age, as a wandering hermit or straggler cut off from the main body. Think how utterly great Schopenhauer is, and what a small and absurd effect he has had! An honest man can feel no greater shame at the present time than at the thought of the casual treatment Schopenhauer has received and the evil powers that have up to now killed his effect among men. First there was the want of readers,--to the eternal shame of our cultivated age;--then the inadequacy of his first public adherents, as soon as he had any; further, I think, the crassness of the modern man towards books, which he will no longer take seriously. As an outcome of many attempts to adapt Schopenhauer to this enervated age, the new danger has gradually arisen of regarding him as an odd kind of pungent herb, of taking him in grains, as a sort of metaphysical pepper. In this way he has gradually become famous, and I should think more have heard his name than Hegel's; and, for all that, he is still a solitary being, who has failed of his effect.--Though the honour of causing the failure belongs least of all to the barking of his literary antagonists; first because there are few men with the patience to read them, and secondly, because any one who does, is sent immediately to Schopenhauer himself; for who will let a donkey-driver prevent him from mounting a fine horse, however much he praise his donkey? Whoever has recognised Nature's unreason in our time, will have to consider some means to help her; his task will be to bring the free spirits and the sufferers from this age to know Schopenhauer; and make them tributaries to the flood that is to overbear all the clumsy uses to which Nature even now is accustomed to put her philosophers. Such men will see that the identical obstacles hinder the effect of a great philosophy and the production of the great philosopher; and so will direct their aims to prepare the regeneration of Schopenhauer, which means that of the philosophical genius. The real opposition to the further spread of his doctrine in the past, and the regeneration of the philosopher in the future, is the perversity of human nature as it is; and all the great men that are to be must spend infinite pains in freeing themselves from it. The world they enter is plastered over with pretence,--including not merely religious dogmas, but such juggling conceptions as "progress," "universal education," "nationalism," "the modern state"; practically all our general terms have an artificial veneer over them that will bring a clearer-sighted posterity to reproach our age bitterly for its warped and stunted growth, however loudly we may boast of our "health." The beauty of the antique vases, says Schopenhauer, lies in the simplicity with which they express their meaning and object; it is so with all the ancient implements; if Nature produced amphoræ, lamps, tables, chairs, helmets, shields, breastplates and the like, they would resemble these. And, as a corollary, whoever considers how we all