Артур Шопенгауэр - The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism

That this most perfect manifestation of the will to live, the human organism, with the cunning and complex working of its machinery, must fall to dust and yield up itself and all its strivings to extinction – this is the naïve way in which Nature, who is always so true and sincere in what she says, proclaims the whole struggle of this will as in its very essence barren and unprofitable. Were it of any value in itself, anything unconditioned and absolute, it could not thus end in mere nothing.

If we turn from contemplating the world as a whole, and, in particular, the generations of men as they live their little hour of mock-existence and then are swept away in rapid succession; if we turn from this, and look at life in its small details, as presented, say, in a comedy, how ridiculous it all seems! It is like a drop of water seen through a microscope, a single drop teeming with infusoria

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Translator's Note , cf. Thèod , § 153. – Leibnitz argued that evil is a negative quality — i. e ., the absence of good; and that its active and seemingly positive character is an incidental and not an essential part of its nature. Cold, he said, is only the absence of the power of heat, and the active power of expansion in freezing water is an incidental and not an essential part of the nature of cold. The fact is, that the power of expansion in freezing water is really an increase of repulsion amongst its molecules; and Schopenhauer is quite right in calling the whole argument a sophism.

I have treated this subject at length in a special chapter of the second volume of my chief work.

Cf. Welt als Wille und Vorstellung , vol. ii. p. 404.

See Parerga , vol. i. pp. 139 et seq .

Translator's Note . – Matthias Claudius (1740-1815), a popular poet, and friend of Klopstock, Herder and Leasing. He edited the Wandsbecker Bote , in the fourth part of which appeared the treatise mentioned above. He generally wrote under the pseudonym of Asmus , and Schopenhauer often refers to him by this name.

Cf. Romans vii; Galatians ii, iii.

Cf. Clem. Alex. Strom. L. iii, c, 3, p. 399.

Augustine de cìvitate Dei ., L. xi. c. 23.

Cf. Fragmenta de philosophia .

De admirandis naturae arcanis ; dial L. p. 35.

"Cymbeline," Act v. Sc. 5.