Sympathy is thus seen to be the psychological basis of all morality. But, Schopenhauer says, there is yet another problem awaiting solution. "The principle, which we discovered to be the final explanation of Ethics, now in turn itself requires explaining."[1] What is the metaphysical basis of sympathy itself? Wherein does the Weltanschauung of the egoist differ from that of the compassionate man? An empirical study of the matter discloses to Schopenhauer one fundamental difference: the compassionate man "draws less distinction between himself and others than is usually done."[2] The egoist, the malicious man, looks at all the world from the point of view of his own self-centered individuality; an impassable gulf separates him from his neighbor. Pereat mundus, dum ego salvus sim, is his motto. The man of sympathy, on the contrary, has more or less completely effaced the distinction between his own interests and those of others; a deepening consciousness of oneness with the rest of mankind and of communion with all existence dominates his life. Of these two, which is the one laboring under a delusion—the egoist or the compassionate man?[3] When this question has been satisfactorily answered, in terms of a consistent metaphysics, then the last and deepest problem of ethics shall have found an adequate solution.
The answer, in terms of Schopenhauer's own phenomenalistic epistemology and metaphysical voluntarism, can well be anticipated. No doubt, from the point of view of him for whom the causally connected order of space-time multiplicity exhausts all reality, egoism seems the normal, healthy, 'right' mode of conduct. But the man of clearer, deeper vision, the artist, the philosopher, the ethical saint, pierces through the veil of Mâyâ, and sees beneath the multiplicity of this our world of shadow-shape existence the underlying unity that is the very kernel of reality. "The web of plurality, woven in the loom of Time and Space, is not the Thing in itself, but only its appearance-form. ... That which is objectivated in the countless phenomena of this world of the senses cannot but be a unity, a single indivisible
