VIII.
All these doubts, which now I am able to express more or less coherently, I could not express then. Then I only felt that, no matter how logically inevitable and how confirmed by the greatest thinkers were my deductions about the vanity of hfe, there was something wrong in them. Whether it was in the reflection itself, in the way the question was put, I did not know,—I felt that the mental proof was complete, but that that was not enough. All these deductions did not convince me sufficiently to make me do that which resulted from my reflections, which was, that I should commit suicide. I should be telling an untruth if I said that I arrived through reason at what I did arrive at, and did not kill myself. Reason was at work, but there was also something else at work, which I cannot call otherwise than the consciousness of life. There was also at work that force which compelled me to direct my attention to this rather than to that, and this force brought me out of my desperate situation and directed my reason to something entirely different. This force made me observe that I, with a hundred people like me, did not constitute all humanity and that I did not yet know the life of humanity.
Surveying the narrow circle of my equals, I saw only people who did not understand the question, those who understood the question but stifled it in the intoxication of life, those who had understood life and had made an end of it, and those who understood, but in their weakness waited for the end of their desperate life. I saw no
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