Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/297

Rh regards the birth of the man as his absolute beginning must regard death as his absolute end. For both are what they are in the same sense; consequently every one can only think of himself as immortal so far as he also thinks of himself as unborn, and in the same sense. What birth is, that also is death, according to its nature and significance: it is the same line drawn in two directions. If the former is actual arising out of nothing, then the latter is also an actual annihilation. But in truth it is only by means of the eternity of our real being that we can conceive it as imperishable, and consequently this imperishableness is not temporal. The assumption that man is made out of nothing leads necessarily to the assumption that death is his absolute end. Thus in this the Old Testament is perfectly consistent; for no doctrine of immortality is suitable to a creation out of nothing. New Testament Christianity has such a doctrine because it is Indian in spirit, and therefore more than probably also of Indian origin, although only indirectly, through Egypt. But to the Jewish stem, upon which that Indian wisdom had to be grafted in the Holy Land, such a doctrine is as little suited as the freedom of the will to its determinism, or as

"Humano capiti cervicem pictor equinam Jungere si velit."

It is always bad if one cannot be thoroughly original, and dare not carve out of the whole wood. Brahmanism and Buddhism, on the other hand, have quite consistently, besides the continued existence after death, an existence before birth to expiate the guilt of which we have this life. Moreover, how distinctly conscious they were of the necessary consistency in this is shown by the following passage from Colebrooke's "History of the Indian Philosophy" in the "Transac. of the Asiatic London Society,' vol. i. p. 577: "Against the system of the Bhagavatas which is but partially heretical, the objection upon which