At the age of eighteen Vaihinger proceeded to the Swabian University of Tübingen and here was free to let his wide-ranging, eager mind follow its own impulses. He revealed a taste for the natural sciences and with this the old Greek nature philosophers, especially Anaximander, for the sake of their anticipations of modern evolutionary doctrines. Aristotle also occupied him, later Spinoza, and, above all, Kant, though it was chiefly the metaphysical antinomies and the practical reason which fascinated him. As ever, it was what made for practice that seemed mostly to concern him. Schelling, Hegel, and Schleiermacher, the official German idealists, said nothing to him. He turned from them to Schopenhauer, and thence he drew the pessimisms, the irrationalism, and the voluntarism which became permanent features of his system of thought. The irrationalism, as he himself points out, was completely opposed to all early influences on him, but it lay in his own personal circumstances. The contrast between his temperamental impulse to energetic practical action in every direction, and the reserve, passivity, and isolation which myopia enforced, seemed to him absolutely irrational and sharpened his vision for all the irrationality of existence. So that a philosophy which, like Schopenhauer’s, truthfully recognised and allowed for the irrational element in existence came like a revelation. As to Vaihinger’s pessimism, that, as we might expect, is hardly of what would be generally considered a pessimistic character. It is merely a recognition of the fact that most people are over-sanguine and thereby come to grief, whereas a little touch of pessimism would have preserved them from much misery. Long before the Great War, Vaihinger felt that many Germans were over-sanguine regarding the military power of their Empire, and of Germany’s place in the world, and that such optimism might easily conduce to war and disaster. In 1911 he even planned to publish anonymously in Switzerland a pamphlet entitled “Finis Germaniæ,” with the motto “Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat,” and was only prevented by a sudden development of the eye-trouble. Vaihinger points out that an unjustified optimism had for a long time past led in the politics of Germany—and also, he might have said, of the countries later opposed to her—to lack of foresight, over-haste, and arrogance; he might have added that a very slight touch of pessimism would also have enabled these countries, on both sides, to discover the not very remote truth that even the victors in such a contest would suffer scarcely less than the conquered. In early life Vaihinger had playfully defined Man as a “species of ape afflicted by megalomania”; he admits that, whatever truth lies behind the definition, the statement is somewhat exaggerated. Yet it is certainly strange to observe, one may comment, how many people seem to feel vain of their own ungratified optimism when the place where optimism most flourishes is