Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 1.djvu/520

478 THE WORLD AS WILL. bk. iv. words, but only in deeds, in conduct, in the course of the life of man. We who here seek the theory of virtue, and have therefore also to express abstractly the nature of the knowledge which lies at its foundation, will yet be unable to convey that knowledge itself in this expression. We can only give the concept of this knowledge, and thus always start from action in which alone it becomes visible, and refer to action as its only adequate expression. We can only explain and interpret action, i.e., express abstractly what really takes place in it.

Before we speak of the good proper, in opposition to the bad, which has been explained, we must touch on an intermediate grade, the mere negation of the bad: this is justice. The nature of right and wrong has been fully explained above; therefore we may briefly say here, that he who voluntarily recognises and observes those merely moral limits between wrong and right, even where this is not secured by the state or any other external power, thus he who, according to our explanation, never carries the assertion of his own will so far as to deny the will appearing in another individual, is just. Thus, in order to increase his own well-being, he will not inflict suffering upon others, i.e., he will commit no crime, he will respect the rights and the property of others. We see that for such a just man the principium individuationis is no longer, as in the case of the bad man, an absolute wall of partition. We see that he does not, like the bad man, merely assert his own manifestation of will and deny all others; that other persons are not for him mere masks, whose nature is quite different from his own; but he shows in his conduct that he also recognises his own nature — the will to live as a thing-in-itself, in the foreign manifestation which is only given to him as idea. Thus he finds himself again in that other manifestation, up to a certain point, that of doing no wrong, i.e., abstaining from injury. To this extent, therefore, he sees through the principium individuationis, the veil of Mâyâ; so far he