The terrors of death depend for the most part upon the false illusion that now the ego vanishes and the world remains. But rather is the opposite the case; the world vanishes, but the inmost kernel of the ego, the supporter and producer of that subject, in whose idea alone the world has its existence, remains. With the brain the intellect perishes, and with the intellect the objective world, its mere idea. That in other brains, afterwards as before, a similar world lives and moves is, with reference to the intellect which perishes, a matter of indifference. If, therefore, reality proper did not lie in the _will_, and if the moral existence were not that which extends beyond death, then, since the intellect, and with it its world, is extinguished, the true nature of things in general would be no more than an endless succession of short and troubled dreams, without connection among themselves; for the permanence of unconscious nature consists merely in the idea of time of conscious nature. Thus a world‐spirit dreaming without end or aim, dreams which for the most part are very troubled and heavy, would then be all in all. When, now, an individual experiences the fear of death, we have really before us the extraordinary, nay, absurd, spectacle of the lord of the worlds, who fills all with his being, and through whom alone everything that is has its existence, desponding and afraid of perishing, of sinking into the abyss of eternal nothingness;—while, in truth, all is full of him, and there is no place where he is not, no being in which he does not live; for it is not existence that supports him, but he that supports existence. Yet it is he who desponds in the individual who suffers from the fear of death, for he is exposed to the illusion produced by the _principium individuationis_ that his existence is limited to the nature which is now dying. This illusion belongs to the heavy dream into which, as the will to live, he has fallen. But one might say to the dying individual: “Thou ceasest to be something which thou hadst done better never to become.” So long as no denial of the will takes place, what death leaves untouched is the germ and kernel of quite another existence, in which a new individual finds itself again, so fresh and original that it broods over itself in astonishment. What sleep is for the individual, death is for the will as thing in itself. It would not endure to continue the same actions and sufferings throughout an eternity without true gain, if memory and individuality remained to it. It flings them off, and this is lethe; and through this sleep of death it reappears refreshed and fitted out with another intellect, as a new being—“a new day tempts to new shores.”