Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/409

Rh arrangement by virtue of which it is taken care that the planets do not run their heads together, that land and sea do not get mixed into a pulp, but are held so beautifully apart, also that everything is neither rigid with continual frost nor roasted with heat; in the same way, that in consequence of the obliquity of the ecliptic there is no eternal spring, in which nothing could attain to ripeness, &c. &c. But this and all like it are mere conditiones sine quibus non. If in general there is to be a world at all, if its planets are to exist at least as long as the light of a distant fixed star requires to reach them, and are not, like Lessing's son, to depart again immediately after birth, then certainly it must not be so clumsily constructed that its very framework threatens to fall to pieces. But if one goes on to the results of this applauded work, considers the players who act upon the stage which is so durably constructed, and now sees how with sensibility pain appears, and increases in proportion as the sensibility develops to intelligence, and then how, keeping pace with this, desire and suffering come out ever more strongly, and increase till at last human life affords no other material than this for tragedies and comedies, then whoever is honest will scarcely be disposed to set up hallelujahs. David Hume, in his "Natural History of Religion," §§ 6, 7, 8, and 13, has also exposed, mercilessly but with convincing truth, the real though concealed source of these last. He also explains clearly in the tenth and eleventh books of his "Dialogues on Natural Religion," with very pertinent arguments, which are yet of quite a different kind from mine, the miserable nature of this world and the untenableness of all optimism; in doing which he attacks this in its origin. Both works of Hume's are as well worth reading as they are unknown at the present day in Germany, where, on the other hand, incredible pleasure is found, patriotically, in the most disgusting nonsense of home-bred boastful mediocrities, who are proclaimed great men. Hamann, however, translated these