ever as one that suffers lack, — this they condemn, compassionate, and — resign. They do not strive or cry. They simply forsake the will. Life, they say, must be evil, for life is desire, and desire is essentially tragic, since it flees endlessly and restlessly from all that it has; makes perfection impossible by always despising whatever it happens to possess, and by longing for more; lives in an eternal wilderness of its own creation; is tossed fitfully in the waves of its own dark ocean of passion; knows no peace; finds in itself no outcome, — nothing that can finish the longing and the strife.
And this hopelessly struggling desire, — so the saints teach to each one of us in our blindness, — That art Thou. The saints pity us all. Their very existence is compassion. They absent them from felicity awhile, that they may teach us the way of peace. And this way is what? Suicide? No, indeed. Schopenhauer quite consistently condemns suicide. The suicide desires bliss, and flees only from circumstance. He wills life. He hates only this life which he happens to have. No, this is not what the saints teach. One and all they counsel, as the path of perfection, the hard and steep road of Resignation. That alone leads to blessedness, to escape from the world. Deny the will to live. Forsake the power that builds the world. Deny the flesh. While you live be pitiful, merciful, kindly, dispassionate, resisting no evil, turning away from all good fortune, thinking of all things as of vanity and illusion. The whole world, after all, is an evil dream. Deny the will that dreams, and the vision is ended. As for the result, “we confess freely,” says Schopenhauer, in the famous concluding words of the fourth book of his first volume, “what remains, after the entire annulling of the will, is, for all those who are yet full of the will, indeed nothing. But, on the other hand, for those in whom the will has turned again, and has denied itself, this our own so very real world, with all her suns and Milky Ways, is — Nothing.”
