Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/294

278 more fit the individual is, on account of his age, for the propagation of the species, the more powerfully does the vis naturæ medicatrix manifest itself in him, and therefore his wounds heal easily, and he easily recovers from diseases. This diminishes along with the power of generation, and sinks low after it is extinct; for now in the eyes of nature the individual has become worthless.

If now we cast another glance at the scale of existences, with the whole of their accompanying gradations of consciousness, from the polyp up to man, we see this wonderful pyramid, kept in ceaseless oscillation certainly by the constant death of the individuals, yet by means of the bond of generation, enduring in the species through the infinite course of time. While, then, as was explained above, the objective, the species, presents itself as indestructible, the subjective, which consists merely in the self-consciousness of these beings, seems to be of the shortest duration, and to be unceasingly destroyed, in order, just as often, to come fort again from nothing in an incomprehensible manner. But, indeed, one must be very short-sighted to let oneself be deceived by this appearance, and not to comprehend that, although the form of temporal permanence only belongs to the objective, the subjective, i.e., the will, which lives and manifests itself in all, and with it the subject of the knowledge in which all exhibits itself, must be not less indestructible; because the permanence of the objective, or external, can yet only be the phenomenal appearance of the indestructibility of the subjective or internal; for the former can possess nothing which it has not received on loan from the latter; and cannot be essentially and originally an objective, a phenomenon, and then secondarily and accidentally a subjective, a thing in itself, a self-consciousness. For clearly the former as a manifestation presupposes something which manifests itself, as being for other presupposes a being for self, and as object presupposes a subject; and not conversely: because everywhere the root of things must