SIX MAJOR PROPHETS
fraternizes with Pessimism and they hug their miseries in chaos undisguised."
But in his earliest work "Riddles of the Sphinx" he expressed the opinion that nowadays few people took a real interest in the question of immortality and that it had little influence upon conduct. This unconventional opinion was confirmed many years later when the Society for Psychical Research conducted a questionnaire on the subject and found that of the many thousand persons interrogated a large proportion did not regard a future life as of practical importance to them.[1]
Within the last few years Schiller has entered a new field, the eugenics movement, where his keen wit and power of analysis are doing good service. In his review of Nietzsche's work[2] he recognizes that Nietzsche is not without reason when he asserts that the moral qualities he dislikes, such as pity and sympathy, may lead to decadence, for, as Schiller elsewhere shows, social reform, unless it is eugenically directed, may lead to the growth of the evils it aims to alleviate. In a very remarkable article published shortly before the outbreak of the
- ↑ See Schiller's article on this in The Independent of September 15, 1904, or in Fortnightly Review, vol. 76, p. 430.
- ↑ Quarterly Review, 1913.
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