far off somewhere, in the future, in heaven or in the isles of the blessed. These things are not for us. We are born for the world of manly business, and if we are worthy of our destiny, we may possibly have some good part in the wars of the Lord. For nothing better have we any right to hope, and for an honest man that is enough.”
If these words which I have quoted seem to you rather unfeeling in their hardness, I beseech you to wait until I am done, not merely with to-day’s exposition of Schopenhauer, but with my whole course, before you judge them. As for living up to this obvious, but tremendously difficult kind of courage, of course you will not need to hear me say that a student of philosophy finds that quite as hard a task as do any of his neighbors. I am only stating the doctrine. A coward is not an admirable person, but it is only too easy to be one.
Thus, then, forsaking for the moment my position as chronicler, I try to tell you, in this wholly unoriginal fashion, what, to be sure, has always been the creed of brave men ever since our remote ancestors, or their cousins, struggled with the climate of the glacial period. And having thus freed my mind and defined my attitude towards pessimism, I can venture to assume once more the position of the historical student, and to set forth something of Schopenhauer’s contribution to the great philosophic task of modern humanity.
II.
The general character and worth of this contribution I must first describe, and in doing so I shall follow in the main the view of a recent German writer on the history of philosophy, namely. Professor Windelband, to whose well-known book, “Die Geschichte der neueren Philosophie,” these lectures have owed throughout not a little. Modern idealism, as it developed since Kant, was from the first an effort to discover the rationality of our world through an
