Reading Parerga and Paralipomena reconciled me to philosophy.
After that I bought in French The Critique of Pure Reason, The
World as Will and Idea, and a number of other books.
How was it that I, who am gifted with but little tenacity of purpose, mustered up perseverance enough to read difficult books for which I was without preparation? I do not know, but the fact is that I read them.
Years after this initiation into philosophy, I began reading the works of Nietzsche, which impressed me greatly.
Since then I have picked at this and that in order to renew my philosophic store, but without success. Some books and authors will not agree with me, and I have not dared to venture others. I have had a volume of Hegel's Logic on my table for a long time. I have looked at it, I have smelled of it, but courage fails me.
Yet I am attracted to metaphysics more than to any other phase of philosophy. Political philosophy, sociology and the common sense schools please me least. Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, Comte and Spencer I have never liked at all. Even their Utopias, which ought to be amusing, bore me profoundly, and this has been true from Plato's Republic to Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread and Wells's A Modern Utopia. Nor could I ever become interested in the pseudo-philosophy of anarchism. One of the books which have disappointed me the most is Max Stirner's Ego and His Own.
Psychology is a science which I should like to know. I have therefore skimmed through the standard works of Wundt and Ziehen. After reading them, I came to the conclusion that the psychology which I am seeking, day by day and every day, is not to be found in these treatises. It is contained rather in the writings of Nietzsche and the novels of Dostoievski. In the course of time, I may succeed, perhaps, in entering the more abstract domains of the science.
VI
THE HISTORIANS
Miss Blimber, the school teacher in Dickens's Dombey and Son, could have died happily had she known Cicero. Even if such a thing were possible I should have no great desire to know Cicero, but I should be glad to listen to a lecture by Zeno in the portico of the Poecilé at Athens, or to Epicurus's meditations in his garden.
My ignorance of history has prevented me from becoming deeply interested in Greece, although now this begins to embarrass me, as a curiosity about and sympathy for classical art stirs within me. If I were a young man and had the leisure, I might even begin the study of Greek.