Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/266

242 A troublesome and slowly growing deafness, similar to one manifest in his father, is referred to the same cause. Against these stood always a very fine general constitution and a rather over-anxiously guarded fashion of life. The question suggested by all these facts, — the well-known question whether Schopenhauer’s pessimism was mainly due to mere morbidness of temperament, was in short mere Stimmungspessimismus, — is not so easy to decide as some of his critics fancy. In fact, the man was unquestionably incapable of a permanently cheerful view of life, — was a born outcast, doomed to hide and to be lonely. Unquestionably, moreover, he was given to pettiness in the minor relations of life, was vain, uncompanionable, and bitter. But then, many clever men have had all these burdens to bear, without being able to see the tragedy of life as wisely and deeply as Schopenhauer saw it. He would have said of his own unhappy temper very much what he once said of the crimes of Napoleon’s career, namely, that there are conditions which make manifest the latent evil of human selfishness, the dangers of the restless will that is in us all alike, better than do other conditions, but which do not therefore create their latent evil. It will not do in any case to state the case against Schopenhauer’s pessimism in such shallow fashion as to make it appear that, whilst all pessimism is mere pettiness, all optimism is prima facie noble-mindedness. Optimists also can be selfish and even intolerable. In fine, then, I am disposed to say, as a matter of mere historical judgment, that Schopenhauer's nervous burdens unquestionably opened his eyes to the particular aspect of life which he found so tragic, but that meanwhile the fact of such burdens is of positively no service to us in forming our estimate of the ultimate significance of our philosopher's insight, — an insight which, for my part, I find as deep as it was partial.

The Italian psychologist, Lombroso, in his well-known