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.
In Massilia and on the isle of Ceos, the man who could give valid reasons for relinquishing his life, was handed the cup of hemlock by the magistrate; and that, too, in public. And in ancient times, how many heroes and wise men died a voluntary death. Aristotle, it is true, declared suicide to be an offence against the State, although not against the person;
It will generally be found that, as soon as the terrors of life reach the point at which they outweigh the terrors of death, a man will put an end to his life. But the terrors of death offer considerable resistance; they stand like a sentinel at the gate leading out of this world. Perhaps there is no man alive who would not have already put an end to his life, if this end had been of a purely negative character, a sudden stoppage of existence. There is something positive about it; it is the destruction of the body; and a man shrinks from that, because his body is the manifestation of the will to live.
However, the struggle with that sentinel is, as a rule, not so hard as it may seem from a long way off, mainly in consequence of the antagonism between the ills of the body and the ills of the mind. If we are in great bodily pain, or the pain lasts a long time, we become indifferent to other troubles; all we think about is to get well. In the same way great mental suffering makes us insensible to bodily pain; we despise it; nay, if it should outweigh the other, it distracts our thoughts, and we welcome it as a pause in mental suffering. It is this feeling that makes suicide easy; for the bodily pain that accompanies it loses all significance in the eyes of one who is tortured by an excess of mental suffering. This is especially evident in the case of those who are driven to suicide by some purely morbid and exaggerated ill-humor. No special effort to overcome their feelings is necessary, nor do such people require to be worked up in order to take the step; but as soon as the keeper into whose charge they are given leaves them for a couple of minutes, they quickly bring their life to an end.
When, in some dreadful and ghastly dream, we reach the moment of greatest horror, it awakes us; thereby banishing all the hideous shapes that were born of the night. And life is a dream: when the moment of greatest horror compels us to break it off, the same thing happens.
Suicide may also be regarded as an experiment—a question which man puts to Nature, trying to force her to an answer. The question is this: What change will death produce in a man’s existence and in his insight into the nature of things? It is a clumsy experiment to make; for it involves the destruction of the very vessel which puts the question and awaits the answer.