Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/177

116 of consciousness, there is no indestructible self, death is simply subsidence into the absolute vague, and immortality is therefore a delusion; or, finally, surrendering both of these dreams, they resort to the future, and indulge in the illusion of hope, — this world can yet be made the abode of happiness, and let us make it so. But, admonishes Hartmann, all these fancies ignore the contradiction that lies in the very heart of existence; there is but one plain moral in the drama of experience, and that is the utter hopelessness of life. The world may not, indeed, be the worst world possible, but its being is certainly worse than its not being. It were better if the world had never come to be. Ethics consequently is summed up in the single precept, Make an end of it!

For the Will being in its essence but wild unrest, both metaphysics and experience teach that the only way of escape from the misery inherent in life is to bring the Will to quiescence; or rather, speaking plainly, to blot it out. And in consciousness, seat though this is of sorrow while it lasts, we have the light to the one sure way of deliverance; as consciousness is the preparation for the rescue of the Idea from the clutch of the Will. The way of salvation is the way of annihilation. Our sole intelligent desire, won in the bitter school of experience, is the longing for release from struggle, the wish to be delivered from this delusive Maya of consciousness