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In a few instances Schopenhauer read his essays in public as lectures, but his ideas were keyed to concert pitch and were too pronounced for average audiences. He was offered a professorship at Gottingen and also at Heidelberg, if he would “tone things down,” but he scornfully declined the proposition, and said, “The Universities must grow to my level before I can talk to them.” By his caustic criticisms of contemporaries he became both feared and shunned, and no doubt he found a certain satisfaction in the fact that the so-called learned men of his time would neither listen to his lectures, read his books, nor abide his presence. He had made himself felt in any event. “Blessed are ye when men shall revile you,” is the sweet consolation of all persecuted persons–and persecution is only the natural resentment towards those who have too much ego in their cosmos.

His opinions concerning love and marriage need not be taken too seriously. Ideas are the results of temperaments and moods. When a man amplifies on the woman question he describes the women he knows best, and more especially the particular She who is in his head. Literature is only autobiography, more or less discreetly veiled. Schopenhauer hated his mother to the day of her death, and although during the last twenty-four years of her life he never once saw her, her image could at any time be quickly and vividly thrown upon the screen. The women a strong man has known are never forgotten–here is where time does not tarnish, nor the days grow dim.

Between his twenty-eighth and fortieth years, Schopenhauer had wandered through Italy–spent months at Venice, and dawdled away the days at Rome and Florence. He had dipped deep into life–and the wrong kind of life. And his experiences had confirmed his suspicions–it was all bitter–he was not disappointed.

Until Schopenhauer was past thirty he was known as the son of Johanna Schopenhauer. And when he once told her that posterity would never remember her except as the mother of her son, she reciprocated by congratulating him that his books could always be had cheap in the first editions.

He retorted, “Mamma Dear, my books will be read when butchers are using yours for wrapping up meat.” In some ways this precious pair were very much alike.

It is very probable that Schopenhauer’s mother was not so base as he thought; and when he declared, “Woman’s morality is only a kind of prudence,” he might have said the same of his own. He stood aloof from life and said things about it. He had no wife, no child, no business, no home–he dared not venture boldly into the tide of existence–he stood forever on the bank, and watched the current carrying its flotsam and jetsam to the hungry sea.

In his love for the memory of his father, and in his tender care for his dog, we get a glimpse of depths that were never sounded. One side of his nature was never developed. And the words of the undeveloped man are worth what they are worth.

Schopenhauer once said to Wieland, “Life is a ticklish business–I propose to spend my time looking at it.” This he did, viewing existence from every angle, and writing out his thoughts in terse, epigrammatic language.

Among all the German writers on philosophy, the only one who had a distinct literary style is Schopenhauer. Form was quite as much to him as matter–and in this he showed rare wisdom; although I am told that the writers who have no literary style are the only ones who despise it. Dishes to be palatable must be rightly served: appetite–literary, gastronomic or sexual–is largely a matter of imagination.

Schopenhauer need not be regarded as final. The chief virtue of the man lies in the fact that he makes us think, and thus are we his debtors.

In this summary of Schopenhauer’s philosophy I have had the valuable assistance of my friend and fellow-worker in the Roycroft Shop, George Pannebakker, a kinsman and enthusiastic admirer of the great Prophet of Pessimism.