These sensations depend upon punishment, upon compensation for something which we ought not to have done, which we ought not to have been (this idea was generalised in a more impudent form by Schopenhauer, into that principle in which morality appears in its real colours, that is to say, as a veritable poisoner and slanderer of life: all great suffering, whether mental or physical, reveals what we deserve: for it could not visit us if we did not deserve it, The World as Will and Idea, vol. .