It is one thing to write a witty essay against women, just to annoy the feminists, who, poor ladies, have such quaint ideas about men and are, in physiological language so excessively ready to react to stimuli. But Schopenhauer’s case was far otherwise; with him it was a matter of coarseness in his mind and sheer lust in his body. No wonder he despised the animal in man. In hating woman he was really hating himself because he could not resist them. And it was probably well for him that he had to complain of his gigantic doses of mercury, for, with his family history of a father who committed suicide and his own worrying and neurotic mind, he was just the sort of man to get cerebral syphilis or general paralysis. I have read many attempts to explain Schopenhauer’s misogyny, but I rather fancy we can detect the real reason for it in his own syphilophobia. Some critics have tried to explain it by slandering his mother and sister, on the assumption that every man can only judge woman by the women he knows; and that Joanna Schopenhauer and Adele Schopenhauer must therefore have been of bad character. Possibly! But he was full of phobias and obsessions. And the best thing we read about him was his genuine love for Beethoven. Often he would sit and listen to a symphony, dreaming with his eyes shut; and, the last divine chords sounded, he would leave his seat rudely, lest some lesser music should blur the impression. I have often thought of writing a history of the effect of syphilis upon the history of the world; but the difficulties appal me. We now know that syphilis is less a disease of skin and bone, than a very grim disease of the nervous system; and so secretive is it, so it loves to conceal itself under other names, that even to-day, though every doctor is acutely on the lookout for it, it would be impossible from the mortality returns to pick out which man or woman died of syphilis and which of some apparently quite distinct affection. All that is safe to say is that the very flower of the human race, the greatest artists, poets, musicians and philosophers, have all rested under a strong suspicion of having fought against the spirochæte before it killed them. Too likely such a history as passes through my mind would degenerate into a mere _chronique scandaleuse_, and nobody would believe it. So long as there is this horrible and disgusting prudery about syphilis, so long will it continue to lay waste the fairest part of the human race; and few doctors will disagree with Schopenhauer, the poor hopeless syphilophobe, when he said that war and syphilis are the two greatest foes to humanity.