The majority of men wage a constant battle for their very existence, with nothing before them but the certainty of losing it at last. Man's greatest care in avoiding the rocks and whirlpools of life, only bring him nearer at every step to the greatest, inevitable, and irremediable shipwreck of death. This is the final goal of the laborious voyage.
Whatever nature and fortune may have done, whoever a man be, and whatever he may possess, the pain of life cannot be cast off. Excessive joy and excessive suffering always occur in the same person, for they condition each other reciprocally, and are conditioned by great activity of the mind. Error and delusion lie at the foundation of keen joy or grief. Joy rests on the delusion that lasting satisfaction has been found for the desires. The inevitable result is that when the { 44} delusion vanishes, we pay for it with pain as bitter as the joy was keen. The greater the height from which we drop, the more severe the fall.
For the most part we close our minds to the knowledge that happiness is a delusion. We strive unweariedly from wish to wish, and from desire to desire. It is incredible how meaningless when viewed from without, how dull and unenlightened by intellect when felt from within, is the course of life of the great mass of men. It is a weary longing and complaining, a dreamlike staggering through the four ages of life to death, accompanied only by trivial thoughts. Such men go like clockwork, without knowing the reason why. The life of every individual, if we survey it as a whole, is always a tragedy, but looked at in detail, it has all the character of a comedy. Everyone who has awakened from the first dream of youth, who has reflected on his own experience and on that of others, must conclude inevitably that this human world is the kingdom of chance and error, which rule without mercy in great things and in small. Everything better struggles through only with difficulty. That which is noble and wise seldom attains to expression. The absurd and the perverse in the sphere of thought, the dull and tasteless in the sphere of art, the wicked and deceitful in the sphere of action, assert a supremacy which is rarely disturbed.