against "the vulgar Pelagianism," by Saint Augustine and Luther; but the Gospels are sadly
deficient in metaphysics. Buddhism, he says, is the highest religion; and his ethical doctrines are
orthodox throughout Asia, except where the "detestable doctrine of Islam" prevails.
The good man will practise complete chastity, voluntary poverty, fasting, and self-torture. In all
things he will aim at breaking down his individual will. But he does not do this, as do the Western
mystics, to achieve harmony with God; no such positive good is sought. The good that is sought is
wholly and entirely negative:
"We must banish the dark impression of that nothingness which we discern behind all virtue and
holiness as their final goal, and which we fear as children fear the dark; we must not even evade it
like the Indians, through myths and meaningless words, such as reabsorption in Brahma or the
Nirvana of the Buddhists. Rather do we freely acknowledge that what remains after the entire
abolition of win is for all those who are still full of will certainly nothing; but, conversely, to those
in whom the will has turned and has denied itself, this our world, which is so real, with all its suns
and milky ways--is nothing."
There is a vague suggestion here that the saint sees something positive which other men do not
see, but there is nowhere a hint as to what this is, and I think the suggestion is only rhetorical. The
world and all its phenomena, Schopenhauer says, are only the objectification of will. With the
surrender of the will,
"... all those phenomena are also abolished; that constant strain and effort without end and
without rest at all the grades of objectivity, in which and through which the world consists; the
multifarious forms succeeding each other in gradation; the whole manifestation of the will; and,
finally, also the universal forms of this manifestation, time and space, and also its last
fundamental form, subject and object; all are abolished. No will: no idea, no world. Before us
there is certainly only nothingness."
We cannot interpret this except as meaning that the saint's purpose is to come as near as possible
to non-existence, which, for some reason never clearly explained, he cannot achieve by suicide.
Why the saint is to be preferred to a man who is always drunk is not very easy to see; perhaps
Schopenhauer thought the sober moments were bound to be sadly frequent.
Schopenhauer's gospel of resignation is not very consistent and not