This vanity finds expression in the whole way in which things exist;
in the infinite nature of Time and Space, as opposed to the finite
nature of the individual in both; in the ever-passing present moment
as the only mode of actual existence; in the interdependence and
relativity of all things; in continual Becoming without ever Being; in
constant wishing and never being satisfied; in the long battle
which forms the history of life, where every effort is checked by
difficulties, and stopped until they are overcome. Time is that in
which all things pass away; it is merely the form under which the will
to live--the thing-in-itself and therefore imperishable--has revealed
to it that its efforts are in vain; it is that agent by which at every
moment all things in our hands become as nothing, and lose any real
value they possess.
That which _has been_ exists no more; it exists as little as that
which has _never_ been. But of everything that exists you must say, in
the next moment, that it has been. Hence something of great importance
now past is inferior to something of little importance now present, in
that the latter is a _reality_, and related to the former as something
to nothing.
A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing,
after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for
a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he
must exist no more. The heart rebels against this, and feels that
it cannot be true. The crudest intellect cannot speculate on such a
subject without having a presentiment that Time is something ideal in
its nature. This ideality of Time and Space is the key to every true
system of metaphysics; because it provides for quite another order of
things than is to be met with in the domain of nature. This is why
Kant is so great.
Of every event in our life we can say only for one moment that it
_is_; for ever after, that it _was_. Every evening we are poorer by a
day. It might, perhaps, make us mad to see how rapidly our short span
of time ebbs away; if it were not that in the furthest depths of our
being we are secretly conscious of our share in the exhaustible spring
of eternity, so that we can always hope to find life in it again.
Consideration of the kind, touched on above, might, indeed, lead us to
embrace the belief that the greatest _wisdom_ is to make the enjoyment
of the present the supreme object of life; because that is the only
reality, all else being merely the play of thought. On the other hand,
such a course might just as well be called the greatest _folly_: for
that which in the next moment exists no more, and vanishes utterly,
like a dream, can never be worth a serious effort.
The whole foundation on which our existence rests is the present--the
ever-fleeting present. It lies, then, in the very nature of our
existence to take the form of constant motion, and to offer no
possibility of our ever attaining the rest for which we are always
striving. We are like a man running downhill, who cannot keep on his
legs unless he runs on, and will inevitably fall if he stops; or,
again, like a pole balanced on the tip of one's finger; or like a
planet, which would fall into its sun the moment it ceased to hurry
forward on its way. Unrest is the mark of existence.
In a world where all is unstable, and nought can endure, but is swept
onwards at once in the hurrying whirlpool of change; where a man, if
he is to keep erect at all, must always be advancing and moving, like
an acrobat on a rope--in such a world, happiness in inconceivable.
How can it dwell where, as Plato says, _continual Becoming and never
Being_ is the sole form of existence? In the first place, a man never
is happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which
he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he
does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the
end, and comes into harbor with masts and rigging gone. And then, it
is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was
never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it
is over.
At the same time it is a wonderful thing that, in the world of human
beings as in that of animals in general, this manifold restless motion
is produced and kept up by the agency of two simple impulses--hunger
and the sexual instinct; aided a little, perhaps, by the influence of
boredom, but by nothing else; and that, in the theatre of life, these
suffice to form the _primum mobile_ of how complicated a machinery,
setting in motion how strange and varied a scene!
On looking a little closer, we find that inorganic matter presents
a constant conflict between chemical forces, which eventually works
dissolution; and on the other hand, that organic life is impossible
without continual change of matter, and cannot exist if it does not
receive perpetual help from without. This is the realm of _finality_;
and its opposite would be _an infinite existence_, exposed to no
attack from without, and needing nothing to support it; [Greek: haei
hosautos dn], the realm of eternal peace; [Greek: oute giguomenon oute
apollumenon], some timeless, changeless state, one and undiversified;
the negative knowledge of which forms the dominant note of the
Platonic philosophy. It is to some such state as this that the denial
of the will to live opens up the way.
The scenes of our life are like pictures done in rough mosaic. Looked
at close, they produce no effect. There is nothing beautiful to
be found in them, unless you stand some distance off. So, to gain
anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty
it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better
things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past
back again. We look upon the present as something to be put up with
while it lasts, and serving only as the way towards our goal. Hence
most people, if they glance back when they come to the end of life,
will find that all along they have been living _ad interim_: they will
be surprised to find that the very thing they disregarded and let
slip by unenjoyed, was just the life in the expectation of which they
passed all their time. Of how many a man may it not be said that hope
made a fool of him until he danced into the arms of death!
Then again, how insatiable a creature is man! Every satisfaction he
attains lays the seeds of some new desire, so that there is no end to
the wishes of each individual will. And why is this? The real reason
is simply that, taken in itself, Will is the lord of all worlds:
everything belongs to it, and therefore no one single thing can ever
give it satisfaction, but only the whole, which is endless. For all
that, it must rouse our sympathy to think how very little the Will,
this lord of the world, really gets when it takes the form of an
individual; usually only just enough to keep the body together. This
is why man is so very miserable.
Life presents itself chiefly as a task--the task, I mean, of
subsisting at all, _gagner sa vie_. If this is accomplished, life is a
burden, and then there comes the second task of doing something with
that which has been won--of warding off boredom, which, like a bird
of prey, hovers over us, ready to fall wherever it sees a life secure
from need. The first task is to win something; the second, to banish
the feeling that it has been won; otherwise it is a burden.
Human life must be some kind of mistake. The truth of this will be
sufficiently obvious if we only remember that man is a compound of
needs and necessities hard to satisfy; and that even when they are
satisfied, all he obtains is a state of painlessness, where nothing
remains to him but abandonment to boredom. This is direct proof that
existence has no real value in itself; for what is boredom but the
feeling of the emptiness of life? If life--the craving for which
is the very essence of our being--were possessed of any positive
intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere
existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.
But as it is, we take no delight in existence except when we are
struggling for something; and then distance and difficulties to be
overcome make our goal look as though it would satisfy us--an illusion
which vanishes when we reach it; or else when we are occupied with
some purely intellectual interest--when in reality we have stepped
forth from life to look upon it from the outside, much after the
manner of spectators at a play. And even sensual pleasure itself means
nothing but a struggle and aspiration, ceasing the moment its aim is
attained. Whenever we are not occupied in one of these ways, but cast
upon existence itself, its vain and worthless nature is brought home
to us; and this is what we mean by boredom. The hankering after what
is strange and uncommon--an innate and ineradicable tendency of human
nature--shows how glad we are at any interruption of that natural
course of affairs which is so very tedious.
That this most perfect manifestation of the will to live, the human
organism, with the cunning and complex working of its machinery,
must fall to dust and yield up itself and all its strivings to
extinction--this is the naïve way in which Nature, who is always so
true and sincere in what she says, proclaims the whole struggle of
this will as in its very essence barren and unprofitable. Were it of
any value in itself, anything unconditioned and absolute, it could not
thus end in mere nothing.
If we turn from contemplating the world as a whole, and, in
particular, the generations of men as they live their little hour of
mock-existence and then are swept away in rapid succession; if we turn
from this, and look at life in its small details, as presented, say,
in a comedy, how ridiculous it all seems! It is like a drop of water
seen through a microscope, a single drop teeming with _infusoria_; or
a speck of cheese full of mites invisible to the naked eye. How we
laugh as they bustle about so eagerly, and struggle with one another
in so tiny a space! And whether here, or in the little span of human
life, this terrible activity produces a comic effect.
It is only in the microscope that our life looks so big. It is an
indivisible point, drawn out and magnified by the powerful lenses of
Time and Space.