"Happy are they who heard this last survivor of the conversationalists of the eighteenth century! He was a contemporary of Voltaire and of Diderot, of Helvetius and of Chamfort; his brilliant thoughts on women, on the part that mothers hold in the intellectual qualities of their children; his theories, profoundly original, on the connection between will and mind; his views on art and nature, on the life and death of the species; his remarks on the dull and wearisome style of those who write to say nothing, or who put on a mask and think with the thoughts of others; his pungent reflections on the subject of pseudonyms, and on the establishment of a literary censure for those journals which permitted neologisms, solecisms, and barbarisms; his ingenious hypotheses on magnetic phenomena, dreams, and somnambulism; his hatred of excess of every kind; his love of order; and his horror of obscurantism, 'qui, s'il n'est pas un péché contre le Saint Esprit en est un contre l'esprit humain,' make for him a physiognomy entirely different from any other of this century." A few tags and tatters of these conversations have been preserved by Dr. Frauenstadt,[7] and in them Schopenhauer is discovered sprawled at ease, and expressing himself on a variety of topics with a _disinvoltura_ and freedom of epithet which recalls the earlier essayists. With them, as with him, periphrasis was avoided. Spades were spades, not horticultural implements; and in one dialogue Frauenstadt compliments his master in having, in breadth and reach of his polemic, nothing in common with contemporary regard for ears polite. Citations of this class, however, may well be omitted. A thinker in slippers, and especially _in puris naturalibus_, is generally unattractive even to those the least given to prudishness. But beyond certain instances of this description, the scholar and man of the world is usually very discernible. At times he is profound, at others vivacious; for instance, he is asked what man would be if Nature, in making the last step which leads to him, had started from the dog or the elephant; to which he answers, in that case man would be an intelligent dog or an intelligent elephant, instead of being an intelligent monkey. As may be imagined, there was about Schopenhauer very little of the Sunday-school theologian, and religion was in consequence seldom viewed by him from an orthodox standpoint; when, therefore, Schleiermacher was quoted before him to the effect that no man can be a philosopher who is not religious, he observed very quietly, "No man who is religious can become a philosopher,--metaphysics are useless to him, and no true philosopher is religious; he is sometimes in danger, but he is not fettered, he is free." Elsewhere he said, "Religion and philosophy are like the two scales of a balance; the more one rises, the more does the other descend."