for the acquisition of experience. I am not thinking, of course, of external events, but of the vicissitudes and convulsions which occur in the most solitary and quiet life which has leisure and burns with the passion for thinking. Schopenhauer has one advantage over him; he at least possessed a certain fierce ugliness of nature, hatred, craving, vanity, suspicion; he is of a somewhat more ferocious disposition, and had time and leisure for indulging in this ferocity. But he lacked “ evolution,” which was also absent from the circle of his thoughts; he had no “ history.”
482
To court our company.—Are we then too exacting when we court the company of men who have grown mild, savoury, and nutritive like chestnuts which betimes have been put into and taken out of the fire? Of men who expect little from life and prefer to look upon it as a gift and not as a merit of their own as though carried to them by the birds and bees? Of men who are too proud to feel rewarded, and too serious in their passion for knowledge and honesty to have leisure for and deference to glory? Such men we should call philosophers; and they themselves will always find a more modest appellation.
483
Weariness of mankind.—A: Know thou! Yes!
