The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer | Page 3

existence? or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that
burden upon it in cold blood.
I shall be told, I suppose, that my philosophy is comfortless--because I
speak the truth; and people prefer to be assured that everything the
Lord has made is good. Go to the priests, then, and leave philosophers
in peace! At any rate, do not ask us to accommodate our doctrines to
the lessons you have been taught. That is what those rascals of sham
philosophers will do for you. Ask them for any doctrine you please, and
you will get it. Your University professors are bound to preach
optimism; and it is an easy and agreeable task to upset their theories.
I have reminded the reader that every state of welfare, every feeling of
satisfaction, is negative in its character; that is to say, it consists in
freedom from pain, which is the positive element of existence. It
follows, therefore, that the happiness of any given life is to be
measured, not by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent to which it
has been free from suffering--from positive evil. If this is the true
standpoint, the lower animals appear to enjoy a happier destiny than
man. Let us examine the matter a little more closely.

However varied the forms that human happiness and misery may take,
leading a man to seek the one and shun the other, the material basis of
it all is bodily pleasure or bodily pain. This basis is very restricted: it is
simply health, food, protection from wet and cold, the satisfaction of
the sexual instinct; or else the absence of these things. Consequently, as
far as real physical pleasure is concerned, the man is not better off than
the brute, except in so far as the higher possibilities of his nervous
system make him more sensitive to every kind of pleasure, but also, it
must be remembered, to every kind of pain. But then compared with
the brute, how much stronger are the passions aroused in him! what an
immeasurable difference there is in the depth and vehemence of his
emotions!--and yet, in the one case, as in the other, all to produce the
same result in the end: namely, health, food, clothing, and so on.
The chief source of all this passion is that thought for what is absent
and future, which, with man, exercises such a powerful influence upon
all he does. It is this that is the real origin of his cares, his hopes, his
fears--emotions which affect him much more deeply than could ever be
the case with those present joys and sufferings to which the brute is
confined. In his powers of reflection, memory and foresight, man
possesses, as it were, a machine for condensing and storing up his
pleasures and his sorrows. But the brute has nothing of the kind;
whenever it is in pain, it is as though it were suffering for the first time,
even though the same thing should have previously happened to it
times out of number. It has no power of summing up its feelings. Hence
its careless and placid temper: how much it is to be envied! But in man
reflection comes in, with all the emotions to which it gives rise; and
taking up the same elements of pleasure and pain which are common to
him and the brute, it develops his susceptibility to happiness and misery
to such a degree that, at one moment the man is brought in an instant to
a state of delight that may even prove fatal, at another to the depths of
despair and suicide.
If we carry our analysis a step farther, we shall find that, in order to
increase his pleasures, man has intentionally added to the number and
pressure of his needs, which in their original state were not much more
difficult to satisfy than those of the brute. Hence luxury in all its forms;

delicate food, the use of tobacco and opium, spirituous liquors, fine
clothes, and the thousand and one things than he considers necessary to
his existence.
And above and beyond all this, there is a separate and peculiar source
of pleasure, and consequently of pain, which man has established for
himself, also as the result of using his powers of reflection; and this
occupies him out of all proportion to its value, nay, almost more than
all his other interests put together--I mean ambition and the feeling of
honor and shame; in plain words, what he thinks about the opinion
other people have of him. Taking a thousand forms, often very strange
ones, this becomes the goal of almost all the efforts he makes that are
not rooted in physical pleasure or pain. It is true that besides the
sources