every deed is dissolved, are the worms that gnaw at everything great and noble, to destroy it.” His mother found this sort of thing rather tedious, and especially inconsistent with her son’s social success as an occasional inmate of her house at Weimar. There already a most brilliant company often gathered, Goethe at the head. A youth of twenty or thereabouts could not add grace to such a scene so long as he could talk of nothing but time and worms. She wrote him plainly, being a woman as clear-headed as she was charming: “When you get older, dear Arthur, and see things more clearly, perhaps we shall agree better. Till then let us see that our thousand little quarrels shall not hunt love out of our hearts. To that end we must keep well apart. You have your lodgings; as for my house, whenever you come you are a guest, well received, of course, only you mustn’t interfere. I can’t bear objections. Days when I receive, you may take supper with me, if you’ll only be so good as to refrain from your painful disputations, which make me angry, too, and from all your lamentations over the stupid world and the sorrows of mankind; for all that always gives me a bad night and horrid dreams, and I do so like a sound sleep.”
In 1809, Schopenhauer began his university studies at Göttingen, devoted himself to Kant and Plato, and rapidly acquired the type of erudition which he kept to the end, an erudition vast rather than technical, the learning of one who saw swiftly rather than studied exhaustively, remembered rather than systematized, enjoyed manifold labors rather than professional completeness. He was always a marvelous reader, of wide literary sympathies, especially fond of the satirists, the mystics, and the keen observers of all ages. For the processes of the exact sciences he had a poor comprehension; for natural phenomena of a suggestive sort his eye was always very wide open; he longed to catch the restless World- Will in the
