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of the fact that every great misfortune or deep pain inspires a certain awe. But the sufferer only really becomes an object of reverence, when, surveying the course of his life as a chain of sorrows, or mourning some great and incurable misfortune, he does not really look at the special combination of circumstances which has plunged his own life into suffering, nor stops at the single great misfortune that has befallen him; - for in so doing, his knowledge still follows the principle of sufficient reason, and clings to the particular phenomenon; he still wills life, only not under the conditions which have happened to him; - but only then, I say, is he truly worthy of reverence when he raises his glance from the particular to the universal, when he regards his suffering as merely an example of the whole, and for himsince in a moral regard he partakes of genius-one case stands for a thousand; so that the whole of life, conceived as essentially suffering, brings him to resignation. Therefore it inspires reverence, when in Goethe's 'Torquato Tasso' the princess speaks of how her own life and that of her relations has always been sad and joyless, and yet regards the matter from an entirely universal point of view.

A very noble character we always imagine with a certain trace of quiet sadness, which is anything but a constant fretfulness at daily annoyances (this would be an ignoble trait, and lead us to fear a bad disposition), but is a consciousness derived from knowledge of the vanity of all possessions,- of the suffering of all life, not merely of his own. But such knowledge may primarily be awakened by the personal experience of suffering, especially some one great sorrow; as a single unfulfilled wish brought Petrarch to that state of resigned sadness concerning the whole of life which appeals to us so pathetically in his works,— for the Daphne he pursued had to flee from his hands in order to leave him, instead of herself, the immortal laurel. When through some such great and irrevocable denial of fate the will is to some extent broken, almost nothing else is desired; and the character shows itself mild, just, noble, and resigned. Finally, when grief has no definite object, but extends itself over the whole of life, then it is to a certain extent a going into itself; a withdrawal, a gradual disappearance of the will, whose visible manifestation, the body, it imperceptibly but surely undermines,— so that a man feels a certain loosening of his bonds, a mild foretaste of that death which promises to be the abolition at once of

the body and of the will. Therefore a secret pleasure accompanies this grief; and it is this, as I believe, which the most melancholy of all nations has called "the joy of grief." But here also lies the danger of sentimentality, both in life itself and in the representation of it in poetry; when a man is always mourning and lamenting without courageously rising to resignation. In this way we lose both earth and heaven, and retain merely a watery sentimentality. Only if suffering assumes the form of pure knowledge and this, acting as a quieter of the will, brings about resignation - is it worthy of reverence.

In this regard, however, we feel a certain respect at the sight of every great sufferer, which is akin to the feeling excited by virtue and nobility of character, and also seems like a reproach of our own happy condition. We cannot help regarding every sorrow-both our own and those of others—as at least a potential advance towards virtue and holiness; and on the contrary, pleasures and worldly satisfactions as a retrogression from them. This goes so far that every man who endures a great bodily or mental suffering, indeed, every one who merely performs some physical labor which demands the greatest exertion, in the sweat of his brow and with evident exhaustion, yet with patience and without murmuring,—every such man, I say, if we consider him with close attention, appears to us like a sick man who tries a painful cure; and who willingly, and even with satisfaction, endures. the suffering it causes him, because he knows that the more he suffers the more the cause of his disease is affected, and that therefore the present suffering is the measure of his cure.

According to what has been said, the denial of the will to live which is just what is called absolute, entire resignation, or holiness always proceeds from that quieter of the will which the knowledge of its inner conflict and essential vanity, expressing themselves in the suffering of all living things, becomes. The difference which we have represented as two paths-consists in whether that knowledge is called up by suffering which is merely and purely known, and is freely appropriated by means of the penetration of the principium individuationis, or by suffering which is directly felt by a man himself. True salvation - deliverance from life and suffering - cannot even be imagined without complete denial of the will. Till then, every one is simply this will itself; whose manifestation is an ephemeral existence, a

constantly vain and empty striving, and the world full of suffering we have represented, to which all irrevocably and in like manner belong. For we found above that life is always assured to the will to live; and its one real form is the present, from which they can never escape, since birth and death reign in the phenomenal world. The Indian mythus expresses this by saying "they are born again." The great ethical difference of character means this: that the bad man is infinitely far from the attainment of the knowledge from which the denial of the will proceeds, and therefore he is in truth actually exposed to all the miseries which appear in life as possible; for even the present fortunate condition of his personality is merely a phenomenon produced by the principium individuationis, and a delusion of Maya,—the happy dream of a beggar. The sufferings which in the vehemence and ardor of his will he inflicts upon others are the measure of the suffering, the experience of which in his own. person cannot break his will, and plainly lead it to the denial of itself. All true and pure love, on the other hand, and even all free justice, proceed from the penetration of the principium individuationis, which, if it appears with its full power, results in perfect sanctification and salvation,- the phenomenon of which is the state of resignation described above, the unbroken peace which accompanies it, and the greatest delight in death.

If, however, it should be absolutely insisted upon that in some way or other a positive knowledge should be attained of that which philosophy can only express negatively as the denial of the will, there would be nothing for it but to refer to that state which all those who have attained to complete denial of the will have experienced, and which has been variously denoted by the names ecstasy, rapture, illumination, union with God, and so forth; a state, however, which cannot properly be called knowledge, because it has not the form of subject and object, and is moreover only attainable in one's own experience and cannot be further communicated.

We, however, who consistently occupy the standpoint of philosophy, must be satisfied here with negative knowledge,- content to have reached the utmost limit of the positive. We have recognized the inmost nature of the world as will, and all its phe

as only the objectivity of will; and we have followed this objectivity from the unconscious working of obscure forces

There

of nature up to the completely conscious action of man. fore we shall by no means evade the consequence, that with the free denial, the surrender of the will, all those phenomena are also abolished: that constant strain and effort, without end and without rest, at all the grades of objectivity in which and through which the world consists; the multifarious forms succeeding each other in gradation; the whole manifestation of the will; and finally also the universal forms of this manifestation, time and space, and also its last fundamental form, subject and object, -all are abolished. No will no idea-no world.

Before us there is certainly only nothingness. But that which resists this passing into nothing—our nature—is indeed just the will to live which we ourselves are, as it is our world. That we abhor annihilation so greatly, is simply another expression of the fact that we so strenuously will life, and are nothing but this will, and know nothing besides it. But if we turn our glance from our own needy and embarrassed condition to those who have overcome the world; in whom the will, having attained to perfect self-knowledge, found itself again in all, and then freely denied itself, and who then merely wait to see the last trace of it vanish with the body which it animates: then instead of the restless striving and effort, instead of the constant transition from wish to fruition and from joy to sorrow, instead of the never-satisfied and never-dying hope which constitutes the life of the man who wills, we shall see that peace which is above all reason, that perfect calm of the spirit, that deep rest, that inviolable confidence and serenity, the mere reflection of which in the countenance, as Raphael and Correggio have represented it, is an entire and certain gospel; only knowledge remains, the will has vanished. We look with deep and painful longing upon this state, beside which the misery and wretchedness of our own is brought out clearly by the contrast. Yet this is the only consideration which can afford us lasting consolation, when on the one hand we have recognized incurable suffering and endless misery as essential to the manifestation of will, the world; and on the other hand, see the world pass away with the abolition of will, and retain before us only empty nothingness. Thus, in this way, by contemplation of the life and conduct of saints, whom it is certainly rarely granted us to meet with in our own experience, but who are brought before our eyes by their written history, and with the stamp of inner truth, by art,- we must

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banish the dark impression of that nothingness which we discern behind all virtue and holiness as their final goal, and which we fear as children fear the dark; we must not even evade it like the Indians, through myths and meaningless words, such as reabsorption in Brahma or the Nirvana of the Buddhists. do we freely acknowledge that what remains after the entire abolition of will is, for all those who are still full of will, certainly nothing; but conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and has denied itself, this our world which is so real, with all its suns and Milky Ways, is nothing.

Translation of R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp.

I'

ON BOOKS AND READING

T IS in literature as in life: wherever you turn, you stumble at once upon the incorrigible mob of humanity, swarming in all directions, crowding and soiling everything, like flies in summer. Hence the number, which no man can count, of bad books; those rank weeds of literature, which draw nourishment from the corn and choke it. The time, money, and attention of the public, which rightfully belong to good books and their noble aims, they take for themselves: they are written for the mere purpose of making money or procuring places. So they are not only useless: they do positive mischief. Nine tenths of the whole of our present literature has no other aim than to get a few shillings out of the pockets of the public; and to this end author, publisher, and reviewer are in league.

Let me mention a crafty and wicked trick, albeit a profitable and successful one, practiced by littérateurs, hack writers, and voluminous authors. In complete disregard of good taste and the true culture of the period, they have succeeded in getting the whole of the world of fashion into leading-strings, so that they are all trained to read in time, and all the same thing,-viz., the newest books; and that for the purpose of getting food for conversation in the circles in which they move. This is the aim served by bad novels, produced by writers who were once celebrated, as Spindler, Bulwer-Lytton, Eugene Sue. What can be more miserable than the lot of a reading public like this,always bound to peruse the latest works of extremely common