It is the latter understanding of the outcome that Schopenhauer accepts at the hands of the mystic East. “We have recognized,” he writes, “the inmost nature of the world to be will, and all its phenomena to be but embodiments of the will, and we have followed this embodiment from the unconscious working of the obscure forms of nature up to the completely conscious action of man. Therefore we shall by no means evade the consequence that with the free denial, the surrender of the will, all these phenomena are also abolished; that constant strain and effort without end and without rest at all the grades of objectivity in which and through which the world consists; the multifarious forms succeeding each other in gradation; the whole manifestation of the will and finally the universal forms of this manifestation, time and space, and also its last fundamental form, subject and object, all are abolished. No will: no idea, no world.” “Before us there is certainly only nothingness,” Schopenhauer concludes, but if this prospect be anything but grateful to a man, it must be because he has not really seen or accepted the truth that Schopenhauer would demonstrate and impart. “That we abhor annihilation,” he insists, “is simply another expression of the fact that we so strenuously will life.” Of that folly and the pain of it enough has been said. “But if we turn our glances from our own needy and embarrassed condition to those who have overcome the world ... then instead of the useless striving and effort, ... instead of the never satisfied and never dying hope which constitutes the life of the man who wills, we shall see that peace which passeth understanding, that perfect calm of the spirit, that deep rest, that inviolable confidence and serenity, the mere reflection of which in the countenance as Raphael or Correggio has represented it is an entire and certain gospel; only knowledge remains, the will has vanished.” And it is exactly in this way “by contemplation of the life and conduct of saints, whom it is certainly rarely granted us to meet with in our own experience, but who are brought before our eyes by their written history, and, with the stamp of entire truth, by art, that we may banish the dark impression of that nothingness which we discern behind all virtue and holiness as their final goal, and which we fear as children fear the dark ... What remains after the abolition of the will is for all those who are still full of will certainly nothing; but conversely to those in whom the will has denied itself, this world which is so real, with all its suns and milky-ways--is nothing.” VII FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 1844-1900