The World as Will and Idea Volume I Part 17

86 At the procession of Jagganath in June 1840, eleven Hindus threw themselves under the wheels, and were instantly killed. (Letter of an East Indian proprietor in the _Times_ of 30th December 1840.)

87 On de?te??? p???? cf. Stob. Floril., vol. ii. p. 374.

88 Bruckeri Hist. Philos., tomi iv. pars. i. p. 10.

89 Henry VI., Part ii. act 3, sc. 3.

90 Cf. Ch. xlviii. of the Supplement.

91 How truly this is the case may be seen from the fact that all the contradictions and inconceivabilities contained in the Christian dogmatics, consistently systematised by Augustine, which have led to the Pelagian insipidity which is opposed to them, vanish as soon as we abstract from the fundamental Jewish dogma, and recognize that man is not the work of another, but of his own will. Then all is at once clear and correct: then there is no need of freedom in the _operari_, for it lies in the _esse_; and there also lies the sin as original sin. The work of grace is, however, our own. To the rationalistic point of view of the day, on the contrary, many doctrines of the Augustinian dogmatics, founded on the New Testament, appear quite untenable, and indeed revolting; for example, predestination. Accordingly Christianity proper is rejected, and a return is made to crude Judaism. But the miscalculation or the original weakness of Christian dogmatics lies-where it is never sought-precisely in that which is withdrawn from all investigation as established and certain. Take this away and the whole of dogmatics is rational; for this dogma destroys theology as it does all other sciences. If any one studies the Augustinian theology in the books "_De Civitate Dei_" (especially in the Fourteenth Book), he experiences something a.n.a.logous to the feeling of one who tries to make a body stand whose centre of gravity falls outside it; however he may turn it and place it, it always tumbles over again. So here, in spite of all the efforts and sophisms of Augustine, the guilt and misery of the world always falls back on G.o.d, who made everything and everything that is in everything, and also knew how all things would go. That Augustine himself was conscious of the difficulty, and puzzled by it, I have already shown in my prize-essay on the Freedom of the Will (ch. iv.

pp. 66-68 of the first and second editions). In the same way, the contradiction between the goodness of G.o.d and the misery of the world, and also between the freedom of the will and the foreknowledge of G.o.d, is the inexhaustible theme of a controversy which lasted nearly a hundred years between the Cartesians, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Bayle, Clarke, Arnauld, and many others. The only dogma which was regarded as fixed by all parties was the existence and attributes of G.o.d, and they all unceasingly move in a circle, because they seek to bring these things into harmony, _i.e._, to solve a sum that will not come right, but always shows a remainder at some new place whenever we have concealed it elsewhere.

But it does not occur to any one to seek for the source of the difficulty in the fundamental a.s.sumption, although it palpably obtrudes itself. Bayle alone shows that he saw this.

92 This is also just the Prajna-Paramita of the Buddhists, the "beyond all knowledge," _i.e._, the point at which subject and object are no more. (Cf. J. J. Schmidt, "Ueber das Mahajana und Pratschna-Paramita.")