There is in the Louvre a somewhat dirty piece of marble whose size and weight with the story of how it came to be where it is, may be found in the guide books. This at least is its individual description. But to the many human beings who have stood rapt before the Venus de Milo there has appeared not this dirt, nor yet this marble, nor yet the effigy of a woman; but just the vision of womanhood. And therewith, Schopenhauer would suggest, we have taken a step out of the contentious world. It is no longer a human being but human nature we are in presence of, and to lose oneself in nature is, while the vision lasts, to have forgotten the will to live in its troublesome individuality. While the vision lasts! But the trouble here is that such visions will _not_ last. In the contemplation of beauty we have the foretaste of peace; but not the peace eternal. And the question comes back upon us: What is to be done? The answer now in progressive completeness comes from three sources. The first suggestion, imperfect though it is, we catch from the institution of civil law. Now law, and the penalties it provides, is a conscious effort to restrain the individual from doing wrong. “Wrong,” meanwhile, Schopenhauer defines as “that quality of the conduct of an individual in which he extends the assertion of the will appearing in his own body so far that it becomes the denial of the will appearing in the bodies of others.” It is then the province of law to fix as best it can the boundaries that enclose a man’s rights to the exercise of his individual will and to prevent his trespassing or being trespassed upon. But this rough and partial method of restraining the will to live from multiplying the misery which it creates in proportion as it is untrammeled is but palliative. A deeper suggestion than that offered by formal law comes from an examination of the moral sense. For the distinction between right and wrong as drawn by temporal justice is by no means identical with that between good and bad as intuited by the conscience of man. For wrong, as we have seen, means merely aggression, and right, the exercise of will that commits none of the aggressions law recognizes. But it is by no means enough to keep within one’s rights to possess moral worth. “For example,” our philosopher points out, “the refusal of help to another in great need, the quiet contemplation of the death of another from starvation while we ourselves have more than enough, is certainly cruel and fiendish, but it is not a wrong.”