But, besides all this, death is the great opportunity no longer to be I;—to him who uses it. During life the will of man is without freedom: his action takes place with necessity upon the basis of his unalterable character in the chain of motives. But every one remembers much that he has done, and on account of which he is by no means satisfied with himself. If now he were to go on living, he would go on acting in the same way, on account of the unalterable nature of his character. Accordingly he must cease to be what he is in order to be able to arise out of the germ of his nature as a new and different being. Therefore death looses these bonds; the will again becomes free; for freedom lies in the _Esse_, not in the _Operari_. “_Finditur nodus cordis, dissolvuntur omnes dubitationes, ejusque opera evanescunt_,” is a very celebrated saying of the Vedas, which all Vedantic writers frequently repeat.(33) Death is the moment of that deliverance from the one‐sidedness of an individuality which does not constitute the inmost kernel of our being, but is rather to be thought of as a kind of aberration of it. The true original freedom re‐enters at this moment, which, in the sense indicated, may be regarded as a _restitutio in integrum_. The peace and quietness upon the countenance of most dead persons seems to have its origin in this. Quiet and easy is, as a rule, the death of every good man: but to die willingly, to die gladly, to die joyfully, is the prerogative of the resigned, of him who surrenders and denies the will to live. For only he wills to die _really_, and not merely _apparently_, and consequently he needs and desires no continuance of his person. The existence which we know he willingly gives up: what he gets instead of it is in our eyes _nothing_, because our existence is, with reference to that, _nothing_. The Buddhist faith calls it Nirvana,(34) _i.e._, extinction. Chapter XLII. The Life Of The Species.