He does not do so. He finds strength in a great resolve. He gives up once and for all the idea of pleasure and happiness. "Let us," he says, "look upon all that passes and perishes as of no importance; let us choose a better part in the great drama of the world. It is from our determined resolution alone that we can hope for any enduring result." His determination to live, not to lay violent hands upon himself, is not engendered by humility but by a spirit of haughty defiance. "It may be," he says, "that man is created only to perish. If so, let us perish resisting, and if annihilation is our portion, let us at least do nothing to justify our fate." But it is long before Obermann attains to this calm. Many and impassioned are his arguments in justification of suicide; and this is not surprising, for the suicide-epidemic in literature is one of those symptoms of the emancipation of the individual to which I have already referred. It is one form, the most radical and definite, of the individual's rejection of and release from the whole social order into which he was born. And what respect for human life were men likely to have in the days when Napoleon yearly made a blood-offering of many thousands to his ambition? "I hear every one declare," says Obermann, "that it is a crime to put an end to one's life, but the same sophists who forbid me death, expose me to it, send me to it. It is honourable to give up life when we cling to it, it is right to kill a man who desires to live, but that same death which it is an obligation to seek when dreaded, it is criminal to seek when desired! Under a thousand pretexts, now sophistical, now ridiculous, you play with my existence, and I alone have no rights over myself! When I love life, I am to despise it; when I am happy, you send me to die; and when I wish to die, you forbid me, and burden me with a life that I loathe." "If I ought not to take my life, neither ought I to expose myself to probable death. All your heroes are simply criminals. The command you give them does not justify them. You have no right to send them to death if they had no right to give their consent to your order. If I have no right of decision in the matter of my own death, who has given this right to society? Have I given what I did not possess? What insane social principle is this you have invented, which declares that I have made over to society, for the purpose of my own oppression, a right I did not possess to escape from oppression."