merely a name for a certain set of passions known to literature; in that sense Schopenhauer fully acknowledged it, and even thought it immutable; it is rather the constitution of an animal capable of training and development. What is more patent than that a man may learn something by experience and may be trained? But if he can be trained he is capable of adaptation and, therefore, of happiness, and the preposterous assertion that all desires are equally arbitrary and equally fruitless is blown to the winds.
The belief in a romantic chaos lends itself to pessimism, but it also lends itself to absolute self-assertion. Kant had boasted that he had removed knowledge in order to make room for faith; in other words, he had returned to chaos in order to find freedom. The great egotists, who detested the pressure of a world they had not posited or created, followed gladly in that path; but Schopenhauer was not an egotist. Like Goethe he was probably more selfish personally than those other philosophers whom their very egotism had made zealous and single-minded; but in imagination and feeling he was, like Goethe, genial and humane: the freedom and exuberance of nature impressed him more than his own. Had he been an egotist, as Fichte, Hegel, and Nietzsche were, he might have been an optimist like them. He was rather a happy man, hugely enjoying
