s of experienced events which the great civil war in
Europe is just now giving such an airing, hardly deserve, as natural
data, the high metaphysical status that Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and
company have given them. They follow in fact upon a more primary type of
living, acting form, a type to which the "pathetic fallacy" or any other
manner of psychologizing may not apply. The most that can be said about
this type is that its earlier stages are related to its later ones as
potential is to kinetic energy. If, since we are discussing a
metaphysical issue, we must mythologize, we might call it the "will to
self-expression." Had this "will" chanced to happen in a world which was
made for it, or had it itself been the substance of the world, "struggle
for existence," "will to live," and "will to power," never could have
supervened. All three of these expressions designate data which require
an opposite, a counter-will, to give them meaning. There can be a
struggle for existence only when there are obstacles thereto, a will to
live only when there are obstructions to life, a will to power only when
there is a resistance against which power may be exercised. Expression
alone is self-implying and self-sufficient, and in an altogether
favorable environment we might have realized our instincts, impulses,
interests, appetites and desires, expressed and actualized our
potentialities, and when our day is done, have ceased, as unconcerned
about going on as about starting.

Metchnikoff speaks somewhere of an instinct toward death and the
euphoria which accompanies its realization. He cites, I think, no more
than two or three cases. To most of us the mere notion of the existence
and operation of such an instinct seems fanciful and uncanny. Yet from
the standpoint of biology nothing should be more natural. Each living
thing has its span, which consists of a cycle from birth through
maturation and senescence to dissolution, and the latter half of the
process is as "fateful" and "inevitable" as the former! Dying is itself
the inexpugnable conclusion of that setting free of organic
potentialities which we call life, and if dying seems horrid and
unnatural, it seems so because for most of us death is violent, because
its occasion is a shock from without, not the realization of a tendency
from within. In a completely favorable environment we should not
struggle to exist, we should simply exist; we should not will to live,
we should simply l