The will to live manifesting itself, according to Schopenhauer, by the creation of new individuals, the philosopher would naturally, in accordance with his views of life, abstain from bringing others into the world. Schopenhauer lived and died a bachelor, and, so far as I am aware, had no children. On the other hand, convinced that the solution of life’s problem did not lie in suicide, he clung tenaciously to life. Having relinquished a belief in the immortality of the soul, he fell back upon a belief in the persistence of some ultimate principle, apart from conscious life, and held that in resignation and desire for annihilation (Nirvâna, according to his interpretation of the Buddhist doctrines) lay the true consolation for all the evils of human existence. For a long time Schopenhauer’s views found no echo in the opinions of other thinkers. Later, however, they became more and more widely diffused, and philosophic pessimism became quite fashionable. Those who did not adopt the metaphysical principles of Schopenhauer’s philosophy agreed with his views on life and on the impossibility of happiness. Exactly half a century after the publication of Schopenhauer’s principal work,[228] another German philosopher, E. Hartmann,[229] went a step further in the same direction. Without agreeing wholly with his metaphysics, he shared Schopenhauer’s views on the impossibility of regarding happiness as the true aim of existence. In order to demonstrate this theory, he examined the three phases of illusion through which mankind passes. He held that, in the first phase, people imagined happiness to be attainable during the present life. However, all that have been regarded as the sources of joy—youth, health, desire, conjugal love, family love, glory, etc.—end in disillusion. Love itself is especially submitted to Hartmann’s implacable criticism. According to him, there can be no question but that “love causes far more suffering than pleasure to those concerned.”[230] “It cannot be doubted,” he says, “that reason would prompt a total abstention from love,” and, as a means to this end, he recommends “the extinction of sexual desire by castration, if that could be relied upon to destroy desire.”[231] That, according to Hartmann, “is the only possible means of securing the happiness of the individual.” It is at the sacrifice of his personal happiness that man permits himself to love, and so abets the evolution of the cosmic process.