With his pessimism, personal misfortunes had nothing to do. He was, and
always recognised that he was, among the most fortunately placed of
mankind. He does not hesitate to speak sometimes of his own happiness in
complete freedom from the need to apply himself to any compulsory
occupation. This freedom, as he has put gratefully on record, he owed to
his father, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, who was a rich merchant of
Danzig, where the philosopher was born on the 22nd of February 1788.
Both his parents were of Dutch ancestry. His mother, Johanna
Schopenhauer, won celebrity as a novelist; and his sister, Adele, also
displayed some literary talent. Generalising from his own case,
Schopenhauer holds that men of intelligence derive their character from
their father and their intellect from their mother. With his mother,
however, he was not on sympathetic terms, as may be read in the
biographies. His father intended him for a mercantile career, and with
this view began to prepare him from the first to be a cosmopolitan man
of the world. The name of Arthur was given to him because it is spelt
alike in the leading European languages. He was taken early to France,
where he resided from 1797 to 1799, learning French so well that on his
return he had almost forgotten his German. Portions of the years 1803 to
1804 were spent in England, France, Switzerland, and Austria. In England
he was three months at a Wimbledon boarding-school kept by a clergyman.
This experience he found extremely irksome. He afterwards became highly
proficient in English: was always pleased to be taken for an Englishman,
and regarded both the English character and intelligence as on the whole
the first in Europe; but all the more deplorable did he find the
oppressive pietism which was the special form taken in the England of
that period by the reaction against the French Revolution. He is never
tired of denouncing that phase of 'cold superstition,' the dominance of
which lasted during his lifetime; for the publication of Mill's
_Liberty_ and of Darwin's _Origin of Species_, which may be considered
as marking the close of it, came only the year before his death.