He praises Schopenhauer's lofty honesty, beside which he can only place Montaigne's, his lucidity, his constancy, and the purity of his relations with society, State and State-religion, which are in such sharp contrast with those of Kant. With Schopenhauer there is never a concession, never a dallying. And Nietzsche is astounded by the fact that Schopenhauer could endure life in Germany at all. A modern Englishman has said: "Shelley could never have lived in England: a race of Shelleys would have been impossible." Spirits of this kind are early broken, then become melancholy, morbid or insane. The society of the Culture-Philistines makes life a burden to exceptional men. Examples of this occur in plenty in the literature of every country, and the trial is constantly being made. We need only think of the number of talented men who sooner or later make their apologies and concessions to philistinism, so as to be permitted to exist. But even in the strongest the vain and weary struggle with Culture-Philistinism shows itself in lines and wrinkles. Nietzsche quotes the saying of the old diplomatist, who had only casually seen and spoken to Goethe: "_Voilà un homme qui a eu de grands chagrins_," and Goethe's comment, when repeating it to his friends: "If the traces of our sufferings and activities are indelible even in our features, it is no wonder that all that survives of us and our struggles should bear the same marks." And this is Goethe, who is looked upon as the favourite of fortune! Schopenhauer, as is well known, was until his latest years a solitary man. No one understood him, no one read him. The greater part of the first edition of his work, _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, had to be sold as waste paper. In our day Taine's view has widely gained ground, that the great man is entirely determined by the age whose child he is, that he unconsciously sums it up and ought consciously to give it expression.[3] But although, of course, the great man does not stand outside the course of history and must always depend upon predecessors, an idea nevertheless always germinates in a single individual or in a few individuals; and these individuals are not scattered points in the low-lying mass, but highly gifted ones who draw the mass to them instead of being drawn by it. What is called the spirit of the age originates in quite a small number of brains. Nietzsche who, mainly no doubt through Schopenhauer's influence, had originally been strongly impressed by the dictum that the great man is not the child of his age but its step-child, demands that the educator shall help the young to educate themselves _in opposition to the age_.