World as Will and Idea , I , 231); let us listen to the tone, the suffering, the happiness, the gratitude, with which such words are uttered: “This is the painless state which Epicurus praised as the highest good and as the state of the gods; we are during that moment freed from the vile pressure of the will, we celebrate the Sabbath of the will’s hard labour, the wheel of Ixion stands still.” What vehemence of language! What images of anguish and protracted revulsion! How almost pathological is that temporal antithesis between “that moment” and everything else, the “wheel of Ixion,” “the hard labour of the will,” “the vile pressure of the will.” But granted that Schopenhauer was a hundred times right for himself personally, how does that help our insight into the nature of the beautiful? Schopenhauer has described one effect of the beautiful⁠—the calming of the will⁠—but is this effect really normal? As has been mentioned, Stendhal, an equally sensual but more happily constituted nature than Schopenhauer, gives prominence to another effect of the “beautiful.” “The beautiful promises