nsists in the complete
transformation of our being, and since it is supernatural in its origin,
the Church is right in describing as a new birth and work of grace.

Morality presupposes pessimistic insight into the badness of the world and
the fruitlessness of all desire, and pantheistic discernment of the untruth
of individual existence and the identity in essence of all individuals
from a metaphysical standpoint. Man is able to free himself from egoistic
self-affirmation only when he perceives the two truths, that all striving
is vain and the longed-for pleasure unattainable, and that all individuals
are at bottom one, viz. manifestations of the same primal will. This is
temporarily effected in sympathy, which, as the only counterpoise to
natural selfishness, is the true moral motive and the source of all love
and justice. The sympathizer sees himself in others and feels their
suffering as his own. The entire negation of the will, however, inspiring
examples of which have been furnished by the Christian ascetics and
Oriental penitents, stands higher than the vulgar virtue of sympathy with
the sufferings of others. Here knowledge, turned away from the individual
and vain to the whole and genuine, ceases to be a motive for the will and
becomes a means of stilling it; the intellect is transformed from a motive
into a quietive, and brings him who gives himself up to the All safely
out from the storm of the passions into the peace of deliverance from
existence. Absence of will, resignation, is holiness and blessedness in
one. For him who has slain the will in himself the motley deceptive dream
of phenomena has vanished, he lives in the ether of true reality, which for
our knowledge is an empty nothingness ("Nirvana"), yet (as the ultimate,
incomprehensible _per se_, which remains after the annulling of the will)
only a relative nothingness--relative to the phenomenon.

Schopenhauer disposes of the sense of responsibility and the reproofs of
conscience, which are inconvenient facts for his determinism, by making
them both refer, not to single deeds and the empirical character, but to
the indivisible act of the intelligible character. Conscience does not
blame me because I have acted as I must act with my character and the
motives given, but for being what in these actions I reveal myself to be.
_Operari sequitur esse_. My action follows from my being, my being was my
own free choice, and a new act of freedom is alone capable