is only a blind urgency――an instinctive blind force. The essence of things is undirected striving. Life is the expression of the absolute unreason of the Will. It is a Will without an object. Nature is the objectification of the Will that perpetually creates itself and is forever unsatisfied, unresting, and unhappy. “A Moment’s Halt――a momentary taste Of Being from the Well amid the Waste―― And Lo! the phantom Caravan has reacht The Nothing it set out from――Oh, make haste!”[72] =The Misery of the World as Idea――Pessimism.= The fundamental irrationality of the Will reveals the absolute misery of the World as Idea. The despair of pessimism follows from the very nature of the Will; for it must be remembered that Schopenhauer’s pessimism does not merely mean that the appearances of life are illusory, but that reality itself is irrational. The World as Idea is the objectification of such misery. Willing has its source in want, and want arises from suffering. Moreover the proportion of our wants that are satisfied is very small. To one that is supplied there are many that are not. Furthermore, while our desires last long, their satisfaction is short and scanty, “like the alms thrown to a beggar that keeps him alive to-day that his misery may be prolonged to-morrow.” Our ever-springing wants make lasting peace impossible. The finite world is not adequate to the infinite craving which it contains, and there is no equation between the cares and the satisfactions of life. The greatest evil that can befall a creature is to have been born; and this is a thousand-fold worse in man than in any other. To live is to go from willing to attaining and then to willing again. Attainment means new striving, and the Will shows “the ache of the not-yet-satisfied.” After all is said and done, satisfaction destroys not only the desire, but the satisfaction itself. There is no meaning in life. Pain is positive; pleasure is negative, and is merely the absence of or respite from pain. =The Way of Deliverance.= The relief from misery that Schopenhauer offers is tinged with the grim despair of life itself. It is an escape that he finds, rather than a haven――an escape that consists in giving up all that life means. Why not, then, give up life, since it is misery and torment? But escape is not in suicide, for the act of taking one’s own life is the performance of the greatest act of affirmation of the Will; and in the Buddhistic doctrine the suicidal soul only passes by re-birth (metempsychosis) into another form of Will. Schopenhauer uses two phrases that have become classic in the description of the two attitudes possible to man: (1) if man is merely a part of the World as Idea he is “affirming the Will to life”; and (2) if he seeks a way of deliverance he “is denying the Will to life.” Suicide is an act of affirmation of the Will to life.