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THE STRUGGLE FOR HAPPINESS: If one didn't have to fight for one's happiness on a daily basis, if, by some remote chance, happiness was 'handed to one on a plate', there would be little or no free choice left in the world, little or no incentive for innately happy people to do anything, so greatly would the intrinsic happiness of human existence content and preoccupy them. It is only, however, because our natural condition is one of sadness that we are regularly goaded out of it by the desire to acquire happiness, since no man can struggle from the positive to the negative because the positive would be all-sufficing and thus unable or unwilling to instigate any such procedure.

Hence it is ever man's fate to struggle from the negative to the positive, from sadness to happiness, in accordance with his thoroughly admirable desire to escape from what is disagreeable. And yet the positive can only be sustained for a limited period of time, after which it must again make way for the negative, in order that the phoenix of happiness may subsequently rise from the ashes of sadness and thereby permit man his individual freedom. But man, as already remarked, never struggles from the positive to the negative. On the contrary, he merely subsides or relapses into it.