54 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ture as strong an impulse as the sixteenth century owed to the revival 

 of the Greeks." Foucher de Careil, who had occasion to visit Schopen- 

 hauer, relates that " he had imported at great expense a Buddha, and 

 showed it to his visitors with mischievous pride. He had no patience 

 with English missionaries who undertake to convert their elders in re- 

 ligion." According to Schopenhauer, there is nothing but wretched- 

 ness in the world ; evil alone is positive ; pleasure is a mere negation 

 of pain, and thus has no reality. As to happiness, it is an empty word 

 progress, a sheer Utopia ; history, nothing more than the long-drawn- 

 out torment of humanity's nightmare. What is life ? A fabric that 

 is not worth what it costs an endless hunt in which, sometimes pur- 

 suing, sometimes pursued, men fight over the fragments of their slain 

 victims a war of all against all, helium omnium contra omnes death 

 discounted, Parmenides called it and, to sum up all, a sort of natural 

 history of misery, that may be thus rendered in brief: " To wish with- 

 out a motive; always to suffer; always to strive; and then to die, 

 and so over and over again ' in srecula sreculorum,' till the crust of 

 our planet scales away into little bits." What are the practical conse- 

 quences of such teaching ? That the mere fact of being born is a mis- 

 fortune, and that to give life to a new being is a bad action. Hence, 

 this strange analysis of modesty : " See these two beings whose 

 glances seek each other. Why that mystery they shroud themselves in ? 

 Why their timid and shamefaced air ? Because they are two traitors, 

 who fly to the darkness to perpetuate in another all those tortures and 

 sorrows that would reach a speedy end but for their treachery. And 

 there will always be such criminals, who will ogle and caress after the 

 same fashion, to perpetuate life, to live again in another being." And 

 what is the moral principle of the system? Pity; nothing else than 

 pity. The ascending series of living beings ends with man, because a 

 being superior to man, and more intelligent, would not consent to live 

 and keep up this wretched comedy a single day. The aim of philoso- 

 phy is to enlighten man as to his deplorable condition to inspire him 

 with longing to be annihilated, and never again to live after death, 

 under any form whatever, and to unfold to him at length the means 

 of gaining this annihilation. Remark that in all these teachings there 

 is not a trace of sportiveness, none of the ironic sallies of the humorist, 

 the inspiration of a misanthropic fit ; temperament has nothing to do 

 in producing them. We are brought face to face with a profoundly 

 and learnedly elaborated system, one that criticism must treat with 

 all gravity. Is this the dawn of a Western Buddhism ? Are the 

 European offshoots of the Aryan race, like their brothers of the East, 

 about to aspire to the supreme Nirvana, and petrify themselves in as- 

 ceticism ? 



It is a fact that Schopenhauer did not remain an isolated phenome- 

 non. The pessimist doctrine gathered a school, and we might name 

 its distinguished disciples the Frauenstadts, the Gwiners, the Ashers. 



