This picture of universal warfare is the first scene in Schopenhauer’s world-tragedy; but it is far from the climax. It is in itself not even tragic, for is it not an aspect of nature that however much it may suggest of defeat and suffering it must reveal just as much of triumph and glory? For every victim a victor, and may we not suppose that some principle of justice awards the pains and pleasures of it all? But no, Schopenhauer goes relentlessly on. The conqueror is crowned with vanity and his spoils are illusions: “The inner being of nature is a striving without rest and without respite.... a willing and striving that may very well be compared to an unquenchable thirst. But since the basis of all willing is need, deficiency and thus pain, the nature of brute and man alike is originally and of its very essence subject to pain. If on the other hand, it is deprived of objects of desire through too easy satisfaction, such void and ennui fills the heart that existence becomes an unbearable burden to it. Thus life swings like a pendulum from pain to ennui, from ennui to pain.” And Schopenhauer finds an odd unconscious recognition of this truth in the popular imaginings concerning heaven and hell. “After man had transferred all pain and torments to hell,” he notes with an amused cynicism, “there then remained nothing but ennui to furnish heaven with.” The survivor of the struggle for existence is on these terms hardly a being to be envied, and the “_terque quaterque beati_” must often come to his lips as he recalls those who have fallen. Indeed, it is exactly that place in the scale of existence which gives advantage in the struggle, that brings with it a consciousness of the vanity of this same struggle. It is exactly to man, who in his moment of pride has thought nature a “manufactory of things for his use,” that is given the most poignant sense of alternating hunger and satiety. This most necessitous of all beings “stands upon the earth, left to himself, uncertain about everything except his own lack and misery. Consequently the care for the maintenance of that existence under exacting demands which are renewed every day occupies as a rule the whole of human life. To this is directly related a second claim, the propagation of the species. Here he is threatened from all sides by the most different kinds of danger, from which it requires constant watchfulness to escape. With cautious steps and casting anxious glances around he pursues his path--thus he went as a savage, thus he goes in civilized life; and there is no security for him. “Qualibus in tenebris vitae, quantisque periclis Degitur hoc oevi, quodcumquest. “Life is a sea full of rocks and whirlpools which man avoids with the greatest care and solicitude, although he knows that even if he succeeds in getting through with all his efforts and skill, he comes thus but the nearer at every tack to the greatest, the total, the inevitable shipwreck, death.”