The World as Will and Idea, Vol. I — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp

in this, that the joys of life are shunned, not its sorrows The suicide wills life, and is only dissatisfied with the c^ditions undeFl^TcE' lr'T[a3~'pre8ented~ir3erf to him. He therefore by no means surrenders the will to live, but only life, in that he destroys the individual manifestation.

He wills life— wills the unrestricted existence and assertion of the body ; but the complication of circumstances does not allow this, and there results for him great suffering. The very will to live finds itself so much hampered in this particular manifestation that it cannot put forth its energies.

It therefore comes to such a determination as is in conformity with its own nature, which lies outside the conditions of the principle of sufficient reason, and to which, tlierefore, all particular manifestations are alike indifferent, inasmuch as it itself remains unaffected by all appearing and passing away, and is the inner life of all things; for that firm inward assurance by reason of which we all live free from the constant dread of death, the assurance that a phenomenal existence can never be wanting to the will, supports our action even in the case of suicide.

Thus the will to liye appeara j^t as much in smcide (SiyaX e^ jn the seif-greservation ,(,yishB.uX aud-ia. tliâj£muaLplfi^ijre.of procreation (Brahma). This is the inner meaning of the unity of tlie Trmurtis, w5I^/is„m^df§d^ in eveiy human being, though in time it raises now one, now another, of its “^ee headsT Suicide stands liTThe same relation to the denial of the will as the individual thing does to the Idea.

The suicide denies only the individual, not the speciea We have already seen that as life is always assured to the will to live, and as sorrow is inseparable from life, suicide, the wilful destruction of the single phenomenal existence, is a vain and foolish act ; for the thing-in-itself remains unaffected by it, even as the rainbow endures however fast the drops which support it for the moment may change. But, more than this, it is also the masterpiece of MâyH, as the most 2flagrant example of the contradiction of the will to live with itself.

As we found this contradiction in the case of the lowest manifestations of will, in the permanent struggle of all the forces of nature, and of all organic individuals for matter and time and space ; and as we saw this antagonism come ever more to the front with terrible distinctness in the ascending grades of the objectification of the will, so at last in the highest grade, the Idea of man, it reaches the point at which, not only the individuals which express the same Idea extirpate each other, but even the same individual declares war against itself.

The vehemence with which it wills life, and revolts against what hinders it, namely, suffering, brings it to the point of destroying itself ; so that the individual wiU, by its own act, puts an end to that body which is merely its particular visible expression, rather than permit suffering to break the will. Just because the suicide cannot give up willing, he gives up living.

The will asserts itself here even in putting an end to its own manifestation, because it can no longer assert itself otherwise.

As, however, it was just the suffering which it so shuns that was able, as mortification of the will, to bring it to the denial of itself, and hence to freedom, so in this respect the suicide is like a sick man, who, after a painful operation which would entirely cure him has been begun, will not allow it to be completed, but prefers to retain his disease.

Suffering approaches and reveals itself as the possibility of the denial of will ; but the will rejects it, in that it destroys the body, the manifestation of itself, in order that it may remain unbroken. This is the reason why almost all c;thical teachers, whether philosophical or religious, condemn suicide, although they themselves can only give far-fetched sophistical reasons for their opinion.

But if a human being w’as ever restrained from committing suicide by purely moral motives, the inmost meaning of this self-conquest (in whatever ideas his reason may