The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer | Page 8

should be said that this view of life will enable
us to contemplate the so-called imperfections of the great majority of
men, their moral and intellectual deficiencies and the resulting base
type of countenance, without any surprise, to say nothing of indignation;
for we shall never cease to reflect where we are, and that the men about
us are beings conceived and born in sin, and living to atone for it. That
is what Christianity means in speaking of the sinful nature of man.
Pardon's the word to all! [1] Whatever folly men commit, be their
shortcomings or their vices what they may, let us exercise forbearance;
remembering that when these faults appear in others, it is our follies
and vices that we behold. They are the shortcomings of humanity, to
which we belong; whose faults, one and all, we share; yes, even those
very faults at which we now wax so indignant, merely because they
have not yet appeared in ourselves. They are faults that do not lie on the
surface. But they exist down there in the depths of our nature; and
should anything call them forth, they will come and show themselves,
just as we now see them in others. One man, it is true, may have faults
that are absent in his fellow; and it is undeniable that the sum total of
bad qualities is in some cases very large; for the difference of
individuality between man and man passes all measure.
[Footnote 1: "Cymbeline," Act v. Sc. 5.]
In fact, the conviction that the world and man is something that had
better not have been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one
another. Nay, from this point of view, we might well consider the
proper form of address to be, not Monsieur, Sir, mein Herr, but my
fellow-sufferer, Socî malorum, compagnon de miseres! This may
perhaps sound strange, but it is in keeping with the facts; it puts others
in a right light; and it reminds us of that which is after all the most
necessary thing in life--the tolerance, patience, regard, and love of
neighbor, of which everyone stands in need, and which, therefore,
every man owes to his fellow.

THE VANITY OF EXISTENCE.
This vanity finds expression in the whole way in which things exist; in
the infinite nature of Time and Space, as opposed to the finite nature of
the individual in both; in the ever-passing present moment as the only
mode of actual existence; in the interdependence and relativity of all
things; in continual Becoming without ever Being; in constant wishing
and never being satisfied; in the long battle which forms the history of
life, where every effort is checked by difficulties, and stopped until
they are overcome. Time is that in which all things pass away; it is
merely the form under which the will to live--the thing-in-itself and
therefore imperishable--has revealed to it that its efforts are in vain; it is
that agent by which at every moment all things in our hands become as
nothing, and lose any real value they possess.
That which has been exists no more; it exists as little as that which has
never been. But of everything that exists you must say, in the next
moment, that it has been. Hence something of great importance now
past is inferior to something of little importance now present, in that the
latter is a reality, and related to the former as something to nothing.
A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after
thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for a little
while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must
exist no more. The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be
true. The crudest intellect cannot speculate on such a subject without
having a presentiment that Time is something ideal in its nature. This
ideality of Time and Space is the key to every true system of
metaphysics; because it provides for quite another order of things than
is to be met with in the domain of nature. This is why Kant is so great.
Of every event in our life we can say only for one moment that it is; for
ever after, that it was. Every evening we are poorer by a day. It might,
perhaps, make us mad to see how rapidly our short span of time ebbs
away; if it were not that in the furthest depths of our being we are
secretly conscious of our share in the exhaustible spring of eternity, so

that we can always hope to find life in it again.
Consideration of the kind, touched on above, might, indeed, lead us to
embrace the belief that the greatest wisdom is to make