to himself;
if he could assert his will against the power of circumstance; but
circumstance is too strong for him.]

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 consciousness which puts
the