{118} At this crisis attention was drawn to the long-neglected writings of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), which then attained a vogue that they never since have lost. The son of a Hamburg banker and of a literary lady whose novels enjoyed some reputation in their day, he was placed from the beginning in a position of greater material and social independence than usually falls to the lot of German thinkers; and to this, combined with the fact that he failed entirely as a university teacher, it is partly due that he wrote about philosophy not like a pedant, but like a man of the world. At the same time the German professors, resenting the intrusion of an outsider on their privileged domain, were strong enough to prevent the reading public from ever hearing of Schopenhauer's existence until an article in the _Westminster Review_ (April, 1853) astonished Germany by the revelation that she possessed a thinker whom the man in the street could understand. Schopenhauer found his earliest teachers of philosophy in Plato and Kant. He then attended Fichte's lectures at Berlin. At some uncertain date--probably soon after taking his doctor's degree in 1813--at the suggestion of an Orientalist he took up the study of the Vedanta system. All these various influences converged to impress him with the belief that the things of sense are a delusive appearance under which a fundamental reality lies concealed. According to Hegel, the reality is reason; but the Romanticists, with Schelling at their head, never accepted his conclusion, thinking of the absolute rather as a blind, unconscious substance; still less could it please {119} Schopenhauer, who sought for the supreme good under the form of happiness conceived as pleasure unalloyed by pain. A gloomy and desponding temperament combined, as in the case of Byron and Rousseau, with passionately sensuous instincts and anti-social habits, debarred him from attaining it. The loss of a large part of his private fortune, and the world's refusal to recognise his genius, completed what natural temperament had begun; and it only remained for the philosophy of the Upanishads to give a theoretic sanction to the resulting state of mind by teaching that all existence is in itself an evil--a position which placed him in still more thoroughgoing antagonism to Hegel.