When a bad deed has been done, it affords satisfaction not only to the sufferer, who for the most part feels the desire of revenge, but also to the perfectly indifferent spectator, to see that he who caused another pain suffers himself a like measure of pain; and this quite independently of the end which we have shown the state has in view in punishment, and which is the foundation of penal law. It seems to me that what expresses itself here is nothing but the consciousness of that eternal justice, which is, nevertheless, at once misunderstood and falsified by the unenlightened mind, for, involved in the principium individuationis, it produces an amphiboly of the concepts and demands from the phenomenon what only belongs to the thing in itself. It does not see how far in themselves the offender and the offended are one, and that it is the same being which, not recognising itself in its own manifestation, bears both the pain and the guilt, but it desires rather to see the pain also in the particular individual to whom the guilt belongs. Therefore, most persons would demand that a man who had a very high degree of wickedness which might yet occur in many others, only not matched with other qualities such as are found in him, a man who also far surpassed [pg 462]others by extraordinary intellectual powers, and who inflicted unspeakable sufferings upon millions of others—for example, as a conqueror,—most persons, I say, would demand that such a man should at some time and in some place expiate all these sufferings by a like amount of pain; for they do not recognise how in themselves the inflicter of suffering and the sufferers are one, and that it is the same will through which the latter exist and live which also appears in the former, and just through him attains to a distinct revelation of its nature, and which likewise suffers both in the oppressed and the oppressor; and indeed in the latter in a greater measure, as the consciousness has attained a higher degree of clearness and distinctness and the will has greater vehemence. But that the deeper knowledge, which is no longer involved in the principium individuationis, from which all virtue and nobleness proceed, no longer retains the disposition which demands requital, is shown by the Christian ethics, which absolutely forbids all requital of evil with evil, and allows eternal justice to proceed in the sphere of the thing-in-itself, which is different from that of the phenomenon. ("Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord,"—Rom. xii. 19.)