Download (PDF, 23.58MB) - Plurality Press

376 THE WILL IN NATURE.
to please the world. With me it is different : I have seen
what pleases the world, and therefore shall not swerve a
step from the path of truth in order to please
in this point also my system varies from all the others
and stands by itself. But when all the others have com
it. Thus
pleted their demonstrations to the song of the best of
worlds, quite at the last, at the background of the system,
like a tardy avenger of the monster, like a spirit from
the tomb, like the statue in Don Juan, there comes the
question as to the origin of evil, of the monstrous, name
less evil, of the awful, heartrending misery in the world :
and here they are speechless, or can only find words, empty,
sonorous words, with which to settle this heavy reckoning.
On the other hand, a system, in whose basis already the
existence of evil is interwoven with the existence of the
world, need not fear that apparition any more than a
vaccinated child need fear the smallpox. Now this is
the case when freedom is placed in the esse instead of in
the operari and sin, evil and the world then proceed from
that esse. Moreover it is fair to let me, as a serious
man, only speak of things which I really know and only
make use of words to which I attach a quite definite
meaning ;
since this alone can be communicated with se
curity to others, and Yauvenargues is quite right in
la clarte est la bonne foi des philosophies
There
saying :
"
"
fore if I use the words Will, Will to live, this is no
mere ens rationis, no hypostasis set up by me, nor is it a
term of vague, uncertain meaning ; on the contrary, I
refer him, who asks what it is, to his own inner self,
where he will find it entire, nay, in colossal dimensions, as
a true ens realissimum. I have accordingly not explained
the world out of the unknown, but rather out of that
which is better known than anything, and known to us
moreover in quite a different way from all the rest. As
to the paradoxical character finally, with which the ascetic