Parerga "On the Appearance of Intention in the Fate of Individuals" I have set forth my thoughts upon this mysterious guidance of things, a guidance which indeed can only be conceived symbolically.
In § 14 of my prize essay on the foundation of morals there will be found an exposition of egoism, as regards its nature; and the following attempt to discover its root may be looked upon as supplementary to that paragraph. Nature itself contradicts itself directly, according as it speaks from the individual or the universal, from within or from without, from the centre or the periphery. It has its centre in every individual; for each individual is the whole will to live. Therefore, even if this individual is only an insect or a worm, nature itself speaks out of it thus: "I alone am all in all: in my maintenance everything is involved; the rest may perish, it is really nothing." So speaks nature from the particular standpoint, thus from the point of view of self-consciousness, and upon this depends the egoism of every living thing. On the other hand, from the universal point of view, – which is that of the consciousness of other things, that of objective knowledge, which for the moment looks away from the individual with whom the knowledge is connected, – from without then, from the periphery nature speaks thus: "The individual is nothing, and less than nothing. I destroy millions of individuals every day, for sport and pastime: I abandon their fate to the most capricious and wilful of my children, chance, who harasses them at pleasure. I produce millions of new individuals every day, without any diminution of my productive power; just as little as the power of a mirror is exhausted by the number of reflections of the sun, which it casts on the wall one after another. The individual is nothing." Only he who knows how to really reconcile and eliminate this patent contradiction of nature has a true answer to the question as to the perishableness and imperishableness of his own self. I believe I have given, in the first four
