"Egotism," wrote Schopenhauer
"is a colossal thing; it overtops the world. For, if every
individual had the choice between his own destruction and
that of every other person in the world, I need not say what
the decision would be in the vast majority of cases."
"Many a man," he declares on another page,[22] "would be capable of
killing another merely to get some fat to smear on his boots." The
grim old pessimist confesses that at first he advanced this opinion as
a hyperbole; but on second thought he doubts if it is an exaggeration
after all. Had he been more familiar with the habits of savages, he
would have been fully justified in this doubt. An Australian has been
known to bait his fish-hook with his own child when no other meat was
at hand; and murders committed for equally trivial and selfish reasons
are every-day affairs among wild tribes.