ture as strong an impulse as the sixteenth century owed to the revival of the Greeks." Foucher de Careil, who had occasion to visit Schopenhauer, 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 religion." According to Schopenhauer, there is nothing but wretchedness 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 pursuing, sometimes pursued, men fight over the fragments of their slain victims—a war of all against all, bellum 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 without a motive; always to suffer; always to strive; and then to die, and so over and over again 'in sæcula sæculorum,' till the crust of our planet scales away into little bits." What are the practical consequences of such teaching? That the mere fact of being born is a misfortune, 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 philosophy 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 asceticism?
It is a fact that Schopenhauer did not remain an isolated phenomenon. The pessimist doctrine gathered a school, and we might name its distinguished disciples—the Frauenstadts, the Gwiners, the Ashers.
