Schopenhauer does not think out the pessimistic world-view in the great and calm manner of the wise men of India. He behaves under its influence like a nervous and ailing European. While they, on the ground of the liberating knowledge they have reached, advance with majestic gait from the ethical to the supra-ethical, and leave behind them good and evil as two things, over both of which they have equally triumphed, he reveals himself as a miserable Western sceptic._(_72_)_ Incapable of living out the world-view which he preaches, he clings to life as to money, appreciates the pleasures of the table as well as those of love, and has more contempt than pity for mankind. As though to justify himself in this, he in _The World as Will and Idea_, where he has just been speaking about the deadening of the will-to-live, rebels against the notion that anyone who teaches a saintly course of life must also live like a saint. “It is indeed,” so runs the famous passage, “a strange demand to make of a moralist that he shall recommend no other virtue than those which he himself possesses. To sum up in a series of conceptions the whole essence of the world, in abstract terms, in general terms, and with clearness, and to offer it thus as a reflected copy in permanent rational conceptions which are always ready to hand; that and nothing else is philosophy.”_(_73_)_ With these sentences Schopenhauer’s philosophy commits suicide. Hegel has a right to say that philosophy is not imperative but only reflective thinking, for his own philosophy does not claim to be anything more. But _The World as Will and Idea_ protests with illuminating language and in a tone of urgent entreaty against the will-to-live. It ought therefore to be the life-creed of the man whose voice it is. [pg 174] The fact that Schopenhauer can for a moment so far forget himself as to express himself sceptically about ethics has its own deep-reaching explanation. It belongs to the essence of world- and life-denial, which he wishes to proclaim as ethics, that it cannot be thought out consistently to a conclusion, and that it cannot be put consistently into practice. Even with the Brahmans and the Buddha it keeps itself alive by inadmissible concessions to world- and life-affirmation. But with Schopenhauer it goes so far in that direction that he can no longer make any attempt to bring theory and practice into harmony, but must move about resolutely in an atmosphere of unveracity. Schopenhauer does succeed in letting the ethical appearance which world- and life-denial can assume, shine out in brilliant colours. But of really producing an ethic out of world- and life-denial he is as little capable as the Indians. Nietzsche’s criticism of current ethics