This passage from Schopenhauer will prove illuminating: “He sees that the difference between him who inflicts suffering and him who must bear it is only the phenomenon; and does not concern the thing in itself, for this is the will living in both, which here deceived by the knowledge which is bound to its service, does not recognize itself, and seeking an increased happiness in _one_ of its phenomena, produces great suffering in _another_, and thus, in the presence of excitement, buries its teeth in its own flesh, not knowing that it always injures only itself, revealing in this form, through the medium of individuality, the conflict with itself, which it bears in its inner nature. The inflicter of suffering and the sufferer are one. The former errs in believing that he is not a partaker in the guilt. If the eyes of both were opened, the inflicter of suffering would see that he lives in all that suffers pain in the wide world, and which if endowed with reason, in vain asks why it was called into existence for such great suffering, its desert of which it does not understand, and the sufferer would see that all the wickedness which is, or ever was, committed in this world, proceeds from that will which constitutes _his_ nature also, appears also in _him_, and that through this phenomenon and its assertion he has taken upon himself all the sufferings which proceed from such a will, and bears them as his due, so long as he _is_ this will.”[95] But this pessimism (which in Schopenhauer can at times virtually have the air of a disguise) yields place in Dostoevsky to a boundless optimism. “If you were to give me three lives, it wouldn’t be enough for me,”[96] says one of his characters in _A Raw Youth_. In another passage of the same book: “You so want to live and are so thirsting for life that I do believe three lives would not be enough for you.”[97] I should like to investigate further this blissful state Dostoevsky depicts, or of which he gives us a glimpse, in each of his works, a state wherein we lose all sense of personal limitation and of the flight of time. “At that moment,” said Prince Myshkin to Rogozhin, “I seem somehow to understand the extraordinary saying that there shall be no more time.”[98] And compare this eloquent passage from _The Possessed_: “‘Are you fond of children?’ asked Stavrogin.--‘I am,’ answered Kirillov, though rather indifferently.--‘Then you are fond of life?’--‘Yes, I’m fond of life. What of it?’--‘Though you’ve made up your mind to shoot yourself?’--‘What of it? Why connect it? Life’s one thing, and that’s another. Life exists, but death doesn’t at all.’--‘You’ve begun to believe in future eternal life?’--‘No, not in a future eternal life, but in eternal life here. There are moments, you reach moments, and time suddenly stands still and it will become eternal.’”[99] I could multiply my quotations, but these doubtless will suffice.