if not in your expressed wishes, to refute Schopenhauer. Now refutation is, as I have already tried to maintain, a thing of only very moderate service in the study of philosophy. We may refute a great thinker’s accidental misjudgments; we can seldom refute his deeper insights. And as I must forthwith assure you, and shall very soon show you, Schopenhauer’s pessimism is actually expressive of a very deep insight into life. This insight is indeed not a final one. We must transcend it. But surely you would justly discover me in a very unphilosophical, and in fact very unworthily self-contradictory, attitude if now, after all these successive efforts to show you a continuity and a common body of truth in the modern philosophers, I should suddenly, at this point of my discourse, assume the airs of a champion of the faith against the infidels, and should fall to hewing and hacking at Schopenhauer with genuinely crusading zeal. In fact it is not my calling to do anything of the sort. I always admire the crusaders, but my admiration is due rather to their enthusiasm than to their philosophical many-sidedness; rather to the vitality of their faith than to the universality of their comprehension. I fear that if I should try to join myself unto them they would not accept me without reserve. I cannot therefore treat Schopenhauer as a crusader would treat him. He is to me a philosopher of considerable dignity, whom we could ill spare from the roll of modern thinkers; whom I do not by any means follow as disciple, but to whom I owe, in common with other philosophical students, a great deal, for his skillful analysis and for his fearlessly clear assertion of his own significant temperament.
I.
But as to pessimism itself, Schopenhauer’s famous doctrine, as to this terrible view that life is through and through tragic and evil, what is my attitude towards that? I must, you will probably say, either accept it, and then
