It was a Schopenhauerian doctrine that all men had suicidal tendencies in them, in the sense that every man wished at times for the cessation of the purposeless energy called life, and it was only the violence of the actual act which prevented its more frequent commission.
But Barrant reflected that in his experience suicides were generally people who had been broken by life or were bored with it.

Men of action or intellect rarely committed suicide, not because they valued life highly, but because they had so much to do in their brief span that they hadn't time to think about putting an end to it.

Death usually overtook them in the midst of their schemes.
Robert Turold was not a man of intellect or action, but he belonged to a type which, as a rule, cling to life: the type from which zealots and bigots spring--men with a single idea.

Such men shrink from the idea of destroying the vital engine by which their idea is driven forward.

Their ego is too pronounced for that.
It was true that Robert Turold believed he had realized the aim for which he had lived, and therefore, in a sense, had nothing more to live for.