_The Followers of Schopenhauer.--_What one sees at the contact of civilized peoples with barbarians,--namely, that the lower civilization regularly accepts in the first place the vices, weaknesses and excesses of the higher; then, from that point onward, feels the influence of a charm; and finally, by means of the appropriated vices and weaknesses also allows something of the valuable influence of the higher culture to leaven it:-one can also see this close at hand and without journeys to barbarian peoples, to be sure, somewhat refined and spiritualised, and not so readily palpable. What are the German followers of _Schopenhauer_ still accustomed to receive first of all from their master?--those who, when placed beside his superior culture, must deem themselves sufficiently barbarous to be first of all barbarously fascinated and seduced by him. Is it his hard matter-of-fact sense, his inclination to clearness and rationality, which often makes him appear so English, and so unlike Germans? Or the strength of his intellectual conscience, which _endured_ a life-long contradiction of "being" and "willing," and compelled him to contradict himself constantly even in his writings on almost every point? Or his purity in matters relating to the Church and the Christian God?--for here he was pure as no German philosopher had been hitherto, so that he lived and died "as a Voltairian." Or his immortal doctrines of the intellectuality of intuition, the apriority of the law of causality, the instrumental nature of the intellect, and the non-freedom of the will? No, nothing of this enchants, nor is felt as enchanting; but Schopenhauer's mystical embarrassments and shufflings in those passages where the matter-of-fact thinker allowed himself to be seduced and corrupted by the vain impulse to be the unraveller of the world's riddle: his undemonstrable doctrine of _one will_ ("all causes are merely occasional causes of the phenomenon of the will at such a time and at such a place," "the will to live, whole and undivided, is present in every being, even in the smallest, as perfectly as in the sum of all that was, is, and will be"); his _denial of the individual_ ("all lions are really only one lion," "plurality of individuals is an appearance," as also _development_ is only an appearance: he calls the opinion of Lamarck "an ingenious, absurd error"); his fantasy about _genius_ ("in æsthetic contemplation the individual is no longer an individual, but a pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge," "the subject, in that it entirely merges in the contemplated object, has become this object itself"); his nonsense about _sympathy,_ and about the outburst of the _principium individuationis_ thus rendered possible, as the source of all morality; including also such assertions as, "dying is really the design of existence," "the possibility should not be absolutely denied that a magical effect could proceed from a person