Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/422

406 the principle of sufficient reason is limited to the phenomenon; this was the theme of my first essay on that principle, which was published as early as 1813.

I now go on to supplement particular points, and shall begin by supporting, with two passages from classical poetry, my explanation of weeping given in § 67 of the first volume, that it springs from sympathy the object of which is one's own self. At the end of the eighth book of the "Odyssey," Ulysses, who in all his many sorrows is never represented as weeping, bursts into tears, when, still unknown, he hears his early heroic life and deeds sung by the bard Demodocus in the palace of the Phæacian king, for this remembrance of the brilliant period of his life contrasts with his present wretchedness. Thus not this itself directly, but the objective consideration of it, the picture of his present summoned up by his past, calls forth his tears; he feels sympathy with himself. Euripides makes the innocently condemned Hypolytus, bemoaning his own fate, express the same feeling:

" (1084).

(Heu, si liceret mihi, me ipsum extrinsecus spectare, quantopere deflerem mala, quæ patior.)

Finally, as a proof of my explanation, an anecdote may be given here which I take from the English journal The Herald of the 16th July 1836. A client, when he had heard his case set forth by his counsel in court, burst into a flood of tears, and cried, "I never knew I had suffered half so much till I heard it here to-day."

I have shown in § 55 of the first volume how, notwithstanding the unalterable nature of the character, i.e., of the special fundamental will of a man, a real moral repentance is yet possible. I wish, however, to add the following explanation, which I must preface by a few definitions. Inclination is every strong susceptibility of the will for motives of a certain kind. Passion is an inclination so strong that