What is the answer to all these contradictions and the explanation of a cosmic process which on the one hand leads but to death, and on the other hand develops the intelligence so as to enable it to fear and dread the inevitable end? Is the solution to be found in belief in the immortality of the soul, supported as it is not only by nearly every form of religion, but by numerous systems of philosophy? Schopenhauer devotes many pages to the discussion of this question. He neither supports the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, nor the immortality of the conscious soul. “Just as the individual has no memory of prenatal existence, so after death he will remember nothing of his present life.”[217] “Those who regard birth as the actual beginning of man’s life must necessarily face death as final, the two being parallel. No man can therefore regard himself as immortal without forfeiting his belief in his own birth. Birth and death have the same origin and the same significance. They represent but one line, extending in opposite directions. If birth implies an origin from nothingness, then death must be complete annihilation.”[218] There is no such thing as individual immortality. But, according to Schopenhauer, to desire such immortality would merely be to advocate “the eternal perpetuation of a great mistake. Each individual existence is a definite mistake, a blunder, something that would better not have been, and the object of existence should be to end it.”[219] But if man, as an individual, is mortal, “death only takes away what was given by birth, that is to say, the principle by which death itself became possible.”[220] “Consciousness ceases at death, but the cause which produced that consciousness persists; life comes to an end, but not the principle which became manifest by life.”[221] What then is this immortal principle? It is the idea of the species or genus. Men or dogs, as individuals, perish in due course, but the human species or the canine species, the man “idea” or the dog “idea,” endures. Here Schopenhauer reverted to the conception of Spinoza, who, indeed, denied the immortality of the soul, but none the less believed in the immortality of the principle of life. This everlasting principle, according to Schopenhauer, is the will in its widest and most metaphysical sense, while, on the other hand, the mortal soul is the reason, a product of the functions of the brain. The eternal principle of life cannot be defined, because “we cannot pass outside the limits of our consciousness. And thus the problem of what it is in itself cannot be resolved.”[222]