And Schopenhauer expounds his meaning in a parable. “If we compare life to a course which we must unceasingly run--a path of glowing coals, with a few cool places here and there; then he who is entangled in illusion is consoled by the cool places, on which he now stands or which he sees near him, and sets out to run the course. But he who sees through the [illusion that separates the ‘here’ and ‘there’] and thus recognizes the whole, is no longer susceptible of such consolation; he sees himself at all places at once--and withdraws.” * * * * * This is the transition from virtue to asceticism and here we have the last word of Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the cure. Suicide is a mistake; enjoyment of beauty a true solace, but a momentary one. Restrictions devised by society are a corrective, but the misery they can prevent is as a drop to an ocean; morality which is at bottom a charity born of sympathy is the best the world has dreamed, it destroys more and more the individual will and makes all things one, but though men in the ideal state morality might produce would suffer together, they would still suffer, for from Schopenhauer’s point of view the disjunction is final; “Either desire unsatisfied, which is pain, or satisfied desire, which is ennui.” Well, this infinite wretchedness of the man who has made the round of experience in seeking relief, who has rejected suicide, who has awakened from the dream of beauty to find the old pain still there, who has tried, then lost faith in, the devices of law, who has become at last a “Beautiful Soul,” to find himself then the sharer of all the world’s misery,--the infinite wretchedness of such a man is a disease, not of the wrong kind of will, but of will itself. All will is evil will, and if one would have an end of pain one must refuse to will at all; is not this, the asceticism of Indian sage and Christian saint, the oldest and the ultimate wisdom? Schopenhauer takes his word “asceticism” quite seriously. To this last expression of human insight it no longer suffices that a man should love others as himself and do as much for them as for himself; “but there arises within him a horror of the nature of which his own (phenomenal) existence is an expression, the will to live, the kernel and inner being of that world which is recognized as full of misery. He therefore disowns his own nature which appears in him and is already expressed through his body. His body, healthy and strong, expresses the sexual impulse; but he denies the will and gives the lie to the body. It thereby denies the assertion of the will which extends beyond the individual life, and gives the assurance that with the life of this body, the will, whose manifestation it is, ceases.