Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/439

Rh not upon their own feet; they would like to be carried there by the course of nature. That, however, is impossible. Therefore nature will never let us fall and become nothing; but yet it can lead us nowhere but always again into nature. Yet how questionable a thing it is to exist as a part of nature every one experiences in his own life and death. Accordingly existence is certainly to be regarded as an erring, to return from which is salvation: it also bears this character throughout. It is therefore conceived in this manner by the ancient Samana religions, and also, although indirectly, by real and original Christianity. Even Judaism itself contains at least in the fall (this its redeeming feature) the germ of such a view. Only Greek paganism and Islamism are entirely optimistic: therefore in the former the opposite tendency had to find expression at least in tragedy; but in Islamism, which is the worst, as it is the most modern, of all religions, it appeared as Sufism, that very beautiful phenomenon, which is completely of Indian spirit and origin, and has now continued for upwards of a thousand years. Nothing can, in fact, be given as the end of our existence but the knowledge that we had better not be. This, however, is the most important of all truths, which must therefore be expressed, however great the contrast in which it stands with the European manner of thought of the present day. On the other hand, in the whole of non-Mohammedan Asia it is the most universally recognised fundamental truth, to-day as much as three thousand years ago.

If now we consider the will to live as a whole and objectively, we have, in accordance with what has been said, to think of it as involved in an illusion, to escape from which, thus to deny its whole existing endeavour, is what all religions denote by self-renunciation, abnegatio sui ipsius; for the true self is the will to live. The moral virtues, thus justice and benevolence, since if they are pure they spring, as I have shown, from the fact that