Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 1.djvu/517

THE ASSERTION AND DENIAL OF THE WILL. 475 through moral theory or abstract knowledge in general, but that such virtue must spring from that intuitive knowledge which recognises in the individuality of others the same nature as in our own.

For virtue certainly proceeds from knowledge, but not from the abstract knowledge that can be communicated through words. If it were so, virtue could be taught, and by here expressing in abstract language its nature and the knowledge which lies at its foundation, we should make every one who comprehends this even ethically better. But this is by no means the case. On the contrary, ethical discourses and preaching will just as little produce a virtuous man as all the systems of æsthetics from Aristotle downwards have succeeded in producing a poet. For the real inner nature of virtue the concept is unfruitful, just as it is in art, and it is only in a completely subordinate position that it can be of use as a tool in the elaboration and preserving of what has been ascertained and inferred by other means. Velle non discitur. Abstract dogmas are, in fact, without influence upon virtue, i.e., upon the goodness of the disposition. False dogmas do not disturb it; true ones will scarcely assist it. It would, in fact, be a bad look-out if the cardinal fact in the life of man, his ethical worth, that worth which counts for eternity, were dependent upon anything the attainment of which is so much a matter of chance as is the case with dogmas, religious doctrines, and philosophical theories. For morality dogmas have this value only: The man who has become virtuous from knowledge of another kind, which is presently to be considered, possesses in them a scheme or formula according to which he accounts to his own reason, for the most part fictitiously, for his non-egoistical action, the nature of which it, i.e., he himself, does not comprehend, and with which account he has accustomed it to be content.

Upon conduct, outward action, dogmas may certainly exercise a powerful influence, as also custom and example