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Suicide, according to Schopenhauer, frustrates the attainment of the highest moral aim by the fact that, for a real release from this world of misery, it substitutes one that is merely apparent. For death merely destroys the phenomenon, that is, the body, and never my inmost being, or the universal Will.

Suicide can deliver me merely from my phenomenal existence, and not from my real self, which can not die.

How, then, can man be released from this life of misery and pain? Where is the road that leads to Salvation?

Slow and weary is the way of redemption.

The deliverance from life and its sufferings is the freedom of the intellect from its creator and despot, the Will.

The intellect, freed from the bondage of the Will, sees through the veil of selfhood into the unity of all being, and finds that he who has done wrong to another has done wrong to his own self. For selfhood–the asserting of the Ego–is the root of all evil.

Covetousness and sensuality are the causes of misery.

Sympathy is the basis of all true morality, and only through renunciation, through self-sacrifice, and universal benevolence, can salvation be obtained.

He who has recognized that existence is evil, that life is vanity, and self an illusion, has obtained true knowledge, which is the reflection of reality. He is in possession of the highest wisdom, which is not merely theoretical, but also practical perfection; it is the ultimate true cognition of all things in mass and in detail, which has so penetrated man’s being that it appears as the guide of all his actions. It illumines his head, warms his heart, leads his hand. We take the sting out of life by accepting it as it is. “Drink ye all of it.”

* * * * *

Arthur Schopenhauer very early in life contracted a bad habit of telling the truth. He stated the thing absolutely as he saw it. He spared no one’s feelings, and conciliation was not in his bright lexicon of words. If any belief or any institution was in his way, the pilot in charge of the craft had better put his prow hard a’ port–Schopenhauer swerved for nobody.

Should every one deal in plain speaking on all occasions, the philosophy of Ali Baba–that this earth is hell, and we are now suffering for sins committed in a former incarnation–would be fully proved. Our friends are the pleasant hypocrites who sustain our illusions. Society is made possible only through a vast web of delicate evasions, polite subterfuges, and agreeable falsehoods. The word person comes from “persona,” which means a mask. The reference is to one who plays a part–assumes a role. The naked truth is not pleasant to look upon, and that is the reason it is so seldom put upon parade.

The man Schopenhauer would be intolerable, but the writer Schopenhauer is gaining ground in inverse ratio to the square of the distance we are from him. “Where shall we bury you?” a friend asked him a few days before his death.

“Oh, anywhere–posterity will find me!” was the answer. And so on the modest stone that marks his resting-place at Frankfort, are engraved the two words, ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, and nothing more. The world will not soon forget the pessimist who had such undying optimism–such unquenchable faith–that he knew the world would make a path to his tomb.

Schopenhauer was the only prominent writer that ever lived who persistently affirmed that life is an evil–existence a curse. Yet every man who has ever lived has at times thought so; but to proclaim the thought–or even entertain it long–would stagger sanity, befog the intellect and make mind lose its way.

And yet we prize Schopenhauer the more for having said the thing that we secretly thought; in some subtle way we get a satisfaction out of his statement, and at the same time, we perceive the man was wrong.