Differently expressed, the question is: Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything? It can also be expressed thus: Is there any meaning in life, that the inevitable death awaiting one, does not destroy? All human knowledge I found divided into two kinds. One kind, such as chemistry and mathematics and the exact sciences, did not deal with my question. They were interesting, attractive, and wonderfully definite, but made no attempt to solve the question; while on the other hand the speculative sciences, culminating in metaphysics, dealt with the question, but supplied no satisfactory answer.
Where philosophy does not lose sight of the essential question, its answer is always one and the same: an answer given by Socrates, Schopenhauer, Solomon and Buddha.
'We approach truth only inasmuch as we depart from life,' said Socrates when preparing for death. 'For what do we who love truth, strive after in life? To free ourselves from the body, and from all the evil that is caused by the body! If so, then how can we fail to be glad when death comes to us?'
'The wise man seeks death all his life, and therefore does not fear death.'
And Schopenhauer also says that life is an evil; and Solomon (or whoever wrote the works attributed to him) says:
'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What profit hath man of all his labour under the sun?... There is no remembrance of former things, neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come, with those that shall come after....
'Therefore I hated life, because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous to me; for all is vanity and vexation of spirit.'
And Sakya Muni when he learnt what age and sickness and death are, could find no consolation in life, and decided that life is the greatest of evils; and he devoted all the strength of his soul to free himself from it, and to free others; and to do this so that even after death life shall not be renewed any more, but be completely destroyed at its very roots. So speaks all the wisdom of India.
These then are the direct replies that human wisdom gives, when it replies to the question of life: