Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/424

motives did not attain to efficiency. What excluded the motives opposed to the action was in the case of the hasty action the emotion, and in the case of the deliberate action the passion. It has also often depended upon the circumstance that his reason certainly presented to him the counter-motives in the abstract, but was not supported by a sufficiently strong imagination to present to him their whole content and true significance in images. Examples of what has been said are the cases in which revenge, jealousy, or avarice have led to murder. After it is committed they are extinguished, and now justice, sympathy, the remembrance of former friendship, raise their voices and say all that they would have said before if they had been allowed to speak. Then enters the bitter repentance, which says, "If it were not done it would never happen." An incomparable representation of this is afforded by the old Scottish ballad, which has also been translated by Herder, "Edward, Edward." In an analogous manner, the neglect of one's own good may occasion an egotistical repentance. For example, when an otherwise unadvisable marriage is concluded in consequence of passionate love, which now is extinguished just by the marriage, and for the first time the counter-motives of personal interest, lost independence, &c., &c., come into consciousness, and speak as they would have spoken before if they had been allowed utterance. All such actions accordingly spring from a relative weakness of intellect, because it lets itself be mastered by the will, just where its function as the presenter of motives ought to have been inexorably fulfilled, without allowing itself to be disturbed by the will. The vehemence of the will is here only indirectly the cause, in that it interferes with the intellect, and thereby prepares for itself repentance. The reasonableness of the character (Greek characters), which is opposed to passionateness, really consists in this, that the will never overpowers the intellect to such an extent as to prevent it from correctly exercising its function of the distinct, full, and clear exposition of the