The mouse's pessimism and Schopenhauer's predator
But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all.
Schopenhauer offers a particularly close comparison: to test whether pleasure outweighs pain, consider the feelings of an animal eating another. Chesterton turns that grim comparison into a reversal of the apparent winner. Continued existence becomes the cat's punishment.
The inspected witness is T. Bailey Saunders's English selection Studies in Pessimism, as transcribed by Project Gutenberg, especially 'On the Sufferings of the World.' Its prefatory note explicitly identifies it as a selective arrangement from Parerga, not an original book bearing that English title; Parerga und Paralipomena first appeared in 1851. The resemblance explains the philosophical joke without proving a specific allusion. Nor is the mouse's triumphant death a complete account of Schopenhauer: 'On Suicide' distinguishes genuine release from suffering from the merely apparent release obtained by killing oneself. Saunders translation; publication history.
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