He
represented him as coming into the world with a given tendency, which
was the result of the feelings and character already attaching to
him in accordance with the doctrine of metempsychosis. The Brahmin
philosophers also express the unalterable fixity of innate character
in a mystical fashion. They say that Brahma, when a man is produced,
engraves his doings and sufferings in written characters on his skull,
and that his life must take shape in accordance therewith. They point
to the jagged edges in the sutures of the skull-bones as evidence of
this writing; and the purport of it, they say, depends on his previous
life and actions. The same view appears to underlie the Christian, or
rather, the Pauline, dogma of Predestination.

[Footnote 1: _Phaedrus_ and _Laws, bk_. x.]

But this truth, which is universally confirmed by experience, is
attended with another result. All genuine merit, moral as well as
intellectual, is not merely physical or empirical in its origin,
but metaphysical; that is to say, it is given _a priori_ and not _a
posteriori_; in other words, it lies innate and is not acquired,
and therefore its source is not a mere phenomenon, but the
thing-in-itself. Hence it is that every man achieves only that which
is irrevocably established in his nature, or is born with him.
Intellectual capacity needs, it is true, to be developed just as many
natural products need to be cultivated in order that we may enjoy or
use them; but just as in the case of a natural product no cultivation
can take the place of original material, neither can it do so in the
case of intellect. That is the reason why qualities which are merely
acquired, or learned, or enforced--that is, qualities _a posteriori_,
whether moral or intellectual--are not real or genuine, but
superficial only, and possessed of no value. This is a conclusion of
true metaphysics, and experience teaches the same lesson to all who
can look below the surface. Nay, it is proved by the great importance
which we all attach to such innate characteristics as physiognomy and
external appearance, in the case of a man who is at all distinguished;
and that is why we are so curious to see him. Superficial people, to
be sure,--and, for very good reasons, commonplace people too,--will be
of the opposite opinion; for if anything fails them they will thus be
enabled to console themselves by thinking that it is still to come.

The world, then, is not merely a battlefield wher