Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Essays of Schopenhauer by Arthur Schopenhauer
page 75 of 236 (31%)
maintained in the balance by a continual advancing and moving, it is
impossible to imagine happiness. It cannot dwell where, as Plato says,
_continual Becoming and never Being_ is all that takes place. First of
all, no man is happy; he strives his whole life long after imaginary
happiness, which he seldom attains, and if he does, then it is only to
be disillusioned; and as a rule he is shipwrecked in the end and enters
the harbour dismasted. Then it is all the same whether he has been happy
or unhappy in a life which was made up of a merely ever-changing present
and is now at an end.

Meanwhile it surprises one to find, both in the world of human beings
and in that of animals, that this great, manifold, and restless motion
is sustained and kept going by the medium of two simple impulses--hunger
and the instinct of sex, helped perhaps a little by boredom--and that
these have the power to form the _primum mobile_ of so complex a
machinery, setting in motion the variegated show!

Looking at the matter a little closer, we see at the very outset that
the existence of inorganic matter is being constantly attacked by
chemical forces which eventually annihilates it. While organic existence
is only made possible by continual change of matter, to keep up a
perpetual supply of which it must consequently have help from without.
Therefore organic life is like balancing a pole on one's hand; it must
be kept in continual motion, and have a constant supply of matter of
which it is continually and endlessly in need. Nevertheless it is only
by means of this organic life that consciousness is possible.

Accordingly this is a _finite existence_, and its antithesis would be an
_infinite_, neither exposed to any attack from without nor in want of
help from without, and hence ἀεί ὡσαύτως ὄν, in eternal rest; οὔτε
DigitalOcean Referral Badge