f it were not so. There is no sort of social
existence possible for a person who is ingenuous enough to say always
what he thinks, and, on the whole, one may be thankful that there is
not. One naturally enough objects to form the subject of a critical
diagnosis and exposure; one chooses for one's friends the agreeable
hypocrites of life who sustain for one the illusions in which one wishes
to live. The mere conception of a plain-speaking world is calculated to
reduce one to the last degree of despair; it is the conception of the
intolerable. Nevertheless it is good for mankind now and again to have a
plain speaker, a "mar feast," on the scene; a wizard who devises for us
a spectacle of disillusionment, and lets us for a moment see things as
he honestly conceives them to be, and not as we would have them to be.
But in estimating the value of a lesson of this sort, we must not be
carried too far, not be altogether convinced. We may first take into
account the temperament of the teacher; we may ask, is his vision
perfect? We may indulge in a trifling diagnosis on our own account. And
in an examination of this sort we find that Schopenhauer stands the test
pretty well, if not with complete success. It strikes us that he suffers
perhaps a little from a hereditary taint, for we know that there is an
unmistakable predisposition to hypochondria in his family; we know, for
instance, that his paternal grandmother became practically insane
towards the end of her life, that two of her children suffered from some
sort of mental incapacity, and that a third, Schopenhauer's father, was
a man of curious temper and that he probably ended his own life. He
himself would also have attached some importance, in a consideration of
this sort, to the fact, as he might have put it, that his mother, when
she married, acted in the interests of the individual instead of
unconsciously fulfilling the will of the species, and that the offspring
of the union suffered in consequence. Still, taking all these things
into account, and attaching to them what importance they may be worth,
one is amazed at the clearness of his vision, by his vigorous and at
moments subtle perception. If he did not see life whole, what he did see
he saw with his own eyes, and then told us all about it with
unmistakable veracity, and for the most part simply, brilliantly. Too
much importance cannot be attached to this quality of seeing things for
oneself; it is the stamp of a gre