ust and fair to it; but the
teacher of wisdom causes the good to take the place of the
evil, both in appearance and in reality."[299:22]

As truth is indistinguishable from the appearance of truth to the
individual, so good is indistinguishable from a particular seeming good.
The supreme moral value according to this plan of life is the agreeable
feeling tone of that dream world to which the individual is forever
consigned. The possible perfection of an experience which is "reduced to
a swarm of impressions," and "ringed round" for each one of us by a
"thick wall of personality" has been brilliantly depicted in the passage
already quoted from Walter Pater, in whom the naturalistic and
subjectivistic motives unite.[299:23] If all my experience is strictly
my own, then my good must likewise be my own. And if all of my
experience is valid only in its instants of immediacy, then my best good
must likewise consist in some "exquisite passion," or stirring of the
senses.

[Sidenote: Pessimism and Self-denial.]

Sect. 143. But for Schopenhauer the internal world opens out into the
boundless and unfathomable sea of the universal will. If I retire from
the world upon my own private feelings, I am still short of the true
life, for I am asserting myself against the world. I should seek a sense
of unison with a world whose deeper heart-beats I may learn to feel and
adopt as the rhythm of my own. The folly of willing for one's private
self is the ground of Schopenhauer's pessimism.

"All _willing_ arises from want, therefore from deficiency,
and therefore from suffering. The satisfaction of a wish ends
it; yet for one wish that is satisfied there remain at least
ten which are denied. Further, the desire lasts long, the
demands are infinite; the satisfaction is short and scantily
measured out. But even the final satisfaction is itself only
apparent; every satisfied wish at once makes room for a new
one, both are illusions; the one is known to be so, the other
not yet. No attained object of desire can give lasting
satisfaction, but merely a fleeting gratification; it is like
the alms thrown to the beggar, that keeps him alive to-day
that his misery may be prolonged till the morrow. . . . The
subject of willing is thus constantly stretched on the
revolving wheel of Ixion, pours water into the sieve of the
Danaids, is the ever-longing Tantalus."[300