It is more especially Schopenhauer's theories of art which influenced Nietzsche's thought, and left the deepest and most permanent mark on his work. He adopted in his early days the pessimism along with the rest of Schopenhauer's system. But this conception {50} of life was not really native to his mind, and it was against this aspect of Schopenhauer's philosophy that he reacted most violently in later life. Nietzsche stands, above all else, for the affirmation of life, Schopenhauer for the negation of life. In his protest against pessimism, Nietzsche reaffirms with passionate intensity the worth of life and the splendour of human destiny. He told men to believe in the glory of things, and bade them shout for the joy of living. "All that's joyful shall be true," he says in one of his poems. In another passage he insists that "it is necessary to remain bravely at the surface, to worship appearance, to believe in forms, in tones, in words, in the whole Olympus of appearance." It is clear that by this time nothing of the pessimistic outlook on life had been left in Nietzsche's philosophy. Pessimism will always find an echo in the minds of those who by temperament tend to see only the darker colours of the picture of life. Too much questioning and too little responsibility lead down to the abyss, as William James points out. Pessimism, he says, is essentially a religious disease. It consists in nothing but a religious demand, to which there comes no normal religious reply. To the great mass of mankind there is something alien and repellent in this grim and bitter outlook of hopelessness. It finds little or no response in the heart of the normal human being, even though at times the nightmare view may force itself upon him. "Deliverance," says the Indian poet Tagore, "is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight. All my illusions will burn into illumination of joy and all my desires ripen into fruits of love." {51} For Schopenhauer the way of escape lay in two directions. In considering his æsthetic theories, we shall see how he found in art a temporary release from the bondage of life, and in his ethical system he points the way to a permanent deliverance.