for their contention. May it not be this--that the voluntary surrender
of life is a bad compliment for him who said that _all things were
very good_? If this is so, it offers another instance of the crass
optimism of these religions,--denouncing suicide to escape being
denounced by it.

[Footnote 1: _Translator's Note_.--Schopenhauer refers to _Die Welt
als Wille und Vorstellung_, vol. i., § 69, where the reader may find
the same argument stated at somewhat greater length. According to
Schopenhauer, moral freedom--the highest ethical aim--is to be
obtained only by a denial of the will to live. Far from being a
denial, suicide is an emphatic assertion of this will. For it is in
fleeing from the pleasures, not from the sufferings of life, that this
denial consists. When a man destroys his existence as an individual,
he is not by any means destroying his will to live. On the contrary,
he would like to live if he could do so with satisfaction to himself;
if he could assert his will against the power of circumstance; but
circumstance is too strong for him.]

It will generally be found that, as soon as the terrors of life reach
the point at which they outweigh the terrors of death, a man will
put an end to his life. But the terrors of death offer considerable
resistance; they stand like a sentinel at the gate leading out of this
world. Perhaps there is no man alive who would not have already put an
end to his life, if this end had been of a purely negative character,
a sudden stoppage of existence. There is something positive about
it; it is the destruction of the body; and a man shrinks from that,
because his body is the manifestation of the will to live.

However, the struggle with that sentinel is, as a rule, not so hard