But see now how the young, innocent, human intellect, when that great secret of the world first becomes known to it, is startled at the enormity! The reason of this is that in the long course which the originally unconscious will had to traverse before it rose to intellect, especially to human, rational intellect, it became so strange to itself that it no longer knows its origin, that _pœnitenda origo_, and now, from the standpoint of pure, and therefore innocent, knowing, is horrified at it. Since now the focus of the will, _i.e._, its concentration and highest expression, is the sexual impulse and its satisfaction, this is very significantly and naïvely expressed in the symbolical language of nature through the fact that the individualised will, that is, the man and the brute, makes its entrance into the world through the door of the sexual organs. The assertion of the will to live, which accordingly has its centre in the act of generation, is in the case of the brute infallible. For the will, which is the _natura naturans_, first arrives at reflection in man. To arrive at reflection means, not merely to know the momentary necessity of the individual will, how to serve it in the pressing present—as is the case with the brute, in proportion to its completeness and its necessities, which go hand in hand—but to have attained a greater breadth of knowledge, by virtue of a distinct remembrance of the past, an approximate anticipation of the future, and thereby a general survey of the individual life, both one’s own life and that of others, nay, of existence in general. Really the life of every species of brute, through the thousands of years of its existence, is to a certain extent like a single moment; for it is mere consciousness of the present, without that of the past and the future, and consequently without that of death. In this sense it is to be regarded as a permanent moment, a _Nunc stans_. Here we see, in passing, most distinctly that in general the form of life, or the manifestation of the will with consciousness, is primarily and immediately merely the present. Past and future are added only in the case of man, and indeed merely in conception, are known _in abstracto_, and perhaps illustrated by pictures of the imagination. Thus after the will to live, _i.e._, the inner being of nature, in the ceaseless striving towards complete objectification and complete enjoyment, has run through the whole series of the brutes,—which often occurs in the various periods of successive animal series each arising anew on the same planet,—it arrives at last at reflection in the being who is endowed with reason, man. Here now to him the thing begins to be doubtful, the question forces itself upon him whence and wherefore all this is, and chiefly whether the care and misery of his life and effort is really repaid by the gain? “_Le jeu vaut‐il bien la chandelle?_” Accordingly here is the point at which, in