Nietzsche did well to point out, as Huxley pointed out years ago, that “all men are not born free and equal,” as optimists have averred. A little healthy pessimism would be very good for the world; it would teach it to be more careful about paying its debts and would prevent it from blundering into an ignorant war such as the last one.

But nobody who has ever seen the disgusting spectacle of a man dying of general paralysis, demented, helpless, lying bestial, an obscene body that has long survived its soul, deserted by every one but his mother and his old aunts, could ever look at the portrait of the dying Nietzsche, gazing so wistfully into the setting sun, and say that Nietzsche died of general paralysis. The Italians called him Il Santo, the Saint; so far did he seem to them above all moral frailty.

It was probably owing to his incessant pain that he could never settle down to systematise his philosophy, but had to write in epigrams.

Arthur Schopenhauer

It is difficult not to smile at this peculiar philosopher, even though he has obtained nearly as many admirers as Nietzsche himself, and it is a dangerous thing to offend a Nietzschian. But let us treat him with the seriousness that he would have insisted upon as his right.

He was born in Dantzig in 1788; he died in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1860, a philosopher to whom both Germany and England have laid claim, because his father wished him to be born in England, and took his mother there just before the expected birthday, but the good lady suddenly took fright at the English—is it possible that there can have been anybody on earth who has not liked the English?—and insisted on going back to Germany for the confinement. I have actually heard that to this very natural whim of a pregnant woman is to be attributed Arthur’s detestation of women! In that idea perhaps we may see the natural thought of all Englishmen that England is the only fit country for a man to be born in. But his father had his revenge; for he called the little son “Arthur” and the lady, being a dutiful German wife, had to submit, consoling herself by the thought that it was a German as well as an English name. But Arthur’s detestation of women is probably to be attributed to a more physical cause, as we shall see.

In 1793 Dantzig was annexed by Prussia, so the Schopenhauers moved to Hamburg. Later on, when the question of Arthur’s education came to be settled, they decided to send him to both France and England; and in London the future pessimist was placed at a boarding-school kept by a clergyman at Wimbledon—poor little boy. For some reason he found the life, and more particularly the religious training of the good schoolmaster, intensely irksome; and long afterwards he referred with disgust to the atmosphere of cant and hypocrisy which permeated England at that time. Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis.

In 1807 his father was found dead in the canal at Hamburg, being suspected to have thrown himself from an upper story; and Arthur, out of respect for his father’s wishes, definitely took up his duties in an office, though personally he longed to be an author. His mother, being now free from the encumbrance of a husband—at least presumably she found him an encumbrance—took to literature as a minor novelist at Weimar. When Arthur went to join her, he found that she seemed to have forgotten the memory of his father; and before very long they quarrelled. At the age of twenty-one Arthur determined to enter the university of Göttingen as a medical student; and later on took to philosophy, and gained his Ph.D. It was probably while he was at the university that he caught syphilis; and for long underwent the heroic doses of mercury at intervals that the nineteenth century thought essential for the cure of that disease. It was not till the time of Fournier and Sir Jonathan Hutchinson that it was recognised that, while mercury was essential, it was not so much the amount of mercury as the faithful years of its intermittent duration that were really necessary; and Schopenhauer duly went through the proper course of huge doses accompanied by all the wretchedness of salivation, depression, and internal pain, that used to be thought necessary for every syphilitic if he would escape the legendary tortures of that wonderful disease. He frequently complained to his friends of his treatment; but, in spite of the sufferings that it caused him, he had in reality little to complain about, for he lived to seventy years of age and escaped the graver nervous troubles that often accompany untreated syphilis. Nowadays, of course, we should put him on injections of one of the arseno-benzol compounds, accompanied probably with rubbings, pills or injections of mercury, and insist on his taking moderate exercise in the fresh air and living a sober, righteous and godly life without excitement or dissipation. While we should be chary of giving a definite prognosis we should tell him that probably he would see no more of his disease either in himself or his children if he took care of himself and faithfully continued his treatment. But Schopenhauer, while escaping the more serious nervous, bone and skin manifestation of syphilis, evidently did not escape the psychasthenic troubles, the obsessions and imperative ideas—the phobias; and syphilophobia had him in its grip till the end of his life. In this strange condition the patient becomes possessed by an undue terror of syphilis and its results; and often the fear of syphilis becomes transferred to the fear of every other infectious disease until his life becomes a burden to him as he walks perpetually in the presence of evil spirits which ache to devour him. Probably it was to these phobias that he owed his unnatural hatred of women, and his hatred of the lower side of man’s nature. He knew that these “under-sized, short-legged, long-haired creatures who were not really beautiful,” went about the world simply for the purpose of spreading syphilis—made a trade of it, in short; and that he, being a man of strongly sexual impulses, could not resist their embrace, though he knew it to be death. He had no wax wherewith he might shut his ears to their siren songs, while his sturdy rowers propelled his boat beside their lair; he could not leave his house without knowing that some of them would lure him with their dreadful charms; how different the miserable creatures were from the proper form of a human being, which should be, like Arthur Schopenhauer himself, a rather short, square, blue-eyed, sturdy North German. And so his miserable life went on, carrying its own torture with it, and daily his thoughts turned more and more to the utter wretchedness of life, and the stupidity of those followers of Fichte and Hegel who simply would not see the truth. Probably his pessimism was a direct result of his syphilophobia.

He kept a diary in accordance with his plan of absolute self-confession; and there are many thoughts on love and marriage, written during the years 1819-22 and 1825-31, which his modest English biographer describes as being quite too frank for publication. These thoughts were written down in English; probably Schopenhauer doubted whether the Deity understood that language, just as we nowadays are quite certain that He does not understand French or Latin. But we can leave them unread, in the certain surety that they were completely coarse.