From the Unconscious to the Conscious 



without compensations. Life is objectless. The hopes 

 of religion are absurd, since, apart from their dogmatic 

 difficulties, they are all based on the insensate concept that 

 the individual soul, a thing which had a beginning, 

 should nevertheless have no ending. 



There is therefore no hope, neither in a future world, 

 nor in this present one. 



The will to live does but engender effort without 

 a goal and suffering without result. 



' In considering inanimate nature we have already 

 recognised as its inmost essence continuous, object- 

 less, reposeless effort; but in animals and man the 

 same truth is even more obvious. For every act 

 of willing starts from a need, from a lack, and there- 

 fore from a pain ; it is therefore a necessity of nature 

 that the creatures should be a prey to pain. But 

 when will comes to have no object, when prompt 

 satisfaction removes all motive for desire, they fall 

 into emptiness and weariness; their nature, their 

 mere existence weighs on them intolerably. Life 

 then, swings like a pendulum from right to left, 

 from suffering to weariness: and, in fine, these are 

 the two elements of which life is composed. Hence 

 comes a very significant fact, the more significant 

 by its strangeness man, having placed all pain 

 and misery in hell, has found nothing to put in 

 heaven but monotony! 



* Now this incessant effort, which is fundamental 

 to all forms which Will puts on, finds at last, at the 

 top of the scale of its objective manifestations, its 

 real general principle; there Will is revealed to 

 itself in a living body which imposes an iron law 

 to provide it with nourishment; and that which 

 enforces this law is just the will to live, incarnate. 

 . . . Add a second need, which the first brings in 

 its train, that of perpetuating the species. At the 



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