Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 1.djvu/514

472 THE WORLD AS WILL. bk. iv. him from other individuals and the innumerable miseries which they suffer, and even suffer through him, and may represent them as quite foreign to him, yet in themselves, and apart from the idea and its forms, it is the one will to live appearing in them all, which here failing to recognise itself, turns its weapons against itself, and, by seeking increased happiness in one of its phenomena, imposes the greatest suffering upon another. He dimly sees that he, the bad man, is himself this whole will; that consequently he is not only the inflicter of pain but also the endurer of it, from whose suffering he is only separated and exempted by an illusive dream, the form of which is space and time, which, however, vanishes away; that he must in reality pay for the pleasure with the pain, and that all suffering which he only knows as possible really concerns him as the will to live, inasmuch as the possible and actual, the near and the distant in time and space, are only different for the knowledge of the individual, only by means of the principium individuationis, not in themselves. This is the truth which mythically, i.e., adapted to the principle of sufficient reason, and so translated into the form of the phenomenal, is expressed in the transmigration of souls. Yet it has its purest expression, free from all foreign admixture, in that obscurely felt yet inconsolable misery called remorse. But this springs also from a second immediate knowledge, which is closely bound to the first — the knowledge of the strength with which the will to live asserts itself in the wicked individual, which extends far beyond his own individual phenomenon, to the absolute denial of the same will appearing in other individuals. Consequently the inward horror of the wicked man at his own deed, which he himself tries to conceal, contains, besides that presentment of the nothingness, the mere illusiveness of the principium individuationis, and of the distinction established by it between him and others; also the knowledge of the