not aphorisms. Thus, in the saying that "The perfect man of
the world should be he who never sticks fast in indecision, nor ever
falls into overhaste," the force of it lies in what goes before and
what follows after. The whole collection, winding up with the chapter
of Counsels and Maxims, is in the main an unsystematic enforcement of
those peculiar views of human happiness and its narrow limits which
proved to be the most important part of Schopenhauer's system. "The
sovereign rule in the wisdom of life," he said, "I see in Aristotle's
proposition (_Eth. Nic_. vii. 12), [Greek: ho phronimos to alupon
diokei, ou to haedu]: Not pleasure but freedom from pain is what
the sensible man goes after." The second volume, of Detached though
systematically Ordered Thoughts on Various Circumstances, is
miscellaneous in its range of topics, and is full of suggestion; but
the thoughts are mainly philosophical and literary, and do not come
very close to practical wisdom. In truth, so negative a view of
happiness, such pale hopes and middling expectations, could not guide
a man far on the path of active prudence, where we naturally take for
granted that the goal is really something substantial, serious, solid,
and positive.[1]

[Footnote 1: Burke says on the point raised above: "I am satisfied the
ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the
part of pleasure. Without all doubt, the torments which we may be made
to suffer are much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than
any pleasures which the most learned voluptuary could suggest. Nay,
I am in great doubt whether any man could be found, who would earn a
life of the most perfect satisfaction at the price of ending it in
the torments which justice inflicted in a few hours on the late
unfortunate regicide in France" (_Sublime and Beautiful_, pt. I. sec.
vii.). The reference is, of course, to Damien.]

Nobody cared less than Schopenhauer for the wisdom that is drawn from
books, or has said such hard things of mere reading. In the short
piece to which I have already referred (p. 80), he works out the
difference between the Scholar who has read in books, and the
Thinkers, the Geniuses, the Lights of the World, and Furtherers of
the human race, who have read directly from the world's own pages.
Reading, he says, is only a _succedaneum_ for one's own thinking.
Reading is thinking with a strange head instead of one's own. People
who get their wisdom out of b