Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/242

226 is what Plato holds, this is what Kant holds. One ought therefore to seek to understand what exists, what really is, to-day and always, i.e., to know the Ideas (in Plato's sense). Fools, on the contrary, imagine that something must first become and happen. Therefore they concede to history the chief place in their philosophy, and construct it according to a preconceived plan of the world, according to which everything is ordered for the best, which is then supposed finaliter to appear, and will be a glorious thing. Accordingly they take the world as perfectly real, and place the end of it in the poor earthly happiness, which, however much it may be fostered by men and favoured by fate, is a hollow, deceptive, decaying, and sad thing, out of which neither constitutions and legal systems nor steam-engines and telegraphs can ever make anything that is essentially better. The said philosophers and glorifiers of history are accordingly simple realists, and also optimists and eudæmonists, consequently dull fellows and incarnate Philistines; and besides are really bad Christians, for the true spirit and kernel of Christianity, as also of Brahmanism and Buddhism, is the knowledge of the vanity of earthly happiness, the complete contempt for it, and the turning away from it to an existence of another, nay, an opposite, kind. This, I say, is the spirit and end of Christianity, the true "humour of the matter;" and not, as they imagine, monotheism; therefore even atheistic Buddhism is far more closely related to Christianity than optimistic Judaism or its variety Islamism.

A true philosophy of history ought not therefore to consider, as all these do, what (to use Plato's language) always becomes and never is, and hold this to be the true nature of things; but it ought to fix its attention upon that which always is and never becomes nor passes away. Thus it does not consist in raising the temporal ends of men to eternal and absolute ends, and then with art and imagination constructing their progress through all complications; but in the insight that not only in its development, but in