ETHICS on the same level as his own, up to the point of abstaining from injury to his fellow humans In the really good man, the barrier of individuality is penetrated to a far greater degree, and the principle of individuation is no longer an absolute wall of partition The good man sees that the distinction between himself and others, which to the bad man is so great a gulf, only belongs to a fleeting and illusive phenomenon ‘He is just as little likely to allow others to starve, while he himself has enough and to spare, as any one would be to suffer hunger one day in order to have more the next day than he could enjoy’ (WWI 373) But well doing and benevolence is not the highest ethical state, and the good man will soon be taken beyond it If he takes as much interest in the sufferings of other individuals as his own, and therefore is not only benevolent in the highest degree, but even ready to sacrifice his own individuality whenever such a sacrifice will save a number of other persons, then it clearly follows that such a man, who recognizes in all beings his own inmost and true self, must also regard the infinite suffering of all suffering beings as his own, and take on himself the pain of the whole world (WWI 379) This will lead him beyond virtue to asceticism It will no longer be enough to love others as himself: he will experience a horror of the whole nature of which his own phenomenal existence is an expression He will abandon the will to live, which is the kernel of this miserable world He will all he can to disown the nature of the world as expressed in his own body: he will practise complete chastity, adopt voluntary poverty, and take up fasting and self-chastisement Schopenhauer’s ideal man does indeed adopt the ascetic principle denounced by Bentham: ‘he compels himself to refrain from doing all that he would like to do, and to all that he would like not to do, even if this has no further end than that of serving to mortify his will’ (WWI 382) Such asceticism, he says, is no vain ideal; it can be learned through suffering and it has been practised by many Christian, and still more by Hindu and Buddhist, saints It is true that the life of many saints has been full of the most absurd superstition Religious systems, Schopenhauer believed, are the mythical clothing of truths which in their naked form are inaccessible to the uneducated multitude But, he says, ‘it is just as little needful that a saint should be a philosopher as that a philosopher should be a saint’ (WWI 383) 232