Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/431

Rh ; there wickedness and stupidity. In one the good ness of the heart shines out of the eyes, or the stamp of genius is enthroned in his countenance. The base physiognomy of another is the impression of moral worthlessness and intellectual dulness, imprinted by the hands of nature itself, unmistakable and ineradicable; he looks as if he must be ashamed of existence. But to this outward appearance the inner being really corresponds. We cannot possibly assume that such differences, which transform the whole being of the man, and which nothing can abolish, which, further, in conflict with Ms circumstances, determine his course of life, could exist without guilt or merit on the part of those affected by them, and be merely the work of chance. Even from this it is evident that the man must be in a certain sense his own work. But now, on the other hand, we can show the source of these differences empirically in the nature of the parents; and besides this, the meeting and connection of these parents has clearly been the work of the most accidental circumstances. By such considerations, then, we are forcibly directed to the distinction between the phenomenon and the true being of things, which alone can contain the solution of that problem. The thing in itself only reveals itself by means of the forms of the phenomenon; there fore what proceeds from the thing in itself must yet appear in those forms, thus also in the bonds of causality. Accordingly it will present itself to us here as a mysterious and incomprehensible guidance of things, of which the external empirical connection would be the mere tool. Yet all that happens appears in this empirical connection introduced by causes, thus necessarily and determined from without, while its true ground lies in the inner nature of what thus manifests itself. Certainly we can here see the solution of the problem only from afar, and when we reflect upon it we fall into an abyss of thought – as Hamlet very truly says, "thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls." In my essay in the first volume of the