and to pass into motionless Nirvâna. Hasten, then, the day when the pitch of misery shall have brought the race to the saving anguish of despair, and mankind in united and complete renunciation shall execute a universal auto da fé, by final self-immolation[1] ending the tragedy of existence forever!
Nevertheless, while this is the sum of its theory, ethics may have the important practical question to settle, How shall we make an end of things the surest and soonest? There is here indeed no duty, there is no such thing as duty; there is simply a possible satisfaction of the desire for release from misery. But to this end there may be an alternative of means. We may each promote the end, either by an indirect and negative or else by a direct and positive agency. By following the traditional standards of virtue, we may advance society in order, peace, prosperity, and apparent welfare, the indirect though real outcome of which is however but the profounder despair; or we may by passion, fraud, and violence heighten the rising flood of misery directly. Which each will do is in fact a matter of
- ↑ Hartmann, like Schopenhauer, requires us here to make a refined distinction between this final “act of devotion” and suicide. Suicide, both say, is only an enraged and disappointed form of the “will to live.” The real difference, however, is that suicide, directly, fails to go far enough; nothing short of self-annihilation will answer. But it is difficult to see why, with their doctrine of individual transiency, suicide doesn’t “get there all the same.”
