Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/420

404 the brute, does is equally divine and excellent; nothing can be censurable, and nothing more praiseworthy than the rest: thus there is no ethics. Hence, in consequence of the revived Spinozism of our own day, thus of pantheism, the treatment of ethics has sunk so low and become so shallow that it has been made a mere instruction as to the proper life of a citizen and a member of a family, in which the ultimate end of human existence is supposed to consist: thus in methodical, complete, smug, and comfortable philistinism. Pantheism, indeed, has only led to such shallow vulgarisms through the fact that (by a shameful misuse of the e quovis ligno fit Mercurius) a common mind, Hegel, has, by the well-known means, been falsely stamped as a great philosopher, and a herd of his disciples, at first suborned, afterwards only stupid, received his weighty words. Such outrages on the human mind do not remain unpunished: the seed has sprouted. In the same spirit it was then asserted that ethics should have for its material not the conduct of individuals, but that of nations, that this alone was a theme worthy of it. Nothing can be more perverse than this view, which rests on the most vulgar realism. For in every individual appears the whole undivided will to live, the thing in itself, and the microcosm is like the macrocosm. The masses have no more content than each individual. Ethics is concerned not with actions and their results, but with willing, and willing itself takes place only in the individual. Not the fate of nations, which exists only in the phenomenon, but that of the individual is decided morally. Nations are really mere abstractions; individuals alone actually exist. Thus, then, is pantheism related to ethics. But the evil and misery of the world are not in accord even with theism; hence it sought assistance from all kinds of evasions, theodicies, which yet were irretrievably overthrown by the arguments of Hume and Voltaire. Pantheism, however, is completely untenable in the presence of that bad side of the world. Only when the world is