"If this result appears to the reader who has had the patience to accompany me so far a cheerless one, I must assure him that he was in error if he sought to find consolation and hope in philosophy. For such ends there are books of religion and edification. Philosophy, however, has but a single eye for truth, unconcerned whether what it finds suits the emotional judgment entangled in the illusion of instinct or not. Philosophy is hard, cold, and insensitive as a stone; floating in the ether of pure thought, it endeavours after the icy cognition of what is, its causes, and its essences. If the strength of man is unequal to the task of enduring the results of thought, and the heart, convulsed with woe, stiffens with horror, breaks into despair, or softly dissolves into world-pain, and for any of these reasons the practical pyschological machinery gets out of gear through such knowledge,—then philosophy registers these facts as valuable pyschological material for its investigations. It likewise registers it when the result of these considerations in the sympathising soul of the more strongly built natures is a righteous indignation, a manly wrath clenching the teeth, a fervid fury at the frenzied carnival of existence, or when this rage turns into a Mephistophelean gallows-humour, that with half-suppressed pity and half-unrestrained mockery looks down with a like sovereign irony both on those caught in the illusion of happiness and on those dissolved in tearful woe,—or when the heart wrestling with fate spies after a last way of deliverance from this hell. To philosophy itself, however, the unspeakable wretchedness of existence— as manifestation of the folly of volition—is only a TRANSITION-MOMENT of the theoretical development of its system."