THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

SCHOPENHAUER 245
i. e., more suffering. Even if the socialist Utopia were attained, innumer-
able evils would be left, because some of them like strife are essential
to life; and if every evil were removed, and strife were altogether ended,
boredom would become as intolerable as pain. So "life swings like a
pendulum backward and forward between pain and ennuL . . . After
man had transformed all pains and torments into the conception of hell,
there remained nothing for heaven except ennui" 7* The more successful
we become, the more we are bored. "As want is the constant scourge of
the people, so ennui is the scourge of the fashionable world. In middleclass
the ennui is represented by the Sundays and want by the weekdays."
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Life is evil because the higher the organism the greater the suffering.
The growth of knowledge is no solution.
For as the phenomenon of will becomes more complete, the suffering
becomes more and more apparent. In the plant there is as yet no sensibility,
and therefore no pain. A certain very small degree of suffering is experienced
by the lowest species of animal life Infusoria and Radiata; even in
insects the capacity to feel and suffer is still limited. It first appears in a
high degree with the complete nervous system of vertebrate animals, and
always in a higher degree the more intelligence develops. Thus, in proportion
as knowledge attains to distinctness, as consciousness ascends, pain also
increases, and reaches its highest degree in man. And then, again, the more
distinctly a man knows the more intelligent he is the more pain he has;
the man who is gifted with genius suffers most of all. 76
He that increaseth knowledge, therefore, increaseth sorrow. Even
memory and foresight add to human misery; for most of our suffering
lies in retrospect or anticipation; pain itself is brief. How much more
death itself!
suffering is caused by the thought of death than by
Finally, and above all, life is evil because life is w? ar. Everywhere in
nature we see strife, competition, conflict, and a suicidal alternation of
victory and defeat. Every species "fights for the matter, space, and time
of the others."
The young hydra, which grows like a bud out of the old one, and afterwards
separates itself from it, fights, while it is still joined to the old one,
for the prey that offers itself, so that the one snatches it out of the mouth
of the other. But the bull-dog ant of Australia affords us the most extraordinary
example of this kind; for if it is cut in two, a battle begins between the
head and the tail. The head seizes the tail with its teeth, and the tail
defends itself bravely by stinging the head; the battle may last for half an
hour, until they die or are dragged away by other ants. This contest takes
place every time the experiment is tried. . . . Yunghahn relates that he
saw in Java a plain, as far as the eye could reach, entirely covered with
skeletons, and took it for a battle-field; they were, however, merely the
"1, 400.