As the self‐asserting will to live man has the root of his existence in the species. Accordingly death is the loss of one individuality and the assumption of another, consequently a change of individuality under the exclusive guidance of one’s own will. For in this alone lies the eternal power which could produce its existence with its ego, yet, on account of its nature, was not able to maintain it in existence. For death is the _démenti_ which the essence (_essentia_) of every one receives in its claim to existence (_existentia_), the appearance of a contradiction which lies in every individual existence: “For all that arises Is worthy of being destroyed.” But an infinite number of such existences, each with its ego, stands within reach of this power, thus of the will, which, however, will again prove just as transitory and perishable. Since now every ego has its separate consciousness, that infinite number of them is, with reference to such an ego, not different from a single one. From this point of view it appears to me not accidental that _ævum_, αἰων, signifies both the individual term of life and infinite time. Indeed from this point of view it may be seen, although indistinctly, that ultimately and in themselves both are the same; and according to this there would really be no difference whether I existed only through my term of life or for an infinite time. Certainly, however, we cannot obtain an idea of all that is said above entirely without time‐concepts; yet when we are dealing with the thing in itself these ought to be excluded. But it belongs to the unalterable limitations of our intellect that it can never entirely cast off this first and most immediate form of all its ideas, in order to operate without it. Therefore we certainly come here upon a kind of metempsychosis, although with the important difference that it does not concern the whole ψυχη, not the _knowing_ being, but the _will_ alone; and thus, with the consciousness that the form of time only enters here as an unavoidable concession to the limitation of our intellect, so many absurdities which accompany the doctrine of metempsychosis disappear. If, indeed, we now call in the assistance of the fact, to be explained in chapter 43, that the character, _i.e._, the will, is inherited from the father, and the intellect, on the other hand, from the mother, it agrees very well with our view that the will of a man, in itself individual, separated itself in death from the intellect received from the mother in generation, and in accordance with its now modified nature, under the guidance of the absolutely necessary course of the world harmonising with this, received through a new generation a new intellect, with which it became a new being, which had no recollection of an earlier existence; for the intellect, which alone has the faculty of memory, is the mortal part or the form, while the will is the eternal part, the substance. In