Schopenhauer’s world-view, like that of the Brahmans, because it reveals itself as consistent world- and life-denial, is in the last resort not ethical but supra-ethical. Even though through several chapters of his ethics he can speak in more elemental fashion than Spinoza, Fichte, Schleiermacher, and Hegel, he is nevertheless in reality no more ethical than they are. He ends, as they do, in the frozen sea of the supra-ethical point of view, only at the South Pole instead of at the North. The price which he pays for being able to outbid them in elemental ethics is his world view of world- and life-denial. But the price is a ruinous one. With Schopenhauer, as with the Indians, ethics are only a phase of world- and life-denial. They are nothing in themselves but merely what they are in the frame provided by that world-view. And everywhere there peeps through his ethically tinted world- and life-denial world- and life-denial as such. Like a strange sun in the sky it devours ethics, just as the real sun devours a cloud from which men are vainly hoping to get a refreshing shower of rain. On the assumption of world- and life-denial all ethical action is illusory. Schopenhauer’s pity is merely deliberative. Of pity which brings help he can have no real knowledge any more than the Indian thinkers can. Like all will-to-action in the world, such pity has no meaning. It has no power to lighten the misery of the rest of creation, since that misery lies in the will-to-live, which is incurably full of suffering. The one thing, therefore, that pity can do is to enlighten the will-to-live everywhere about the delusion in which it is held captive, and bring it to the apathy and peace offered by world- and life-denial. Schopenhauer’s pity, like that of the Brahmans and the [pg 172] Buddha, is at bottom merely theoretical. It can use as its own the words of the religion of love, but it stands at a far lower level than the latter. Obstructing the way to any real ethic of love it has before it, as the Indian thinkers also have, the ideal of absolute inactivity.