SCHOPENHAUER was born at Dantzic, Germany, February 22d, 1788. After a short novitiate in the office of a Hamburg merchant, where he had been placed by his father, he decided that he was unfit for business and determined to become great in literature. Studying at Göttingen and beginning his literary work with the deepest problems of philosophy, he published in 1813 his monograph “On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason,” and in 1819 followed it with his most celebrated work, “The World as Will and Idea.” After spending several years as a tutor at the University of Berlin, he went to Frankfort-on-the-Main, where he lived from 1831 until his death, September 21st, 1860. His shorter essays, which were published in 1851, are artistically the best which have come from any professional philosopher of Germany. Schopenhauer knows how to condense his thought to the utmost possible extent without making it obscure, and to expand as much as he pleases without making it so abstract that it ceases to be intelligible. His admirers are not generally inclined to admit that he is a humorist, but there is a latent suspicion of an undertone of humor in his deepest philosophy. His “pessimism” reduces itself to the proposition that the world as men make it “must be some kind of a mistake.” At another time, he compares it to “a drop of water seen through a microscope, a single drop teeming with infusoria, or a speck of cheese full of mites invisible to the naked eye.” This is pessimism, but, after all, it is much less bitter than that of Swift. Indeed, Schopenhauer’s view of the world as it manifests itself through selfishness, is in no essential respect different from that presented in the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis, which account for human life and for the physical and moral conditions under which it is passed as the result of degeneracy or a “Fall” into conditions which destroy the wholly unfit and force those who are fit for survival to improve. When a world controlled by the impulses of selfish struggle is said to be either “a hell or a hospital,” the pessimism of the definition depends on the conclusion from it. Those who argue from it to negation must become hopeless and useless. But while St. Paul and St. John agree with the most extreme modern pessimists in conceding the weariness and uselessness of the life natural to the world, they made this conclusion merely the premise for asserting the infinite possibility of increasing efficiency, to be achieved through Faith and Love, operating as governing motives of action. Schopenhauer’s theory that the body is “the Will objectified” is related on one side to the Pythagorean idea that the Will or the soul it represents, must necessarily take such shapes in animal life as represent its moral qualities; and on the other side it seems to bear a not less distinct relation to the Darwinian hypothesis of the gradual modification of species as a result of Will determining the habits of typical individuals of the class.