“At present we have only the choice of being hammer or anvil, and I was the kind of donkey who let a woman make a slave of him, do you understand?
“The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.
“The blows, as you see, have agreed with me; the roseate supersensual mist has dissolved, and no one can ever make me believe again that these ‘sacred apes of Benares’6 or Plato’s rooster7 are the image of God.”
[Footnote 6: One of Schopenhauer’s designations for women.]
[Footnote 7: Diogenes threw a plucked rooster into Plato’s school and exclaimed: “Here you have Plato’s human being.”]