is capable of no fear, and in general of no desire or emotion, and is
therefore indifferent to being and not being, the mere subject of
knowledge, the intellect, whose existence consists in its relation to the
world of idea, _i.e._, the objective world, whose correlative it is, and
with whose existence its own is ultimately one. Thus, although the
individual consciousness does not survive death, yet that survives it
which alone struggles against it—the will. This also explains the
contradiction that from the standpoint of knowledge philosophers have
always proved with cogent reasons that death is no evil; yet the fear of
death remains inevitable for all, because it is rooted, not in knowledge,
but in the will. It is also a result of the fact that only the will, and
not the intellect, is indestructible, that all religions and philosophies
promise a reward in eternity only to the virtues of the will, or heart,
not to those of the intellect, or head.
The following may also serve to illustrate this consideration. The will,
which constitutes our true being, is of a simple nature; it merely wills,
and does not know. The subject of knowledge, on the other hand, is a
secondary phenomenon, arising from the objectification of the will; it is
the point of unity of the sensibility of the nervous system, as it were
the focus in which the rays of the activity of all the parts of the brain
unite. With this, then, it must perish. In self‐consciousness, as that
which alone knows, it stands over against the will as its spectator, and,
although sprung from it, knows it as something different from itself,
something foreign to it, and consequently also only empirically, in time,
by degrees, in its successive excitements and acts, and also learns its
decisions only _a posteriori_, and often very indirectly. This explains
the fact that our own nature is a riddle to us, _i.e._, to our intellect,
and that the individual regards itself as having newly arisen and as
perishable; although its true nature is independent of time, thus is
eternal. As now the _will_ does not _know_, so conversely the intellect,
or the subject of knowledge, is simply and solely _knowing_, without ever
_willing_. This can be proved even physically in the fact that, as was
already mentioned in the second book, according to Bichat, the various
emotions directly affect all parts of the organism and disturb their
functions, with the exception of the brain, which can only be affected by
them very indirectly, _i.e._, just in consequence of those disturbances
(_De la vie et de la mort_, art. 6, § 2). But from this it follows that
the subject of knowledge, for itself and as such, cannot take part or
interest in anything, but for it the being or not being of everything,
nay, even of its own self, is a matter of indifference. Now why should
this purely neutral being be immortal? It ends with the temporal
manifestation of the will, _i.e._, the individual, as it arose with it. It