Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/253

Rh cut from the living animal, as in Abyssinia; to eat men, as in New Zealand, or to sacrifice their children to Moloch; to castrate themselves, to fling themselves voluntarily on the funeral piles of the dead – in a word, to do anything we please. Hence the Crusades, the extravagances of fanatical sects; hence Chiliasts and Flagellants, persecutions, autos da fe, and all that is offered by the long register of human perversities. Lest it should be thought that only the dark ages afford such examples, I shall add a couple of more modern instances. In the year 1818 there went from Würtemberg 7000 Chiliasts to the neighbourhood of Ararat, because the new kingdom of God, specially announced by Jung Stilling, was to appear there. Gall relates that in his time a mother killed her child and roasted it in order to cure her husband s rheumatism with its fat. The tragical side of error lies in the practical, the comical is reserved for the theoretical. For example, if we could firmly persuade three men that the sun is not the cause of daylight, we might hope to see it soon established as the general conviction. In Germany it was possible to proclaim as the greatest philosopher of all ages Hegel, a repulsive, mindless charlatan, an unparalleled scribbler of nonsense, and for twenty years many thousands have believed it stubbornly and firmly; and indeed, outside Germany, the Danish Academy entered the lists against myself for his fame, and sought to have him regarded as a summus philosophus. (Upon this see the preface to my Grundproblemen der Ethik.) These, then, are the disadvantages which, on account of the rarity of judgment, attach to the existence of reason. We must add to them the possibility of madness. The brutes do not go mad, although the carnivora are subject to fury, and the ruminants to a sort of delirium.