But even from this suffering the soul may finally raise itself through the consciousness that it has too great a value of its own to allow itself to be destroyed by the baseness or pettiness of another. Only he who has fought out the battle alone in all the horrors of the desert night knows what the sunrise is. Years later it may fall to the lot of such a man, who at one blow has lost everything—the sanctity of his memories, the meaning of his experiences, the faith of his love—himself to see the truth of the great, calm thinker’s exhortation: that one ought neither to laugh nor weep at, exalt nor curse a human being’s actions, but only to try to understand them (Spinoza). And then there begins for him a great and difficult work, which perhaps will last as long as life lasts, the work of looking into the depths of this other soul; of again reviewing the past in the perspective of distance; of perceiving his own limitations as well as those of the other, and thus beginning to understand. This is the only forgiveness there is. But thus a person once dead and buried in the midst of life may finally see the grass grow green and the sun shine over his grave. If this can become true—and it has become true for many people whom others regarded as broken-hearted—how much more then is it not true to him who has once been really rich and has never been robbed of his greatest treasure, the glory of his own love? A woman, for example, who for years of her life has possessed complete happiness and through this has become a mother—will she be robbed of it all, if this happiness comes to an end? There is still the happiness of others to serve, the sufferings of others to alleviate, the great ends of humanity to further. To many a one who has never even had a happiness of his own this must still be sufficient consolation. But we judge of happiness as of wealth. That innumerable human beings daily perish from want makes little impression on us. But if one of our friends falls from riches into poverty, this seems to us dreadful. We forget that he may perhaps, through poverty, attain a development that riches never won for him; that he who is robbed by fortune may make a new position for himself. Life has countless possibilities as well as countless contradictions. It is full of secret remedial powers as well as of hidden causes of death. And, finally, it is, therefore, very uncertain whether it is not the two who come together that are “torn asunder”—while the one abandoned remains whole.