Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/396

380 constantly present to the thoughts of all, wherefore also the slightest allusion to it is instantly understood. The leading part which that act, and what is connected with it, plays in the world, because love intrigues are everywhere, on the one hand, pursued, and, on the other hand, assumed, is quite in keeping with the importance of this punctum saliens of the egg of the world. The source of the amusing is simply the constant concealment of the chief concern.

But see now how the young, innocent, human intellect, when that great secret of the world first becomes known to it, is startled at the enormity! The reason of this is that in the long course which the originally unconscious will had to traverse before it rose to intellect, especially to human, rational intellect, it became so strange to itself that it no longer knows its origin, that pœnitenda origo, and now, from the standpoint of pure, and therefore innocent, knowing, is horrified at it.

Since now the focus of the will, i.e., its concentration and highest expression, is the sexual impulse and its satisfaction, this is very significantly and naïvely expressed in the symbolical language of nature through the fact that the individualised will, that is, the man and the brute, makes its entrance into the world through the door of the sexual organs.

The assertion of the will to live, which accordingly has its centre in the act of generation, is in the case of the brute infallible. For the will, which is the natura naturans, first arrives at reflection in man. To arrive at reflection means, not merely to know the momentary necessity of the individual will, how to serve it in the pressing present – as is the case with the brute, in proportion to its completeness and its necessities, which go hand in hand – but to have attained a greater breadth of knowledge, by virtue of a distinct remembrance of the past, an approximate anticipation of the future, and thereby a general survey of the individual life, both one's