criminal isolates himself and is expelled, but the altruistic man finds a field of activity, freedom, and life in the life of the whole. The selfish man is small-minded and takes everything personally, he is confined to his own insignificant, limited personality; the disinterested man is great, because he lives in the great whole, his individuality is enlarged the more he becomes the centre of objective interests. That is the meaning of Schopenhauer's words: "He only is great who in his work, whether it is practical or theoretical, seeks not his own concerns, but pursues an objective end alone.” 1

Christ's words tell us what false and true freedom are: "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it."

1 The World as Will and Idea, vol. III. p. 150.

APPENDIX.

GOD AND THE WORLD.

FOR the benefit of those readers who do not shrink from metaphysics and who may wish for a fuller substantiation of the author's opinion on the relation between God and the world and the significance of genius resulting from it, the following passage from my essay of 1888 on "Das Wesen des Genies" (The Nature of Genius) may be appended:

"We start from the conception of an absolute existence. Let us imagine there existed in reality only one single being, God. Now, a thing may exist either for itself, that is, in its own consciousness, or for some other thing, that is, in the consciousness of that other. If it exists neither in its own consciousness, nor in that of anything else, it has no being at all. Therefore God must necessarily live in His own consciousness, for outside Him nothing exists for which He could form a mere object of consciousness, as a stone does for me, since God is the single existing being, the Absolute. Now, we cannot conceive of any consciousness that does not exhibit contrasts in itself. (A consciousness that we cannot conceive of could not be called by that name, for it would simply be none.) I should have no consciousness of light if I had not at the same time that of darkness, nor of heat, if I did not also feel cold; and, above all, I should have no consciousness of my own self, if there were no other things beside me to which I found myself thrown into contrast, so that

in my consciousness I could distinguish myself from what is not myself. God therefore requires some such contrast, if He is to have consciousness, that is, a real existence. If, for instance, He contemplates Himself in His infinite freedom and absolute unconditionality, there must simultaneously arise within Him the correlative idea of absence of freedom, of complete conditionality.

"It is God Himself, however, who has both the consciousness of His real absolute freedom and the conception of the contrary, that of entire absence of freedom. On the one hand, therefore, He is in reality the infinitely free God, on the other, even in His own conception, a conditioned and limited being; for God Himself forms the conception of limitation, and must therefore even in His own conception be limited.

"Here the relation between God and His creature becomes clear. Each single limited, finite, conditioned being is none other than God Himself in the conception which serves Him as a contrast with the consciousness of His real freedom and unconditionality. Dying is therefore nothing but the coming of God to Himself out of this one definite conception that He has formed of an imperfect being and into which He has lived Himself, as the artist lives himself into his figures. To die is the awakening of God from a dream.

"Since, however, His freedom and unconditionality are based on the fact that His is the only real existence, that nothing exists outside Himself which can condition and limit Him, then lack of freedom and conditionality must consist in the very fact of many beings existing side by side who, by each asserting his own existence, condition and limit one another. Therefore God's conception of an unfree existence includes, at the same time, the conception of many beings that condition one another.

God in His utmost self-abasement and imagined finiteness becomes an atom, a being that is limited in its existence and reduced to its smallest compass by an infinite number of similar beings. The matter out of which everything is built up is God Himself infinitely subdivided, as He is only in His own conception, forming a contrast with His real absolute unity. Multiplicity, therefore, is only a conception, a semblance, and truth lies only in unity, in the abandonment of the particular individual personality, and in the fusion with others to a more exalted whole, in a word, in Love.

"Now, although God may descend from His lofty station and, in His own conception, become a conditioned, finite being, yet a more or less distinct consciousness of His self-abasement must still remain with that conditioned, finite being, for God can yield Himself up, but cannot entirely lose Himself even in the conception of an atom into which He has lived Himself. This consciousness of His self-abasement must now find its corresponding expression, and, indeed, we see in all things, in the atom as well as in the solar system, in the individual human being as well as in the nations, the striving to pass from multiplicity to unity. The force of gravitation, that is, the tendency of bodies to approach each other and form units with a common centre of gravity, the chemical affinities as the result of which single atoms unite into particular groups, the formation of crystals, the development of organisms from cells, and numerous other similar processes, as well as, on the other hand, the gregarious instinct of men and animals, love, devotion to one's profession, to the State, etc., can only in this way find their true explanation. In short, all psychical and physical phenomena can, from this point of view, be uniformly explained and reduced to a final principle.