SCHOPENHAUER.

ONE of the most vigorous and piquant writers, bold thinkers, snappish and gloomy spirits of our century was Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher, who died at Frankfort in 1860. Among the many strong and strange qualities of his character, loneliness was, perhaps, the most prominent, almost from the cradle to the grave. He was imaginatively suspicious and timid, proud and shy, with an astounding assurance of his own greatness and noble destiny, and at the same time with a furious moral irritability, and a morbid physical cowardice. He was a most singular being, interesting and odious, wise and absurd, endowed with a gigantic intellect which shrank from no problem or conclusion, and vehement affections discordant among themselves and awry towards the world. His tender need of sympathy and fierce craving for success baulked and thrust back, made him feel deserted, a sort of outcast; his subsequent curdling hate and scorn, and wilful hardening of his heart in haughty self-protection, made him feel doubly isolated. His biographer says: "Although remaining in the midst of society, never has a man felt more separated and alone than Schopenhauer. The Indian anchorite is a social being in comparison with him; for the solitude of the former is accidental, or rests on practical motives; with him it was essential and the result of knowledge. Therefore this feeling in his consciousness reached an intensive strength which admits of no comparison with mere retirement."

As soon as he began to think, he seems to have found an impassable chasm between himself and the world; astronomic distances divided him from those whom he should live with and love. At first he feared the difference and opposition were his fault, and this often filled him with sadness. But his native pride and complacency, strengthened by a constant feeding on the ideas of kindred spirits in literature,—such as Machiavelli, Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, caused the world to lose, his self-esteem

to gain, something with each conflict. Up to his fortieth year he had felt frightfully lonesome, and had continually sighed, "Give me a friend." In vain! He still remained solitary. But now, after such incessant disappointment, he concluded that humanity was infinitely more penurious than he had imagined, looked around on the earth as on a desert, made up his mind firmly that he was one of the intellectual rulers of the race, and that he must bear his royal solitude with dignity and patience. He said men shrunk from seclusion and sought association because they were so poor and empty. They and their society reminded him of Russian horn-music, wherein each horn can sound but one note, and a whole band is necessary to play a tune. The rich, many-toned wise man is a piano-forte, a little orchestra in himself. From this time he became systematically unsocial, and appeared deliberately to nourish by all means the worst possible views of life and men. Desiring fame with an eagerness proportioned to his estimate of his rank and of the value of his system of philosophy, he sought to cover and soothe his bitter chagrin at its long delay, by casting contempt on it, and expressing disgust at the mixed and unworthy throng who most easily gain it. "Fame is an existence in the heads of others, a wretched theatre; and its happiness is purely chimerical. What a rabble crowds into its temple, of soldiers, ministers, quacks, gymnasts, and millionnaires!"

It is a proof of his originally deep and high heart, that while the men around him were so empty and repulsive to him, he lived in delightful intimacy with the great minds of previous times. The thoughts left behind by those great men, who, like himself, were alone amidst their contemporaries, were his keenest enjoyment. Their writings came to him as letters from his home and kindred to one banished and wandering among islands destitute of men, but where all the trees are full of apes and parrots. That he should have used such an illustration as the foregoing, also proves how sorely wrenched and irritated his heart had become. In ethics a graduate and continuator of the school of Plato and Kant, he defined

the worst man as the one who makes the greatest distinction between himself and others; the best man as the one who makes the least distinction between himself and others. But his practice amazingly violated his insight. In all his habitual modes of personal thought and feeling, instead of minimizing he maximized the distinction of himself from other men.

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During the latter half of his life he considered every contact with men a contamination. He pretty faithfully practised his own precepts wherein he said, "The world is peopled with pitiful creatures, whom the wise man is born not to fellowship with, but to instruct. They are a foreign species, with whom the wisest has the least to do, regarding himself and deporting himself as a Brahmin among Sudras and Pariahs." He would not ordinarily call his fellow-beings men, but contemptuously, with a grim humor like that of Carlyle, whose Teufelsdröck describes the human creature as a "forked radish," characterizes them as "bipeds," the "two-footed." serted that he was not a man-hater, but a man-despiser. To despise the species as they deserve it was necessary not to hate them. Two classes of men, however, he did hate with especial relish and virus. First, the University professors of philosophy; ostensibly because they were charlatans, dishonest smatterers; really because they enjoyed the place and attention he coveted for himself, refused to give his works and genius the tribute he deemed his due, and formed a conspiracy, as he fancied, to prevent all public recognition of him. Second, the Opt mists; because their system seemed a biting irony in view of the facts of sin, sorrow, and death, - a shallow mockery of the inexpressible wretchedness and emptiness of existence as presented by his theory and emphasized by his experience. He was himself a Pessimist, one who reverses the proposition that this is the best of all possible worlds. The ingenious argument on which he based his reversal of the scheme of Leibnitz was this: Life is crowded with examples of discord, baseness, and misery; the whole system is so exactly interdependent, that if the least feature of it were altered, made worse, all would

go to destruction: therefore, this is the worst possible world!

He esteemed himself an imperial mind, his contribution one of the richest the world had ever received. At nineteen he said he would become the philosopher of the nineteenth century. Forty years had passed, and his books were lumber, his name unknown. He rebelled with injured and wrathful arrogance against the injustice. He imagined it was the result of a malignant coalition. 'This mischievous conceit worked like vitriol in his blood, poisoned all his peace, aggravated his worse traits, filled even his philosophic works with savage invectives, and made him chuckle with ignoble delight over the flattering notices his books at last began to win. He exclaims: "I have dismal news to communicate to the professors. Their Caspar Hauser, whom for forty years they had so closely immured that no sound could betray his existence to the world their Caspar Hauser is escaped. Some even think he is a prince. In plain prose, that which they feared above all things, and took every conceivable means to prevent, has befallen. Men begin to read me, and henceforth will not cease."

Ardently wishing the complacent sense of being admired and renowned, he turned angrily against those who withheld the boon. Cynically secluded in Frankfort, neglected, deprived of all the associations and sympathies he most desired, "a solitary thinker in a den of moneychangers, he mused, and plodded, and nourished the grudges which disappointment had engendered in a nature predisposed by some radical vice or defect to misanthropic gloom." He sought to support himself by two atifices. First, by aggrandizing his own sense of his own merit and of the sure reward yet awaiting it. "I have litted the veil of truth further than any mortal before me. But I should like to see the man who could ever boast of being begirt by worse contemporaries than I have had." "The world has learned many things from me which it will never forget." "Since the great soapbubble blowing of the Fichte-Schelling-Hegel philosophy is done, there is greater need than ever of philosophy.

Now people will look about for solider nourishment, and this is to be found alone with me; for I am the only one who has labored purely from an inner vocation." When asked where he would be buried, he proudly replied, "It matters not; they will find me out."

The second artifice to which he had recourse was the sour-grapes principle. The prize is contemptible. The love and praise of such unworthy creatures as men are hateful. The world is a hideous place, existence a cursed burden. Absolute detachment is the supreme good. In this way the misery of his own experience infects and discolors all. He pours over the whole scene of life an inexhaustible tempest of execrations, contempt, and gloom. His pictures of the "Nothingness and Sorrows of Life," his eulogies of death and annihilation, are not surpassed in their energetic blackness and perverse gusto by the most disgusting portrayals of Oriental pessimism, the Buddhist catalogues of the evils of existence.

"In this world," says Schopenhauer, "there is very much that is very bad, but the worst thing in it is society." "The more I go among men the less of a man I come away." "Conversation with others leaves an unpleasant tang; the employment of the soul in itself leaves an agreeable echo." "The jabber of companies of men is as profitless as the idle yelping of packs of hounds." Under the influence of such a doctrine of the penal character of life and the loathsomeness of man, society contracted to a unit, and solitude expanded to a boundless desolation. It could not otherwise than dilate and intensify the woe it was meant to antidote. Yet there is in the doctrine a weird horror that allures while it affrights. As Hedge says, "Nature shudders, but curiosity tempts. It is the fascination of the cavern and the catacomb. The world of this philosophy is a world of darkness which no sunshine or starshine irradiates, but whose only illumination is the phosphorescence of the animal matter contained in it."

The poor Titan took the wrong way. Instead of aggregating the topics and motives of unhappiness he should have aggregated the stimulants and materials of peace