world,” we are told, “in the balance with the weight and intensity of his natural gifts, and he came to the conclusion that a man gifted with genius, by merely being and working, sacrifices himself for all mankind: therefore, he is free from the obligation of sacrificing himself in particular individually. On this account, he may ignore claims which others are bound to fulfil.”[14] But the third “note” was, I venture to think, the true key of Schopenhauer’s character. It was ARROGANCE. The philosophers whom the world has hitherto honored have been generally noted for the opposite quality. As saints learn humility by gazing up at infinite holiness above them, so sages acquire modesty by looking out on the boundless ocean of truth, beside which their greatest discoveries appear but as the pebbles which the child gathers by the shore. But the philosophers who are so good as to enlighten us in these days scarcely belong to the antiquated type of either a Socrates or a Newton. The pride and conceit of Arthur Schopenhauer, at all events, commenced in boyhood, and seems to have grown like a snowball till he died of old age. His mother (described as a woman of “modest, pleasing manners” and amiable character, who received habitually in her house such men as Goethe, the Schlegels, Grimm, and Wieland) depicts him thus, when a lad yet engaged in collegiate studies: “Your ill-humor, your complaints of things inevitable, your sullen looks, the extraordinary opinions you utter _like oracles which none may presume to contradict_,--all this depresses me. Your eternal quibbles, your laments over the stupid world and human misery, give me bad nights and unpleasant dreams.”[15] This little preliminary glance at the youth of twenty enables us to judge what value should be attached to the plea urged on his behalf, that his arrogance and bitterness were but the natural results of the neglect with which his great book was received by an unappreciative public and a jealous coterie of offended philosophers, the “necessary armor of scorn and self-defence” which enabled him to hold his ground. The boy at college, it seems, long before he had written a work to instruct the world, or had experienced anything but kindness and prosperity, the healthy, rich, gifted, and independent young lad, was already habitually “lamenting over the stupid world and human misery,” and uttering, with “sullen looks,” “oracles which none may presume to contradict.”