Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/325

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CHAPTER XLII.

THE LIFE OF THE SPECIES.

the preceding chapter it was called to mind that the (Platonic) Ideas of the different grades of beings, which are the adequate objectification of the will to live, exhibit themselves in the knowledge of the individual, which is bound to the form of time, as the species, i.e., as the successive individuals of one kind connected by the bond of generation, and that therefore the species is the Idea (, species) broken up in time. Accordingly the true nature of every living thing lies primarily in its species: yet the species again has its existence only in the individuals. Now, although the will only attains to self-consciousness in the individual, thus knows itself immediately only as the individual, yet the deep-seated consciousness that it is really the species in which his true nature objectifies itself appears in the fact that for the individual the concerns of the species as such, thus the relations of the sexes, the production and nourishment of the offspring are of incomparably greater importance and consequence than everything else. Hence, then, arises in the case of the brutes, heat or rut (an excellent description of the vehemence of which will be found in Burdach's "Physiology," vol. i. §§ 247, 257), and, in the case of man, the careful and capricious selection of the other individual for the satisfaction of the sexual impulse, which can rise to the height of passionate love, to the fuller investigation of which I shall devote a special chapter: hence also, finally the excessive love of parents for their offspring.