INSATIABILITY A CAUSE OF PESSIMISM 241 



Every desire once attained is the starting-point of a new desire, 

 as Schopenhauer has long since pointed out.^ Only the indi- 

 vidual who knows how to limit his desires, and how to regulate 

 his activity, can hope to realise that enjoyment of life which 

 alone renders the latter worth living. Otherwise he will be in 

 a state of perpetual insatiabihty — that is to say, of perpetual 

 sufEering. Under the influence of this feeling of insatiability, 

 the individual will incline to pessimism as regards the value of 

 life. He wiU come to look upon the life of inaction, of minimum 

 vitality, as the ideal hfe, in contrast to the life of desires and 

 passions which are never satisfied. We have said that the only 

 power capable of regulating the psychosocial life of the individual 

 is society in one or other of its forms. But a society of individuals 

 in which the Nirvana is held to be the goal of all life, in which 

 pessimism and distrust of hfe prevail, is a society deprived of its 

 regulating power. There where the philosophy of inaction and 

 pessimism prevails, there are also the germs of social disintegra- 

 tion. A society in process of disintegration cannot exercise suffi- 

 cient control over the individual ; so that social disintegration 

 leads to individual nihilism, and the prevalence of nihiUstic doc- 

 trines within a society is a symptom of decay and disruption. 



Concurrently with the progress of economic development, with 

 the Hasten, Drdngen und Jagen of modern life, we find the pro- 



^ " Let us suppose a man whose will is fired by an unusually strong 

 passion ; in vain, in the fury of his passion, he wiU seize hold of everything 

 he can in order to appease his desire and to cahn it ; he will inevitably dis- 

 cover that every satisfaction is but pure illusion, that the object which he 

 possesses invariably falls short of the object which he desired, for it does not 

 afford us any lasting satisfaction, any permanent appeasement of our 

 desires ; he will find out that every desire which he imagines to be satisfied 

 does in reality but change its aspect, and that it continually assumes new 

 shapes in order to torture us the more ; and at last he wiU become conscious 

 of the fact that, even if aU tangible forms of desire were exhausted, the 

 VMvt to wish for something wiU still remain, devoid of aU motives, and wiU 

 reveal itself as a feeling of dreadful weariness, of absolute helplessness : 

 atrocious torture !" (Schopenhauer, Le Monde comme VolorUe et corrnne 

 Bepresentation, vol. i., p. 381 ; French translation by Burdeau, Paris, 1903). 



16 



