o for a moment
(their author would have scarcely permitted it!), one feels that one
enters a field of criticism in which opinions can scarcely vary. So far
as his philosophy is concerned, this unanimity does not exist; he is one
of the best abused amongst philosophers; he has many times been
explained and condemned exhaustively, and no doubt this will be as many
times repeated. What the trend of his underlying philosophical principal
was, his metaphysical explanation of the world, is indicated in almost
all the following essays, but chiefly in the "Metaphysics of Love," to
which the reader may be referred.

These essays are a valuable criticism of life by a man who had a wide
experience of life, a man of the world, who possessed an almost inspired
faculty of observation. Schopenhauer, of all men, unmistakably observed
life at first hand. There is no academic echo in his utterances; he is
not one of a school; his voice has no formal intonation; it is deep,
full-chested, and rings out its words with all the poignancy of
individual emphasis, without bluster, but with unfailing conviction. He
was for his time, and for his country, an adept at literary form; but he
used it only as a means. Complicated as his sentences occasionally are,
he says many sharp, many brilliant, many epigrammatic things, he has the
manner of the famous essayists, he is paradoxical (how many of his
paradoxes are now truisms!); one fancies at times that one is almost
listening to a creation of Moliere, but these fireworks are not merely a
literary display, they are used to illumine what he considers to be the
truth. _Rien n'est beau que le vrai; le vrai seul est aimable_, he
quotes; he was a deliberate and diligent searcher after truth, always
striving to attain the heart of things, to arrive at a knowledge of
first principles. It is, too, not without a sort of grim humour that
this psychological vivisectionist attempts to lay bare the skeleton of
the human mind, to tear away all the charming little sentiments and
hypocrisies which in the course of time become a part and parcel of
human life. A man influenced by such motives, and possessing a frank and
caustic tongue, was not likely to attain any very large share of popular
favour or to be esteemed a companionable sort of person. The fabric of
social life is interwoven with a multitude of delicate evasions, of
small hypocrisies, of matters of tinsel sentiment; social intercourse
would be impossible, i