cooperation with this evolution, because of their obscurity and inexactness cannot be regarded as answers.
The other side of knowledge, the speculative, so long as it sticks strictly to its fundamental principles in giving a direct answer to the question, everywhere and at all times has answered one and the same: “The world is something infinite and incomprehensible. Human life is an incomprehensible part of this incomprehensible all.” Again I exclude all those transactions between the speculative and the experimental sciences, which form the whole ballast of the half-sciences, the so-called science of jurisprudence and the political and historical sciences. Into these sciences are just as irregularly introduced the concepts of evolution and perfection, but with this difference, that there it is the evolution of everything, while here it is the evolution of the life of man. The irregularity is one and the same: evolution, perfection in the infinite, can have neither aim nor direction, and answers nothing in respect to my question.
Where speculative science is exact, namely, in real philosophy,—not in the one which Schopenhauer calls the professorial philosophy, which serves only for distributing all existing phenomena according to new philosophical rubrics and calling them by new names,—where the philosopher does not let out of sight the essential question, the answer is always one and the same,—the answer given by Socrates, Schopenhauer, Solomon, Buddha.
“We shall approach truth in proportion as we remove ourselves from life,” says Socrates, preparing himself for death. “What are we, who love truth, striving after in life? To free ourselves from the body and from all evil which results from the life of the body. If that is so, why should we not rejoice when death comes to us? The wise man is seeking his death all the time, and therefore death is not terrible to him.”
And this is what Schopenhauer says:
