446 THE WORLD AS WILL. bk. iv. (Finis civitatis est bene vivere, hoc autem est beate et pulchre vivere). Hobbes also has accurately and excellently expounded this origin and eud of the state; and that old first principle of all state policy, salus publica prima lex esto, indicates the same thing. If the state completely attains its end, it will produce the same outward result as if perfect justice of disposition prevailed everywhere. But the inner nature and origin of both phenomena will be the converse. Thus in the second case it would be that no one wished to do wrong, and in the first that no one wished to suffer wrong, and the means appropriate to this end had been fully employed. Thus the same line may be drawn from opposite directions, and a beast of prey with a muzzle is as harmless as a graminivorous animal. But beyond this point the state cannot go. It cannot exhibit a phenomenon such as would spring from universal mutual well-wishing and love. For just as we found that from its nature it would not forbid the doing of a wrong which involved no corresponding suffering of wrong on the part of another, and prohibits all wrong-doing only because this is impossible; so conversely, in accordance with its tendency towards the well-being of all, it would very gladly take care that every benevolent action and work of human love should be experienced, if it were not that these also have an inevitable correlative in the performance of acts of benevolence and works of love, and every member of the state would wish to assume the passive and none the active rôle, and there would be no reason for exacting the latter from one member of the state rather than from another. Accordingly only the negative, which is just the right, not the positive, which has been comprehended under the name of obligations of love, or, less completely, duties, can be exacted by force.

Legislation, as we have said, borrows the pure philosophy of right, or the doctrine of the nature and limits of right and wrong, from ethics, in order to apply it from