"There is only one difference between it and the individual. Hoary humanity will have no heir to whom it may bequeath its heaped-up wealth, no children and grandchildren, the love of whom might disturb the clearness of its thought. Then will it, imbued with that sublime melancholy which one usually finds in men of genius, or even in highly intellectual old men, hover like a glorified spirit over its own body, as it were, and as (Edipus at Colonos, feel in the anticipated peace of non-existence the sorrows of existence as if they were alien to it, no longer passion, but only a self-compassion. That is the heavenly serenity, the divine repose, that breathes in Spinoza’s Ethics, when the passions are swallowed up in the abyss of reason because they are clearly and distinctly grasped as ideas. But even if we assume that pure passionless state attained, if even the sorrow in self-compassion is glorified, it yet does not cease to be grief, i.e., pain. The illusions are dead, hope is extinct; for what is there still to hope? The dead-tired humanity drags along its frail earthly body wearily from day to day. The highest attainable were indeed painlessness, for where is positive happiness still to be sought? In the vain self-sufficiency of the knowledge that all is vanity, or that in the contest with those vain impulses reason now usually remains victor? Oh, no; such vainest of all vanities, such arrogance of the intellect has long been surmounted! But even painlessness is not attained by hoary humanity, for it is still not pure spirit; it is feeble and frail, and must nevertheless work in order to live, and yet does not know for what it lives; for it has indeed the illusions of life behind it, and hopes and expects nothing more from life. It has, as every very aged and self-knowing man, only one wish more: repose, peace, eternal dreamless sleep that may soothe its weariness. After the three stages of illusion of the hope of a positive happiness it has finally seen the folly of its endeavour: it finally foregoes all positive happiness, and longs only for absolute painlessness, for nothingness, Nirvana. But not, as before, this or that man, but mankind longs for nothingness, for annihilation. This is the only conceivable end of the third and last stage of the illusion."