rich in their stately castles is at bottom nothing but a futile attempt to escape the very essence of existence, _misery_. * * * * * That the most perfect manifestation of the _will to live_, which presents itself in the extremely subtle and complicated machinery of the human organism, must fall to dust and finally deliver up its whole being to dissolution, is the naïve way in which Nature, invariably true and genuine, declares the whole striving of the will in its very essence to be of no avail. If it were of any value in itself, something unconditioned, its end would not be non-existence. This is the dominant note of Goethe's beautiful song: "Hoch auf dem alten Thurme steht Des Helden edler Geist." That man is nothing but a phenomenon, that he is not-the-thing-in-itself--I mean that he is not ὄντως ὄν--is proved by the fact that _death is a necessity_. And how different the beginning of our life is to the end! The former is made up of deluded hopes, sensual enjoyment, while the latter is pursued by bodily decay and the odour of death. The road dividing the two, as far as our well-being and enjoyment of life are concerned, is downhill; the dreaminess of childhood, the joyousness of youth, the troubles of middle age, the infirmity and frequent misery of old age, the agonies of our last illness, and finally the struggle with death--do all these not make one feel that existence is nothing but a mistake, the consequences of which are becoming gradually more and more obvious? It would be wisest to regard life as a _desengaño_, a delusion; that everything is intended to be so is sufficiently clear. Our life is of a microscopical nature; it is an indivisible point which, drawn out by the powerful lenses of Time and Space, becomes considerably magnified. Time is an element in our brain which by the means of duration gives a semblance of reality to the _absolutely empty existence_ of things and ourselves. How foolish it is for a man to regret and deplore his having made no use of past opportunities, which might have secured him this or that happiness or enjoyment! What is there left of them now? Only the ghost of a remembrance! And it is the same with everything that really falls to our lot. So that the _form of time_ itself, and how much is reckoned on it, is a definite way of proving to us the vanity of all earthly enjoyment. Our existence, as well as that of all animals, is not one that lasts, it is only temporary, merely an _existentia fluxa_, which may be compared to a water-mill in that it is constantly changing.