The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer | Page 4

of pleasure which he has in common with the brute, man has
the pleasures of the mind as well. These admit of many gradations,
from the most innocent trifling or the merest talk up to the highest
intellectual achievements; but there is the accompanying boredom to be
set against them on the side of suffering. Boredom is a form of
suffering unknown to brutes, at any rate in their natural state; it is only
the very cleverest of them who show faint traces of it when they are
domesticated; whereas in the case of man it has become a downright
scourge. The crowd of miserable wretches whose one aim in life is to
fill their purses but never to put anything into their heads, offers a
singular instance of this torment of boredom. Their wealth becomes a
punishment by delivering them up to misery of having nothing to do;
for, to escape it, they will rush about in all directions, traveling here,
there and everywhere. No sooner do they arrive in a place than they are
anxious to know what amusements it affords; just as though they were
beggars asking where they could receive a dole! Of a truth, need and
boredom are the two poles of human life. Finally, I may mention that as
regards the sexual relation, a man is committed to a peculiar
arrangement which drives him obstinately to choose one person. This
feeling grows, now and then, into a more or less passionate love,[1]
which is the source of little pleasure and much suffering.
[Footnote 1: I have treated this subject at length in a special chapter of
the second volume of my chief work.]

It is, however, a wonderful thing that the mere addition of thought
should serve to raise such a vast and lofty structure of human happiness
and misery; resting, too, on the same narrow basis of joy and sorrow as
man holds in common with the brute, and exposing him to such violent
emotions, to so many storms of passion, so much convulsion of feeling,
that what he has suffered stands written and may be read in the lines on
his face. And yet, when all is told, he has been struggling ultimately for
the very same things as the brute has attained, and with an
incomparably smaller expenditure of passion and pain.
But all this contributes to increase the measures of suffering in human
life out of all proportion to its pleasures; and the pains of life are made
much worse for man by the fact that death is something very real to
him. The brute flies from death instinctively without really knowing
what it is, and therefore without ever contemplating it in the way
natural to a man, who has this prospect always before his eyes. So that
even if only a few brutes die a natural death, and most of them live only
just long enough to transmit their species, and then, if not earlier,
become the prey of some other animal,--whilst man, on the other hand,
manages to make so-called natural death the rule, to which, however,
there are a good many exceptions,--the advantage is on the side of the
brute, for the reason stated above. But the fact is that man attains the
natural term of years just as seldom as the brute; because the unnatural
way in which he lives, and the strain of work and emotion, lead to a
degeneration of the race; and so his goal is not often reached.
The brute is much more content with mere existence than man; the
plant is wholly so; and man finds satisfaction in it just in proportion as
he is dull and obtuse. Accordingly, the life of the brute carries less of
sorrow with it, but also less of joy, when compared with the life of man;
and while this may be traced, on the one side, to freedom from the
torment of care and anxiety, it is also due to the fact that hope, in any
real sense, is unknown to the brute. It is thus deprived of any share in
that which gives us the most and best of our joys and pleasures, the
mental anticipation of a happy future, and the inspiriting play of
phantasy, both of which we owe to our power of imagination. If the
brute is free from care, it is also, in this sense, without hope; in either

case, because its consciousness is limited to the present moment, to
what it can actually see before it. The brute is an embodiment of
present impulses, and hence what elements of fear and hope exist in its
nature--and they do not go very far--arise only in relation to objects that
lie before it and within reach of those impulses: whereas a man's range