The ethic of self-perfecting also is present in Schopenhauer more in word than in reality. The attainment of inward freedom from the world is really ethical only if the personality is thereby enabled to work as a more direct force in the world, but this thought is not to be found either in Schopenhauer or in the Indians. World- and life-denial is with them an end in itself, and it continues to assert itself when its ethical character has ceased. Higher than ethics, says Schopenhauer, stands asceticism. Everything which helps to deaden the will-to-live, is to him significant. Men and women who renounce love and the hope of offspring so that there may be less life in the world, are to him in the right. Those who deliberately choose religious suicide, and after employing every conceivable device for deadening the will-to-live allow the lamp of life to be extinguished, as the Brahmans do, by withholding all nourishment from the body, these similarly act as truly enlightened. Only suicide as the outcome of despair is to be rejected. That is, of course, not a result of the true life-denial, but is, on the contrary, the act of a life-affirming will, which is only discontented with the conditions in which it finds itself._(_71_)_ With Schopenhauer, then, ethics reach only so far as world- and life-denial has willed and is in a position to declare itself ethical. They are only an introduction to, and a preparation for, liberation from the world. It is, at bottom, by an intellectual act that the suspension of the will-to-live is consummated. If I have won my way through to the understanding that the whole phenomenal world is delusion and misery, and that my will-to-live has no need to take seriously the world and itself, then I am released. How far and to what extent I then take part in [pg 173] the game of life with the consciousness that I am but a player in it, has no importance.