It must not be supposed that when this self-surrender has been won, that it never wavers or hesitates. We can never rest upon it as an assured possession. It must ever be attained anew by a constant battle. For so long as the body lives, the whole will to live exists potentially, striving to realise itself and to burn again with its old intensity. The peace and blessedness which is attained in the lives of holy men is found only as the flower which blossoms after victory in the constant battle with the will to live. In the histories of the saints we find their inner lives full of conflicts and temptations, the end which gives the deepest peace and opens the door of freedom constantly eluding them. The suffering which is experienced personally is that which most frequently produces the fullest resignation. The illusions of life are a constant hindrance to the fullest self-surrender. The will must first be broken by great personal suffering before complete self-conquest is reached. Then, having passed through increasing stages of affliction, and being brought finally to the verge of despair, a man knows himself and the world, and rises above himself and all suffering. He renounces willingly everything he desired formerly, and faces death joyfully. This is the refined gold, which is drawn out of the purifying flame of suffering. Goethe has given an incomparable picture of an unfolding of character to such ends, in his drawing of Gretchen in Faust. The extent to which man is free to make himself good raises the perennial question of the freedom of the will. Schopenhauer held that the answer depends entirely on the statement of the problem. In so far as the real nature of man is will, and man himself is only a {91} phenomenon of this will, a particular action follows inevitably on a given motive in a given character. It is just as absurd, he says, to doubt such inevitableness as to doubt that the three angles of any triangle are together equal to two right angles. If the character and the motives were given completely, it would be possible to calculate the future conduct of a man as exactly as we can calculate an eclipse of the sun or moon. Character is as consistent as nature. There is no independence of the law of causality, the necessity of which extends to man as to all else in nature. But in the metaphysical world, Schopenhauer, following Kant, maintains that the will is free. In so far as the will represents the only reality, it transcends experience. It is outside time, outside every form of the mind which limits or moulds our experience. It is above and beyond the forms of causality, and therefore free transcendentally. In that dim region where character is formed we are our own creators. Action which is seen empirically to follow inevitably from a character already formed is seen from another point of view to be but a form of self-realisation, of self-expression.