To have reached at thirty a life-view from which one never afterwards departs might be taken to argue either a certain shallowness of mind or an unusual depth of conviction. One recalls the sixty-year-old Kant, painfully struggling with a bare theory of method, and then for some twenty years more laboring to apply this method to the problems of life with results so vigorously reacting on the method itself as to have created a suspicion of change of view. It is certain that in contrast with Kant, Schopenhauer leaves an impression of facility in thought and style. This effect is no doubt partly to be accounted for by a difference in upbringing and in the circumstances surrounding production. Kant was the very complete university professor; Schopenhauer, a man of the world whose one early experiment in academic life was a most convincing failure. He alone of all the great names that recognize Kant as master--Fichte, Schelling, Hegel--had the assured position and material means to spare himself the laborious training of one who would enter the academic lists. Free then to live as he would, he develops the tastes and the methods of the private scholar of means, reflecting the experience of an easy bachelor existence of inns, and travel, and wide unsystematic reading. It is the early training doubtless of one intended for a higher social stratum, that imposes on Schopenhauer a sense of obligation to be lordly; a style that is free, rather grand, perhaps a bit overdressed; a certain insolence of tone from which even his friends suffer at times, and which when it is question of his enemies sinks to a level of abuse whose epithets must be shadowed forth with initial and dash. But apart from these external conditions, one recognizes in Schopenhauer the spirit of the fighter rather than that of the critic. He is a man of one idea, embraced as soon as encountered, then defended with boldness and eloquence and wit. Such a character hardly develops the great thinker; but it may well be possessed of a great thought. The thought of Schopenhauer is none the less great for being gloomy and repellant. * * * * * The double title, “The World as Will and Idea,” hints at a double aspect that experience presents, the one to the eye of the observer, the other to the mind of the thinker. To the observing eye, it is a spread of bodies in space and time, obeying the laws of mechanical necessity; just such a world as Kant has described in his “Kritik der reinen Vernunft.” Schopenhauer, following Kant, calls this the world of appearance, the phenomenal world.