If, on the other hand, man lacks objects of desire, being deprived of them by too easy satisfaction, then a terrible emptiness and sense of boredom, comes over him. His very existence becomes an unbearable burden to him. Thus life swings like a pendulum backwards and forwards between pain and boredom. Men have {43} expressed this truth oddly, says Schopenhauer, in transferring all pain and torments to hell, and in leaving what remains, that is, boredom, for heaven. Man is of all animals the most full of wants and needs. He is a concretion of a thousand necessities. Driven by these, he wanders through life, uncertain about everything except his own need and misery. The care for the maintenance of his existence occupies, as a rule, the whole of human life. A second claim, that of the reproduction of the species, is related directly to this. At the same time, he is threatened from all sides by different kinds of dangers, from which it requires constant watchfulness to escape. "With cautious steps and casting anxious glances round him, he pursues his path, for a thousand accidents and a thousand enemies lie in wait for him. Thus he went while yet a savage, thus he goes in civilised life. There is no security for him." The majority of men wage a constant battle for their very existence, with nothing before them but the certainty of losing it at last. Man's greatest care in avoiding the rocks and whirlpools of life, only bring him nearer at every step to the greatest, inevitable, and irremediable shipwreck of death. This is the final goal of the laborious voyage. Whatever nature and fortune may have done, whoever a man be, and whatever he may possess, the pain of life cannot be cast off. Excessive joy and excessive suffering always occur in the same person, for they condition each other reciprocally, and are conditioned by great activity of the mind. Error and delusion lie at the foundation of keen joy or grief. Joy rests on the delusion that lasting satisfaction has been found for the desires. The inevitable result is that when the {44} delusion vanishes, we pay for it with pain as bitter as the joy was keen. The greater the height from which we drop, the more severe the fall.