them, as if everything were a dispensation or intimation of Providence, something planned and sent on behalf of the salvation of the soul: all that is now _past,_ it has conscience _against_ it, it is regarded by all the more acute consciences as disreputable and dishonourable, as mendaciousness, femininism, weakness, and cowardice,--by virtue of this severity, if by anything, we are _good_ Europeans, the heirs of Europe's longest and bravest self-conquest. When we thus reject the Christian interpretation, and condemn its "significance" as a forgery, we are immediately confronted in a striking manner with the _Schopenhauerian_ question: _Has existence then a significance at all?_--the question which will require a couple of centuries even to be completely heard in all its profundity. Schopenhauer's own answer to this question was--if I may be forgiven for saying so--a premature, juvenile reply, a mere compromise, a stoppage and sticking in the very same Christian-ascetic, moral perspectives, _the belief in which had got notice to quit_ along with the belief in God.... But he _raised_ the question--as a good European, as we have said, and _not_ as a German.--Or did the Germans prove at least by the way in which they seized on the Schopenhauerian question, their inner connection and relationship to him, their preparation for his problem, and their _need_ of it? That there has been thinking and printing even in Germany since Schopenhauer's time on the problem raised by him,--it was late enough!--does not at all suffice to enable us to decide in favour of this closer relationship; one could, on the contrary, lay great stress on the peculiar _awkwardness_ of this post-Schopenhauerian Pessimism--Germans evidently do not behave themselves here as in their element. I do not at all allude here to Eduard von Hartmann; on the contrary, my old suspicion is not vanished even at present that he is _too clever_ for us; I mean to say that as arrant rogue from the very first, he did not perhaps make merry solely over German Pessimism--and that in the end he might probably "bequeathe" to them the truth as to how far a person could bamboozle the Germans themselves in the age of bubble companies. But further, are we perhaps to reckon to the honour of Germans, the old humming-top, Bahnsen, who all his life spun about with the greatest pleasure around his realistically dialectic misery and "personal ill-luck,"--was _that_ German? (In passing I recommend his writings for the purpose for which I myself have used them, as anti-pessimistic fare, especially on account of his _elegantia psychologica,_ which, it seems to me, could alleviate even the most constipated body and soul). Or would it be proper to count such dilettanti and old maids as the mawkish apostle of virginity, Mainländer, among the genuine Germans? After all he was probably a Jew (all Jews become mawkish when they moralise). Neither Bahnsen, nor