Let it be remembered, too, that this was in Schopenhauer’s old age. For a _young_ author to be nervously excited about the reception of his works is nothing blameworthy or ridiculous. He is looking for the confirmation of the yet uncertain whispers of his own consciousness of ability, or to the extinction of his hopes. But this exculpation cannot apply to a man advanced in life and of established literary reputation, whose opinion of his own exalted gifts had been fully expanded while he was yet a lad at college. Is it too much to say that in this inordinate opinion of his own powers and merits lies the secret of this man’s Pessimism, of his contempt of other men, of his discontent with life, of his revolt against Providence? It is not wonderful that a man who looks on his fellows like Apollo Belvidere, slaying them with the arrows of his scorn, should find them wretched and unlovable; for no man, however humble, is ever truly seen by him who looks _down_ on him, and thus lacks all the insight of love and sympathy, and all the charity of one who forgives as he hopes to be forgiven. It is not wonderful that a man who estimates himself as supremely wise, and condones his own faults on the score of the unalterableness of natural character, should survey the world and find it a godless desert. Probably no human heart ever yet bloomed out into gratitude even under the brightest sunshine of prosperity, which had not once been ploughed up by self-reproach and softened by tears of repentance. In truth, any kind of religious sense is well-nigh incompatible with such pride as we are discussing. The doors whereby other men enter the Temple,--the tender guidance of human affection, the awful strife of the higher self against passion and sin, the sacred moral ambition after yet unattained purity and goodness,--all these are closed to him. Schopenhauer’s religious history is a confirmation of the truth that it is not the marble-palace mind of the philosopher which God will visit so often as the humble heart which lies sheltered from the storms of passion, and all trailed over by the sweet blossoms of human affections.