as he was an intense hater of many English institutions. Not, of course, the English Philistine, but the English man of the world, attracted him, by that clear-headedness and that freedom from systematic delusions which are so characteristic of the stock. To sum all up in a word, the maxim of his whole life as a learner was, See and record the vital struggles and longings of the will wherever they appear.
Such scholarship as this was ill-fitted to prepare Schopenhauer for an academic life. In 1813, he printed his dissertation for the doctor’s degree, on the “Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.” It is his most technical book, with least of his genius in it. In 1818 was published the first edition of his “Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.” In 1820, he entered on his work as Privat-Docent at the university of Berlin, and immediately made a sufficiently complete academic failure to discourage him from any serious effort to continue. Embittered by the indifference with which both his books and his attempts as a teacher were received, he gradually acquired that intense hatred of all professors of philosophy, and of the whole post-Kantian speculative movement in Germany, which he expressed more than once in a furious form, and which wholly misled him as to his own historical relations. After 1831, he retired to Frankfort-on-the-Main, and lived upon his little fortune until the close of his life. How he came slowly to be publicly known, in spite of the indifference with which academic circles treated him; how in old age there gathered round him a little circle of well-received flatterers; how young Russians used to come and stare at the wise man; how he loved the attentions of all such people, and better still the more intelligent understanding of two or three faithful disciples, but best of all his dinner and his dog; how he died at last suddenly, when he was quite alone, — are not all these things written in the books of modern literary
