Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 2.djvu/356

346 purpose waver, and the delusive forms with which preconcerted plots surround it leave it unmoved, if the scorn of fools and of the vulgar herd does not disturb it nor trouble it as to its own worth, then it seems to stand under the influence of a spirit-world, visible to it alone (and this is the world of conceptions), before which that perceptibly present world which lies open to all dissolves like a phantom. But, on the other hand, what gives to the external world and visible reality their great power over the mind is their nearness and directness. As the magnetic needle, which is kept in its position by the combined action of widely distributed forces of nature embracing the whole earth, can yet be perturbed and set in violent oscillation by a small piece of iron, if only it comes quite close to it, so even a great mind can sometimes be disconcerted and perturbed by trifling events and insignificant men, if only they affect it very closely, and the deliberate purpose can be for the moment shaken by a trivial but immediately present counter motive. For the influence of the motives is subject to a law which is directly opposed to the law according to which weights act on a balance, and in consequence of it a very small motive, which, however, lies very near to us, can outweigh one which in itself is much stronger, but which only affects us from, a distance. But it is this quality of the mind, by reason of which it allows itself to be determined in accordance with this law, and does not withdraw itself from it by the strength of actual practical reason, which the ancients denoted by animi impotentia, which really signifies ratio regendæ voluntatis impotens. Every emotion (animi perturbatio) simply arises from the fact that an idea which affects our will comes so excessively near to us that it conceals everything else from us, and we can no longer see anything but it, so that for the moment we become incapable of taking account of things of another kind. It would be a valuable safeguard against this if we were to bring ourselves to regard