III.
Arthur Schopenhauer, born in 1788, was probably descended, on the father's side, from a Dutch family. He was the son of a wealthy merchant of Danzig. His mother, the once noted Johanna Schopenhauer, brilliant novelist, and in her later years ambitious hostess in the literary circles at Weimar, had married, as she very frankly tells us, not from love, but for position. On both sides, Schopenhauer’s ancestry was somewhat burdened, as we should say, in respect of nerves, although this fact is decidedly more marked on the father's side. The philosopher's paternal grandmother was declared insane during the latter years of her life; and of his uncles, on the same side, one was idiotic, and one was given to excesses of the neurotic type. Schopenhauer’s father, a busy and uncommonly intelligent man, many-sided and successful, still suffered, towards the last, froui the family trouble. He showed at fifty-eight years of age occasional but acute symptoms of an excited form of derangement, lost, meanwhile, his memory for well-known persons, and very soon died under mysterious circumstances that strongly indicated an insane suicide. Johanna herself wa3 indeed personally quite free from noteworthy nervous defect, unless heartlessness be reckoned as such. The philosopher himself, as is well known, lived in excellent general health until past seventy, dying in 1860, of a cause having no apparent relation to nervous difficulties. Still, especially in youth, he was vexed by his hereditary burden enough to enable us without question to associate his pessimism in some measure with his temperament. Several neurasthenic symptoms are reported, showing themselves in sporadic but decided forms, — night-terrors, of a known pathological type; causeless depressions; a persistent dread of possible misfortunes; a complaining and frequently unbearable ill humor, with attendant crises of violent temper.
