Death is the great reprimand which the will to live, or more especially the egoism, which is essential to this, receives through the course of nature; and it may be conceived as a punishment for our existence.(32) It is the painful loosing of the knot which the act of generation had tied with sensual pleasure, the violent destruction coming from without of the fundamental error of our nature: the great disillusion. We are at bottom something that ought not to be: therefore we cease to be. Egoism consists really in the fact that man limits all reality to his own person, in that he imagines that he lives in this alone and not in others. Death teaches him better, for it destroys this person, so that the true nature of man, which is his will, will henceforth live only in other individuals; while his intellect, which itself belonged only to the phenomenon, _i.e._, to the world as idea, and was merely the form of the external world, also continues to exist in the condition of being idea, _i.e._, in the _objective_ being of things as such, thus also only in the existence of what was hitherto the external world. His whole ego thus lives from this time forth only in that which he had hitherto regarded as non‐ego: for the difference between external and internal ceases. We call to mind here that the better man is he who makes the least difference between himself and others, does not regard them as absolute non‐ego, while for the bad man this difference is great, nay, absolute. I have worked this out in my prize essay on the foundation of morals. According to what was said above, the degree in which death can be regarded as the annihilation of the man is in proportion to this difference. But if we start from the fact that the distinction of outside me and in me, as a spatial distinction, is only founded in the phenomenon, not in the thing in itself, thus is no absolutely real distinction, then we shall see in the losing of our own individuality only the loss of a phenomenon, thus only an apparent loss. However much reality that distinction has in the empirical consciousness, yet from the metaphysical standpoint the propositions, “I perish, but the world endures,” and “The world perishes but I endure,” are at bottom not really different.