What then constitutes goodness? The quality of goodness consists in an infinite sympathy, such an intuition of the misery of others as gives us a horror of inflicting pain, a delicate skill in alleviating it. Now all the misery of life comes from the assertion of the individual will, which if justice may indeed feebly hold in check, goodness alone can effectively still by destroying the distinction between soul and soul. “To the noble man,” we find Schopenhauer writing, “this distinction is not significant.... The suffering which he sees in others touches him quite as his own. He therefore tries to strike a balance between them, denies himself pleasures, practices renunciation, in order to mitigate the sufferings of others. He sees that the distinction between himself and others, which to the wicked man is so great a gulf, only belongs to a fleeting and illusive phenomenon. He recognizes directly and without reasoning that the in-itself of his own manifestation is also that of others, the will to live which constitutes the inner nature of everything and lives in all; indeed, that this applies also to the brutes and the whole of nature, and therefore he will not cause suffering even to a brute.” And yet this conception of the good life, this living in sympathy and doing works of love, beautiful as the ideal of it is, is not the final cure for the world’s misery. The will to live, even so chastened, has not lost all of its genius for harm. “If the veil of Maya,” our thinker has it, “is lifted from the eyes of a man to such an extent that he no longer makes the egotistical distinction between his person and that of another, ... then it clearly follows that such a man, who recognizes all beings as his own inmost and true self, must also regard the infinite suffering of all suffering beings as his own, and take on himself the pain of the whole world.... All the miseries of others which he sees and is so seldom able to alleviate, all the miseries he knows directly, and even those which he only knows as possible, work upon his mind as his own.... Why should he now, with such knowledge of the world assert this very life through constant acts of will, and thereby bind himself ever more closely to it, hug it ever more closely to himself?” Should not rather, we ask, this bitter world-knowledge become a permanent and final _quieter_ of all and of every volition? Should not the will now turn away from life, shuddering at the pleasures it once craved, but in which it has come to recognize that assertion of life which is the fountain of misery?