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 2. I 
 
THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 Le bonheur n'est pas ctosi aisie : il est trks- 
 difficile de le trouver en nous, et impossible 
 de le trouver ailleurs. 
 
 Cham fort. 
 
First Edition, March, 1890 ; Second, November, 
 1890; Third, August, 1891 ; Fourth, October, 1892; 
 Fifth, October, 1895 ; Sixth, October, 1897. 
 
THE WISDOM OF LIFE 
 
 BEING THE FIRST PART OF 
 
 ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER'S 
 
 Hpborismen 3ur Xebenswetsbeit 
 
 Vitam inrpendere vero. — Jvvevau 
 
 TRA NSLA TED WITH A PRE FA CR 
 
 BY 
 
 T. BAILEY SAUNDERS, M. A. 
 
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 SWAN SONNEN 
 
 PATERN 
 
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TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 Schopenhauer is one of the few philosophers who 
 can be generally understood without a commentary. 
 All his theories claim to be drawn direct from the facts, 
 to be suggested by observation, and to interpret the 
 world as it is ; and whatever view he takes, he is con- 
 stant in his appeal to the experience of common life. 
 This characteristic endows his style with a freshness 
 and vigour which would be difficult to match in the 
 philosophical wiiting of any country, and impossible 
 in that of Germany. If it were asked whether there 
 were any circumstances, apart from heredity, to which 
 he owed his mental habit, the answer might be found 
 in the abnormal character of his early education, his 
 acquaintance with the world rather than with books, 
 the extensive travels of his boyhood, his ardent pur- 
 suit of knowledge for its own sake and without regard 
 to the emoluments and endowments of learning. He 
 was trained in realities even more than in ideas ; and 
 hence he is original, forcible, clear, an enemy of all 
 philosophic indefiniteness and obscurity ; so that it 
 may well be said of him, in the words of a writer in 
 the " Revue Contemporaine," ce n'est pas unphilosophe 
 
 5793 
 
ii TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 comme les autres, c'est un philosophe qui a vu le 
 monde. 
 
 It is not my purpose, nor would it be possible with- 
 in the limits of a prefatory note, to attempt an account 
 of Schopenhauer's philosophy, to indicate its sources, 
 or to suggest or rebut the objections which may be 
 taken to it. M. Bibot, in his excellent little book, * 
 has done all that is necessary in this direction. But 
 the essays here presented need a word of explanation. 
 It should be observed, and Schopenhauer himself is at 
 pains to point out, that his system is like a citadel 
 with a hundred gates : at whatever point you take it 
 up, wherever you make your entrance, you are on the 
 road to the centre. In this respect his writings 
 resemble a series of essays composed in support of a 
 single thesis ; a circumstance which led him to insist, 
 more emphatically even than most philosophers, that 
 for a proper understanding of his system it was 
 necessary to read every line he had written. Perhaps 
 it would be more correct to describe Die Welt als Wille 
 und Vorstellung as his main thesis, and his other 
 treatises as merely corollary to it. The essays in these 
 volumes form part of the corollary ; they are taken 
 from a collection published towards the close of 
 Schopenhauer's life, and by him entitled Parerga und 
 Paralipomena, as being in the nature of surplusage 
 and illustrative of his main position. They are by fai 
 * La Philosophie de Schopenhauer, par Th. Ribot. 
 

 TRANSLATORS PREFACE. Ill 
 
 the most popular of bis works, and since their first 
 publication in 1851 they have done much to build up his 
 fame. Written so as to be intelligible enough in them- 
 selves, the tendency of many of them is towards the 
 fundamental idea on which his system is based. It may , 
 therefore be convenient to summarise that idea in a ' 
 couple of sentences ; more especially as Schopenhauer 
 sometimes writes as if his advice had been followed 
 and his readers were acquainted with the whole of his 
 work. 
 
 All philosophy is in some sense the endeavour to 
 
 find a inifying principle, to discover the most general 
 
 conception underlying the whole field of nature and 
 
 of knowledge. By one of those bold generalisations 
 
 which occasionally mark a real advance in science, 
 
 Schopenhauer conceived this unifying principle, this 
 
 underlying unity, to consist in something analogous 
 
 r to that vill which self-consciousness reveals to us. 
 
 Will is, according to him, the fundamental reality of 
 
 I the world the thing-in-itself ; and its objectivation is I 
 
 what is presented in phenomena. The struggle of the 
 
 will to realise itself evolves the organism, which in its 
 
 turn evokes intelligence as the servant of the will. 
 
 And in practical life the antagonism between the will 
 
 and the in.ellect arises from the fact that the former 
 
 is the metaphysical substance, the latter something 
 
 accidental ind secondary. And further, will is desire, ,- 
 
 that is to say, need of something ; hence need and 
 
IV TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 pain are what is positive in the world, and the only 
 possible happiness is a negation, a renunciation of the 
 will to live. 
 
 It is instructive to note, as M. Bibot points out, 
 that in finding the origin of all things, not in intelli- 
 gence, as some of his predecessors in philosophy had 
 done, but in will, or the force of nature, from which 
 all phenomena have developed, Schopenhauer was 
 anticipating something of the scientific spirit of the 
 nineteenth century. To this it may be added that in 
 combating the method of Fichte and Hegel, who 
 spun a system out of abstract ideas, and in discarding 
 it for one based on observation and experience, 
 Schopenhauer can be said to have brought down 
 philosophy from heaven to earth. 
 
 In Schopenhauer's view the various forms of 
 Religion are no less a product of human ingenuity 
 than Art or Science. He holds, in effect, that all 
 religions take their rise in the desire to explain the 
 world ; and that, in regard to truth and error, they 
 differ, in the main, not by preaching monotheism, 
 polytheism or pantheism, but in so far as they 
 recognise pessimism or optimism as the tru I descrip- 
 tion of life. Hence any religion which lookecjupon the 
 world as being radically evil appealed to hip. as con- 
 taining an indestructible element of truth I have 
 endeavoured to present his view of two of the great 
 religions of the world in the extract whfch comes 
 
TRANSLATOR S PREFACE. V 
 
 in the third volume, and to which I have given the 
 title of The Christian System. The tenor of it is 
 to show that, however little he may have been in 
 sympathy with the supernatural element, he owed 
 much to the moral doctrines of Christianity and 
 of Buddhism, between which he traced great resem- 
 blance. 
 
 Of Schopenhauer, as of many another writer, it may 
 be said that he has been misunderstood and depreciated 
 just in the degree in which he is thought to be new ; 
 and that, in treating of the Conduct of Life, he is, in 
 reality, valuable only in so far as he brings old truths 
 to remembrance. His name used to arouse, and in 
 certain quarters still arouses, a vague sense of alarm ; 
 as though he had come to subvert all the rules of 
 right thinking and all the principles of good conduct, 
 rather than to proclaim once again and give a new 
 meaning to truths with which the world has long 
 been familiar. Of his philosophy in its more tech- 
 nical aspects, as matter upon which enough, perhaps ; 
 has been written, no account need be taken here, 
 except as it affects the form in which he embodies 
 these truths or supplies the fresh light in which he 
 sees them. For whatever claims to originality his 
 metaphysical theory may possess, the chief interest to 
 be found in his views of life is an affair of form 
 rather than of substance ; and he stands in a sphere 
 of his own, not because he sets new problems or opens 
 
VI TRANSLATOR S PREFACE. 
 
 up undiscovered truths, but in the manner in which 
 he approaches what has been already revealed. 
 
 He is not on that account less important ; for the 
 great mass of men at all times requires to have old 
 truths imparted as if they were new — formulated, as 
 it were, directly for them as individuals, and of 
 special application to their own circumstances in life 
 A discussion of human happiness and the way to 
 obtain it is never either unnecessary or uncalled for, 
 if one looks to the extent to which the lives of most 
 men fall short of even a poor ideal, or, again, to the 
 difficulty of reaching any definite and secure conclu- 
 sion. For to such a momentous inquiry as this, the 
 vast majority of mankind gives nothing more than a 
 nominal consideration, accepting the current belief, 
 whatever it may be, on authority, and taking as little 
 thought of the grounds on which it rests as a man 
 walking takes of the motion of the earth. But for 
 those who are not indifferent — for those whose desire 
 to fathom the mystery of existence gives them the 
 right to be called thinking beings — it is just here, in 
 regard to the conclusion to be reached, that a diffi- 
 culty arises, a difficulty affecting the conduct of life : 
 for while the great facts of existence are alike for all, 
 they are variously appreciated, and conclusions differ, 
 chiefly from innate diversity of temperament in those 
 who draw them. It is innate temperament, acting on 
 a view of the facts necessarily incomplete, that has 
 
TRANSLATORS PREFACE. Vll 
 
 inspired so many different teachers. The tendencies 
 of a man's own mind — the Idols of the Cave before 
 which he bows — interpret the facts in accordance 
 with his own nature : he elaborates a system containing, 
 perhaps, a grain of truth, to which the whole of life is 
 then made to conform ; the facts purporting to be the 
 foundation of the theory, and the theory in its turn 
 giving its own colour to the facts. 
 
 Nor is this error, the manipulation of facts to suit a 
 theory, avoided in the views of life which are pre- 
 sented by Schopenhauer. It is true that he aimed 
 especially at freeing himself from the trammels of 
 previous systems ; but he was caught in those of his 
 own. His natural desire was to resist the common 
 appeal to anything extramundane, anything outside 
 or beyond life, as the basis of either hope or fear. 
 He tried to look at life as it is ; but the metaphysical 
 theory on which his whole philosophy rests made it 
 necessary for him, as he thought, to regard it as an 
 unmixed evil. He calls our present existence an in- 
 finitesimal moment between two eternities, the past 
 and the future, a moment, like the life of Plato's 
 " Dwellers in the Cave," filled with the pursuit of 
 shadows ; where everything is relative, phenomenal, 
 illusory, and man is bound in the servitude of ignor- 
 ance, struggle and need, in the endless round of effort 
 and failure. If you confine yourself, says Schopen- 
 hauer, only to some of its small details, life may 
 
viii translator's preface. 
 
 I 
 
 indeed appear to be a comedy, because of the one or 
 two bright spots of happy circumstance to be found 
 in it here and there ; but when you reach a higher 
 point of view and a broader outlook, these soon 
 become invisible, and Life, seen from the distance 
 which brings out the true proportion of all its parts, 
 is revealed as a tragedy — a long record of struggle 
 / and pain, with the death of the hero as the final, 
 certainty. How then, he asks, can a man make the 
 best of his brief hour under the hard conditions of 
 his destiny ? What is the true Wisdom of Life ? 
 
 Schopenhauer has no pre-conceived divine plan to 
 vindicate ; no religious or moral enthusiasm to give a 
 roseate hue to some far-off event, obliging us in the 
 end to think that all things work together for good. 
 Let poets and theologians give play to imagination ! 
 he, at any rate, will profess no knowledge of any- 
 thing beyond our ken. If our existence does not 
 entirely fail of its aim, it must, he says, be suffering ; 
 for this is what meets us everywhere in the world, 
 and it is absurd to look upon it as the result of 
 chance. Still, in the face of all this suffering, and in 
 spite of the fact that the uncertainty of life destroys 
 its value as an end in itself, every man's natural 
 desire is to preserve his existence ; jso that life is a 
 blind, unreasoning force, hurrying us we know not 
 whither. From his high metaphysical standpoint, 
 Schopenhauer is ready to admit that there are many 
 
TRANSLATOR S PREFACE. ix 
 
 things in life which give a short satisfaction and 
 blind us for the moment to the realities of existence, — 
 pleasures as they may be called, in so far as they are 
 a mode of relief; but that pleasure is not positive in 
 its nature nor anything more than the negation of 
 suffering, is proved by the fact that, if pleasures 
 come in abundance, pain soon returns in the form of 
 satiety ; so that the sense of illusion is all that has- 
 been gained. Hence, the most a man can achieve in* 
 the way of welfare is a measure of relief from this 
 suffering ; and if people were prudent, it is at this 
 they would aim, instead of trying to secure a happi- 
 ness which always flies from them. 
 
 It is a trite saying that happiness is a delusion, a 
 chimaera, the fata morgana of the heart ; but here is a 
 writer who will bring our whole conduct into line 
 with it, as a matter of practice; making pain the 
 positive groundwork of life, and a desire to escape it 
 the spur of all effort. While most of those who treat 
 of the conduct of life come at last to the conclusion, 
 more or less vaguely expressed, that religion and 
 morality form a positive source of true happiness, 
 Schopenhauer does not professedly take this view; 
 though it is quite true that the practical outcome of 
 his remarks tends, as will be seen, to support it. 
 His method is different : he does not direct the 
 imagination to anything outside this present life as 
 making it worth while to live at all ; his object is to 
 
X TRANSLATOR S PREFACE. 
 
 state the facts of existence as they immediately 
 appear, and to draw conclusions as to what a wise 
 man will do in the face of them. 
 
 In the practical outcome of Schopenhauer's ethics — 
 the end and aim of those maxims of conduct which 
 he recommends, there is nothing that is not sub- 
 stantially akin to theories of life which, in different 
 forms, the greater part of mankind is presumed to 
 hold in reverence. It is the premises rather than the 
 conclusion of his argument which interest us as some- 
 thing new. The whole world, he says, with all its 
 phenomena of change, growth and development, is 
 ultimately the manifestation of Will — Wille und 
 Vorstellung — a blind force conscious of itself only 
 when it reaches the stage of intellect. And life is a 
 constant self-assertion of this will, a long desire which J 
 is never fulfilled. Disillusion inevitably follows 
 upon attainment, because the will, the thing-in- 
 itself — in philosophical language, the noumenon — 
 always remains as the permanent element ; and with 
 this persistent exercise of its claim, it can never be 
 satisfied. So life is essentially suffering ; and the only \L 
 remedy for it is the freedom of the intellect from the 
 servitude imposed by its master, the will. 
 
 The happiness a man can attain, is thus, in Schopen- 
 hauer's view, negative only ; but how is it to be 
 acquired ? Some temporary relief, he says, may be 
 obtained through the medium of Art; for in the 
 
translator's preface. xi 
 
 apprehension of Art we are raised out of our bondage^ 
 contemplating objects of thought as they are in them- 
 selves, apart from their relations to our own ephemeral 
 existence, and free from any taint of the will. This 
 contemplation of pure thought is destroyed when Art 
 is degraded from its lofty sphere, and made an instru- 
 ment in the bondage of the will. How few of those who 
 feel that the pleasure of Art transcends all others could 
 give such a striking explanation of their feeling ! 
 
 But the highest ethical duty, and consequently the 
 supreme endeavour after happiness, is to withdraw 
 from the struggle of life, and so obtain release from 
 the misery which that struggle imposes upon all, even 
 upon those who are for the moment successful. For 
 as will is the inmost kernel of everything, so it is 
 identical under all its manifestations ; and through 
 the mirror of the world a man may arrive at the 
 knowledge of himself. The recognition of the 
 identity of our own nature with that of others is the 
 beginning and foundation of all true morality. For 
 when a man clearly perceives this solidarity of the 
 will, there is aroused in him a feeling of sympathy 
 ,. which is the main-spring of ethical conduct. This 
 feeling of sympathy must, in any true moral system, 
 prevent our obtaining success at the price of others' 
 loss. Justice, in this theory, comes to be a noble, 
 enlightened self-interest; it will forbid our doing 
 wrong to onr fellow-man, because, in injuring him, we 
 
xii translator's preface. 
 
 are injuring ourselves — our own nature, which is 
 identical with his. On the other hand, the recogni- 
 tion of this identity of the will must lead to com- 
 miseration — a feeling of sympathy with our fellow- 
 sufferers-— to acts of kindness and benevolence, to the 
 manifestation of what Kant, in the Metaphysic of 
 Ethics, calls the only absolute good, the good will. In 
 Schopenhauer's phraseology, the human will, in other 
 words, epo)<s, the love of life, is in itself the root of all 
 evil, and goodness lies in renouncing it. Theoreti- 
 cally, his ethical doctrine is the extreme of socialism, 
 in a large sense ; a recognition of the inner identity 
 and equal claims, of all men with ourselves ; a 
 recognition issuing in dydirrj, universal benevolence, 
 and a stifling of particular desires. 
 
 It may come as a surprise to those who affect to 
 hold Schopenhauer in abhorrence, without, perhaps, 
 really knowing the nature of his views, that, in this 
 theory of the essential evil of the human will — 'ipus, 
 the common selfish idea of life — he is reflecting and 
 indeed probably borrowing what he describes as the 
 fundamental tenet of Christian theology, that the 
 whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain, 1 stand- 
 ing in need of redemption. Though Schopenhauer 
 was no friend to Christian theology in its ordinary 
 tendencies, he was very much in sympathy with some 
 of the doctrines which have been connected with it. 
 1 Romans viii. , 22. 
 
TRANSLATOR S PREFACE. Xlll 
 
 In his opinion the foremost truth which Christianity 
 proclaimed to the world lay in its recognition of 
 pessimism, its view that the world was essentially 
 corrupt, and that the devil was its prince or ruler. 1 
 It would be out of place here to inquire into the exact 
 meaning of this statement, or to determine the pre- 
 cise form of compensation provided for the ills of life 
 under any scheme of doctrine which passes for Chris- 
 tian •, and even if it were in place, the task would be 
 an extremely difficult one ; for probably no system of 
 belief has ever undergone, at various periods, more 
 radical changes than Christianity. But whatever 
 prospect of happiness it may have held out, at an 
 early date of its history, it soon came to teach that 
 the necessary preparation for happiness, as a positive 
 spiritual state, is renunciation, resignation, a looking 
 away from external life to the inner life of the soul — 
 a kingdom not of this world. So far, at least, as con- 
 cerns its view of the world itself, and the main lesson 
 and duty which life teaches, there is nothing in the 
 theory of pessimism which does not accord with that 
 religion which is looked up to as the guide of life over 
 a great part of the civilised world. 
 
 What Schopenhauer does is to attempt a meta- 
 physical explanation of the evil of life, without any 
 reference to anything outside it. Philosophy, he 
 urges, should be cosmology, not theology ; an explana- 
 1 John xii. , 31. l 
 
xiv TRANSLATORS PREFACE. 
 
 tion of the world, not a scheme of divine knowledge : 
 it should leave the gods alone — to use an ancient 
 phrase — and claim to be left alone in return. Scho- 
 penhauer was not concerned, as the apostles and 
 fathers of the Church were concerned, to formulate a 
 scheme by which the ills of this life should be 
 remedied in another — an appeal to the poor and 
 oppressed, conveyed often in a material form, as, for 
 instance, in the story of Dives and Lazarus. In his 
 theory of life as the self-assertion of will, he endeav- 
 ours to account for the sin, misery and iniquity of the 
 world, and to point to the way of escape by the denial 
 of the will to live. 
 
 Though Schopenhauer's views of life have this 
 much in common with certain aspects of Christian 
 doctrine, they are in decided antagonism with another 
 theory which, though, comparatively speaking, the 
 birth of yesterday, has already been dignified by the 
 name of a religion, and has, no doubt, a certain 
 number of followers. It is the theory which looks 
 upon the life of mankind as a continual progress 
 towards a state of perfection, and humanity in its 
 nobler tendencies as itself worthy of worship. To 
 those who embrace this theory, it will seem that 
 because Schopenhauer does not hesitate to declare the 
 evil in the life of mankind to be far in excess of the 
 good, and M as long as the human will remains 
 what it is, any radical change for the better to be im- 
 
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. XV 
 
 possible, he is therefore outside the pale of civilisation, 
 an alien from the commonwealth of ordered know- 
 ledge and progress. But it has yet to be seen how 
 the religion of humanity will fare, either as a theory 
 of conduct or as a guide of life. 
 
 If there is any one doctrine more than another 
 which has distinguished Christianity wherever it has 
 been a living force among its adherents, it is the 
 doctrine of renunciation; the same doctrine which, 
 in a different shape and with other surroundings, 
 forms the spirit of Buddhism. With those great 
 religions of the world which mankind has hitherto 
 professed to revere as the most ennobling of all in- 
 fluences, Schopenhauer's theories, not perhaps in their 
 details, but in the principle which informs them, are, 
 as we have seen, in close alliance. According to 
 him, too, renunciation, in the same sense, is the 
 truest wisdom of life, from the higher ethical stand- 
 point. His heroes are the Christian ascetics of the 
 Middle Age, and the followers of Buddha who turn away 
 from the Sansara to the Nirvana. But our modern 
 habits of thought are different. We look askance at 
 the doctrines, and we have no great enthusiasm for 
 the heroes. The system which is in vogue amongst 
 us just now objects to the identification of nature 
 with evil, and, in fact, abandons ethical dualism alto- 
 gether. yAnd if nature is not evil, where, it will be 
 asked, is the necessity or the benefit of renunciation 
 
Xvi TRANSLATOR S PREFACE. 
 
 — a question which may even come to be generally- 
 raised, in a not very distant future, on behalf of some 
 new conception of Christianity. And from another 
 point of view, let it be most fully and frankly 
 admitted that renunciation is incompatible with 
 ordinary practice, with the rules of life as we are 
 compelled to formulate them ; and that, to the vast 
 majority, the doctrine seems little but a mockery, a 
 hopelessly unworkable plan, inapplicable to the con- 
 ditions under which men have to exist. 
 
 In spite of the fact that he is theoretically in 
 sympathy with truths which lie at the foundation of 
 certain widely revered systems, the world has not yet 
 accepted Schopenhauer for what he proclaimed him* 
 self to be, a great teacher- and probably for the reason 
 that hope is not an element in his wisdom of life, and 
 that he attenuates love into something that is not a 
 real, living force — a shadowy recognition of the 
 identity of the will. For men are disinclined to 
 welcome a theory which neither flatters their present 
 position nor holds out any prospect of better things 
 to come. Optimism — the belief that in the end 
 everything will be for the best — is the natural creed 
 of mankind ; and a writer who of set purpose seeks 
 to undermine it by an appeal to facts is regarded as 
 one who tries to rob humanity of its rights. How 
 seldom an appeal to the facts within our reach is 
 really made ! Whether the evil of life actually out- 
 
translator's preface. xvii 
 
 weighs the good ; or, if we should look for better 
 things, what is the possibility or the nature of a 
 Future Life, either for ourselves as individuals, or as 
 part of some great whole, or, again, as contributing to 
 a coming state of perfection? — such inquiries claim an 
 amount of attention which the mass of men every- 
 where is unwilling to give. But, in any case, whether 
 it is a vague assent to current beliefs, or a blind reliance 
 on a baseless certainty, or an impartial attempt to put 
 away what is false, — hope remains as the deepest 
 foundation of every faith in a happy future. 
 
 But it should be observed that this looking to the 
 future as a complement for the present is dictated 
 mainly by the desire to remedy existing ills ; and 
 that the great hold which religion has on mankind, as 
 an incentive to present happiness, is the promise it 
 makes of coming perfection. Hope for the future is 
 a tacit admission of evil in the present ; for if a man 
 is completely happy in this life, and looks upon 
 happiness as the prevailing order, he will not think 
 over much of another. So a discussion of the nature of 
 happiness is not thought complete if it takes account 
 only of our present life, and unless it connects what 
 we are now and what we do here with what we may 
 be hereafter. Schopenhauer's theory does not profess 
 to do this : it promises no positive good to the_ia- 
 dividual, at most, only relief ; he breaks the idol of 
 the world, and sets up nothing in its place ; and like 
 
XV111 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 many another iconoclast, he has long been condemned 
 by those whose temples he has desecrated. If there 
 are optimistic theories of life, it is not life itself, he 
 would argue, which gives colour to them ; it is rather 
 the reflection of some great final cause which humanity 
 has created as the last hope of its redemption : — 
 
 Heaven but the vision of fulfilled desire, 
 And hell the shadow from a soul 071 fire, 
 
 Cast on the darkness into which ourselves, 
 So late emerged from, shall so soon expire. l 
 
 Still, hope, it may be said, is not knowledge, nor a 
 real answer to any question ; at most, a makeshift, a 
 moral support for intellectual weakness. The truth 
 is that, as theories, both optimism and pessimism are 
 failures, because they are extreme views where only 
 a very partial judgment is possible. And in view of 
 the great uncertainty of all answers, most of those 
 who do not accept a stereotyped system leave the 
 question alone, as being either of little interest, or of 
 no bearing on the welfare of their lives, which are 
 commonly satisfied with low aims ; tacitly ridiculing 
 those who demand an answer as the most pressing 
 affair of existence. But the fact that the final pro- 
 blems of the world are still open, makes in favour of 
 an honest attempt to think them out, in spite of all 
 previous failure or still existing difficulty ; and how- 
 
 1 Omar Khayyam ; translated by E. Fitzgerald. 
 
TRANSLATOR S PREFACE. XIX 
 
 ever old these problems may be, the endeavour tc 
 solve them is one which it is always worth while to 
 encourage afresh. For the individual advantages 
 which attend an effort to find the true path accrue 
 quite apart from any success in reaching the goal; 
 and even though the height we strive to climb be 
 inaccessible, we can still see and understand more 
 than those who never leave the plain. The sphere, it 
 is true, is enormous. It is the world and life and 
 destiny as a whole ; and our mental vision is so ill- 
 adapted to a range of this extent that to aim at form- 
 ing a complete scheme is to attempt the impossible. 
 It must be recognised that the data are insufficient for 
 large views, and that we ought not to go beyond the 
 facts we have, the facts of ordinary life, interpreted 
 by the common experience of every day. These form 
 our only material. The views we take must of 
 necessity be fragmentary ; they can be little but 
 apergus, rough guesses at the undiscovered, or else of 
 the same nature as all our possessions in the way of 
 knowledge — small tracts of solid land reclaimed from 
 the mysterious ocean of the unknown. 
 
 But if we do not admit Schopenhauer to be a great 
 teacher, because he is out of sympathy with the 
 highest aspirations of mankind, and too ready to 
 dogmatise from partial views, he is a very suggestive 
 writer, and eminently readable. His style is brilliant, 
 animated, forcible, pungent; although it is also dis- 
 
XX TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 cursive, irresponsible, and with a tendency to super- 
 ficial generalisation. He brings i n the most unexpected 
 topics without any very sure sense of their relative 
 place ; everything, in fact, seems to be fair game, when 
 he has taken up his pen. His irony is noteworthy ; 
 for it extends beyond mere isolated sentences, and 
 sometimes applies to whole passages, which must be 
 read cum grano satis. And if he has grave faults as 
 well as excellences of literary treatment, he is at least 
 always witty and amusing, and that, too, in dealing 
 with subjects — as here, for instance, with the Conduct of 
 Life — on which many others have been at once severe 
 and dull. It is easy to complain that though he is 
 witty and amusing, he is often at the same time bitter 
 and ill-natured. This is in some measure the un- 
 pleasant side of his uncompromising devotion to truth, 
 his resolute eagerness to dispel illusion at any cost — 
 those defects of his qualities which were intensified by 
 a solitary and, until his last years, unappreciated life. 
 He was naturally more disposed to coerce than to 
 flatter the world into accepting his views ; he was 
 above all things un esprit fort, and at times brutal 
 in the use of his strength. If it should be urged that, 
 however great his literary qualities, he is not worth 
 reading because he takes a narrow view of life and is 
 blind to some of its greatest blessings, it will be well 
 to remember the profound truth of that line which a 
 friend inscribed on his earliest biography : Si non 
 
TRANSLATOR'S preface, xxi 
 
 errasset fecerat ille minus, 1 a truth which is seldom 
 without application, whatever be the form of human 
 effort. Schopenhauer cannot be neglected because he 
 takes an unpleasant view of existence, for it is a view 
 which must present itself, at some time, to every 
 thoughtful person. To be outraged by Schopenhauer 
 means to be ignorant of many of the facts of life. 
 
 In the volumes containing his Aphorismen zur 
 Lebensweisheit, Schopenhauer abandons the high meta- 
 physical standpoint, and discusses, with the same zest 
 and appreciation as in fact marked his enjoyment of 
 them, some of the pleasures which a wise man will 
 seek to obtain, — health, moderate possessions, intel- 
 lectual riches. And when, as in this little work, he 
 comes to speak of the wisdom of life as the practical 
 art of living, the pessimist view of human destiny is 
 obtruded as little as possible. His remarks profess to 
 be the result of a compromise — an attempt to judge 
 life by the common standards. He is content to 
 call these witty and instructive pages a series of 
 aphorisms; thereby indicating that he makes no claim 
 to expound a complete theory of conduct. It will 
 doubtless occur to any intelligent reader that his ob- 
 servations are but fragmentary thoughts on various 
 phases of life; and, in reality, mere aphorisms — in the 
 old, Greek sense of the word — pithy distinctions, 
 definitions of facts, a marking-ofT, as it were, of the 
 1 Slightly altered from Martial. Epigram : I. xxii. 
 
xxh translator's preface. 
 
 true from the false in some of our ordinary notions of 
 life and prosperity. Here there is little that is not in 
 complete harmony with precepts to which the world 
 has long been accustomed ; and in this respect, also, 
 Schopenhauer offers a suggestive comparison rather 
 than a contrast with most writers on happiness. 
 
 The philosopher in his study is conscious that the 
 world is never likely to embrace his higher metaphy- 
 sical or ethical standpoint, and annihilate the will to 
 live ; nor did Schopenhauer himself do so except so far 
 as, in common with most serious students of life, he 
 avoided the ordinary aims of mankind. The theory 
 which recommended universal benevolence as the 
 highest ethical duty, came, in personal practice, to 
 mean a formal standing-aloof — the ne plus ultra of 
 individualism. Wisdom, as the ordinary art of living, 
 he took to be a compromise. We are here not by 
 any choice of our own ; and while we strive to make 
 the best of it, we must not let ourselves be deceived. 
 If we want to be happy, he says, it will not do to 
 cherish illusions. Schopenhauer would have found 
 nothing admirable in the conclusion at which the late 
 M. Edmond Scherer, for instance, arrived. L'art de 
 vivre, he wrote in his preface to Amiel's Journal, c'esl 
 de se faire une raison, de souscrire au compromis, de se 
 preter aux fictions. Schopenhauer conceives his mis- 
 sion to be, rather, to dispel illusion, to tear the mask 
 from life ; — a violent operation, not always productive 
 
TRANSLATOR S PREFACE. XX111 
 
 of good. Some illusion, he urges, may profitably bo 
 dispelled by recognising that no amount of external 
 aid will make up for inward deficiency ; and that if a 
 man has not got the elements of happiness in himself, 
 all the pride, pleasure, beauty and interest of the 
 world will not give it to him. Success in life, as 
 gauged by the ordinary material standard, means to 
 place faith wholly in externals as the source of happi- 
 ness, to assert and emphasize the common will to live, 
 in a word, to be vulgar. He protests against this 
 search for happiness — something subjective — in the 
 world of our surroundings, or anywhere but in a 
 man's own self; a protest the sincerity of which 
 might well be imitated by some professed advocates 
 of spiritual claims. 
 
 It would be interesting to place his utterances or 
 this point side by side with those of a distinguished 
 interpreter of nature in this country, who has recently 
 attracted thousands of readers by describing The - '(JA-ocJ~ 
 Pleasures of Life ; in other words, the blessings which 
 the world holds out to all who can enjoy them — 
 health, books, friends, travel, education, art. On the 
 common ground of their regard for these pleasures 
 there is no disagreement between the optimist and the 
 pessimist. But a characteristic difference of view 
 may be found in the application of a rule of life 
 which Schopenhauer seems never to tire of repeating ; 
 namely, that happiness consists for the most part in 
 
xxiv translator's preface. 
 
 what a man is in himself, and that the pleasure he 
 derives from these blessings will depend entirely upon 
 the extent to which his personality really allows him 
 to appreciate them. This is a rule which runs some 
 risk of being overlooked when a writer tries to 
 dazzle the mind's eye by describing all the possible 
 sources of pleasure in the world of our surroundings ; 
 but Sir John Lubbock, in common with every one 
 who attempts a fundamental answer to the question of 
 happiness, cannot afford to overlook it. The truth of 
 the rule is perhaps taken for granted in his account of 
 life's pleasures ; but it is significant that it is only 
 when he comes to speak of life's troubles that he 
 freely admits the force of it. Happiness, he says, in 
 this latter connection, depends much more on what is 
 within than without us. Yet a rigid application of this 
 truth might perhaps discount the effect of those 
 pleasures with which the world is said to abound. 
 That happiness as well as unhappiness depends mainly 
 upon what is within, is more clearly recognised in the 
 case of trouble ; for when troubles come upon a man, 
 they influence him, as a rule, much more deeply than 
 pleasures. How few, even amongst the millions to 
 whom these blessings are open — health, books, travel, 
 art — really find any true or permanent happiness in 
 them ! 
 
 While Schopenhauer's view of the pleasures of life 
 may be elucidated by comparing it with that of a 
 
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. XXV 
 
 popular writer like Sir John Lubbock, and by con- 
 trasting the appeals they severally make to the outer 
 and the inner world as a source of happiness, 
 Schopenhauer's view of life itself will stand out more 
 clearly if we remember the opinion so boldly ex- 
 pressed by the same English writer. If we resolutely 
 look, observes Sir John Lubbock, I do not say at 
 the bright side of things, but at things as they really 
 are ; if we avail ourselves of the manifold blessings 
 which surround us; we cannot but feel that life is 
 indeed a glorious inheritance. 1 There is a splendid 
 excess of optimism about this statement which well 
 fits it to show up the darker picture drawn by the 
 German philosopher. 
 
 Finally, it should be remembered that though 
 Schopenhauer's picture of the world is gloomy and 
 sombre, there is nothing weak or unmanly in his 
 attitude. If a happy existence, he says, — not merely 
 an existence free from pain — is denied us, we can at 
 least be heroes and face life with courage : das 
 hochste was der Mensch erlangen kann ist ein heroischer 
 Lebenslauf A noble character will never complain at 
 misfortune; for if a man looks round him at other 
 manifestations of that which is his own inner nature, 
 the will, he finds sorrows happening to his fellow-men 
 harder to bear than any that have come upon himself. 
 And the ideal of nobility is to deserve the praise 
 1 The Pleasures of Life. Part I., p. 5. 
 
XXVI TRANSLATOR S PREFACE. 
 
 which Hamlet — in Shakespeare's Tragedy of Pessim- 
 ism — gave to his friend : 
 
 Thou hast been 
 As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing. 
 
 But perhaps Schopenhauer's theory carries with it 
 its owd correction. He describes existence as a more 
 or less violent oscillation between pain and boredom. 
 If this were really the sum of life, and we had to 
 reason from such a partial view, it is obvious that 
 happiness would lie in action ; and that life would be 
 so constituted as to supply two natural and inevitable 
 incentives to action, and thus to contain in itself the 
 very conditions of happiness. Life itself reveals our 
 destiny. It is not the struggle which produces misery, 
 it is the mistaken aims and the low ideals — was uns 
 alle bdndigt, das Gemeine ! That life is an evil is a 
 deduction, and possibly a mistaken deduction, from 
 his metaphysical creed. Whether his scheme of things 
 is correct or not — and it shares the common fate of all 
 metaphysical systems in being unverifiable, and to 
 that extent unprofitable — he will in the last resort 
 have made good his claim to be read by his insight 
 into the varied needs of human life. It may be that 
 a future age will consign his metaphysics to the 
 philosophical lumber-room ; but he is a literary artist 
 as well as a philosopher, and he can make a bid for 
 fame in either capacity. T. B. S. 
 
 December, 1889. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 
 FAOB 
 
 
 Introduction . . . . 
 
 I 
 
 I. 
 
 Division of the Subject . 
 
 3 
 
 II. 
 
 Personality, or what a Man is . 
 
 . 15 
 
 III. 
 
 Property, 
 
 OR WHAT A Man has . 
 
 . 48 
 
 IV. 
 
 Position, or a Man's Place in the Estimation 
 
 
 of Others — 
 
 
 
 Sect. 
 
 i. Reputation 
 
 • 59 
 
 
 3» 
 
 2. Pride .... 
 
 . 63 
 
 
 »» 
 
 3. Rank .... 
 
 . 72 
 
 
 *♦ 
 
 4. Honour ... 
 
 • 73 
 
 
 M 
 
 5. Farns .... 
 
 . 116 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 In these pages I shall speak of The Wisdom of Life in 
 the common meaning of the term, as the art, namely, 
 of ordering our lives so as to obtain the greatest 
 possible amount of pleasure and success ; an art the 
 theory of which may be called Eudcemonology, for it 
 teaches us how to lead a happy existence. Such an 
 existence might perhaps be defined as one which, 
 looked at from a purely objective point of view, or, 
 rather, after cool and mature reflection — for the 
 question necessarily involves subjective considerations, 
 — would be decidedly preferable to non-existence ; 
 implying that we should cling to it for its own sake, 
 and not merely from the fear of death ; and further, 
 that we should never like it to come to an end. 
 
 Now whether human life corresponds, or could 
 possibly correspond, to this conception of existence, is 
 a question to which, as is well-known, my philoso- 
 phical system returns a negative answer. On the 
 eudsemonistic hypothesis, however, the question must 
 be answered in the affirmative ; and I have shown, in 
 the second volume of my chief work (ch. 49), that 
 this hypothesis is based upon a fundamental mistake. 
 Accordingly, in elaborating the scheme of a happy 
 existence, I have had to make a complete surrender 
 of the higher metaphysical and ethical standpoint tc 
 
2 , .' ■ INTRODUCTION. 
 
 which my own theories lead ; and everything I shall 
 say here will to some extent rest upon a compromise ; 
 in so far, that is, as I take the common standpoint of 
 every day, and embrace the error which is at the 
 bottom of it. My remarks, therefore, will possess 
 only a qualified value, for the very word eudosmono- 
 logy is a euphemism. Further, I make no claims to 
 completeness ; partly because the subject is inex- 
 haustible, and partly because I should otherwise have 
 to say over again what has been already said by 
 others. 
 
 The only book composed, as far as I remember, 
 with a like purpose to that which animates this 
 collection of aphorisms, is Cardan's Be utilitate ex 
 ttdversis capiendo,, which is well worth reading, and 
 may be used to supplement the present work. 
 Aristotle, it is true, has a few words on eudsemono- 
 logy in the fifth chapter of the first book of his 
 Rhetoric; but what he says does not come to very 
 much. As compilation is not my business, I have 
 made no use of these predecessors; more especially 
 because in the process of compiling individuality of 
 view is lost, and individuality of view is the kernel 
 of works of this kind. In general, indeed, the wise 
 in all ages have always said the same thing, and the 
 fools, who at all times form the immense majority, 
 have in their way, too, acted alike, and done j ust the 
 opposite; and so it will continue. For, as Voltaire 
 says, we shall leave this world as foolish and as 
 wicked as we found it on our arrival. 
 
THE WISDOM OF LIFE 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 DIVISION OF THE SUBJECT. 
 
 Aristotle 1 divides the blessings of life iDto three 
 classes — those which come to us from without, those 
 of the soul, and those of the body. Keeping nothing 
 of this division but the number, I observe that the 
 fundamental differences in human lot may be reduced 
 to three distinct classes : 
 
 (1) What a man is : that is to say, personality, in 
 the widest sense of the word ; under which are in- 
 cluded health, strength, beauty, temperament, moral 
 character, intelligence and education. 
 
 (2) What a man has : that is, property and posses- 
 sions of every kind. 
 
 (3) How a man stands in the estimation of others : 
 by which is to be understood, as everybody knows, 
 what a man is in the eyes of his fellow-men, or, more 
 strictly, the light in which they regard him. This is 
 shown by their opinion of him ; and their opinion is in 
 its turn manifested by the honour in which he is held, 
 and by his rank and reputation. 
 
 1 Eth. Nichom., I. 8. 
 
4 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 The differences which come under the first head are 
 those which Nature herself has set between man and 
 man ; and from this fact alone we may at once infer 
 that they influence the happiness or unhappiness of 
 mankind in a much more vital and radical way than 
 those contained under the two following heads, which 
 are merely the effect of human arrangements. Com- 
 pared with genuine personal advantages, such as a 
 great mind or a great heart, all the privileges of rank 
 or birth, even of royal birth, are but as kings on the 
 stage to kings in real life. The same thing was said 
 long ago by , Metrodorus, the earliest disciple of 
 Epicurus, who wrote as the title of one of his chapters, 
 The happiness we receive from ourselves- is greater 
 than that which we obtain from our surroundings. 1 
 And it is an obvious fact, which cannot be called in 
 question, that the principal element in a man's well- 
 being, — indeed, in the whole tenor of his existence, — is 
 what he is made of, his inner constitution. For this 
 is the immediate source of that inward satisfaction or 
 dissatisfaction resulting from the sum total of his 
 sensations, desires and thoughts ; whilst his surround- 
 ings, on the other hand, exert only a mediate or 
 indirect influence upon him. This is why the same 
 external events or circumstances affect no two people 
 alike ; even with perfectly similar surroundings every 
 one lives in a w T orld of his own. For a man has 
 immediate apprehension only of his own ideas, feelings 
 and volitions ; the outer world can influence him only 
 in so far as it brings these to life. The world in 
 which a man lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in 
 1 Cf. Clemens Alex. Strom. II., 21. 
 
DIVISION OF THE SUBJECT. 5 
 
 which he looks at it, and so it proves different to 
 different men ; to one it is barren, dull, and super- 
 ficial ; to another rich, interesting, and full of meaning. 
 On hearing of the interesting events which have hap- 
 pened in the course of a man's experience, many people 
 will wish that similar things had happened in their lives 
 too, completely forgetting that they should be envious 
 - rather of the mental aptitude which lent those events 
 the significance they possess when he describes them. 
 To a man of genius they were interesting adventures ; 
 but to the dull perceptions of an ordinary individual 
 they would have been stale, everyday occurrences. 
 This is in the highest degree the case with many of 
 Goethe's and Byron's poems, which are obviously 
 founded upon actual facts; where it is open to a 
 foolish reader to envy the poet because so many 
 delightful things happened to him, instead of envying 
 that mighty power of phantasy which was capable of 
 turning a fairly common experience into something 
 so great and beautiful. 
 
 In the same way, a person of melancholy tempera- 
 ment will make a scene in a tragedy out of what 
 appears to the sanguine man only in the light of an 
 interesting conflict, and to a phlegmatic soul as some- 
 thing without any meaning. This all rests upon 
 the fact that every event, in order to be realised and 
 appreciated, requires the co-operation of two factors, 
 namely, a subject and an object ; although these are 
 as closely and necessarily connected as oxygen and 
 hydrogen in water. When therefore the objective or 
 external factor in an experience is actually the same, 
 but the subjective or personal appreciation of it varies, 
 
6 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 the event is just as much a different one in the eyes of 
 different persons as if the objective factors had not 
 been alike ; for to a blunt intelligence the fairest and 
 best object in the world presents only a poor reality 
 and is therefore only poorly appreciated, — like a fine 
 landscape in dull weather, or in the reflection of a bad 
 camera obscura. In plain language, every man is 
 pent up within the limits of his own consciousness, 
 and cannot directly get beyond those limits any more 
 than he can get beyond his own skin ; so external aid 
 is not of much use to him. On the stage, one man is 
 a prince, another a minister, a third a servant or a 
 soldier or a general, and so on, — mere external differ- 
 ences : the inner reality, the kernel of all these appear- 
 ances is the same — a poor player, with all the anxieties 
 of his lot. In life it is just the same. Differences of 
 rank and wealth give every man his part to play, but 
 this by no means implies a difference of inward happi- 
 ness and pleasure ; here, too, there is the same being 
 in all — a poor mortal, with his hardships and troubles. 
 Though these may, indeed, in every case proceed from 
 dissimilar causes, they are in their essential nature 
 much the same in all their forms, with degrees of 
 intensity which vary, no doubt, but in no wise corre- 
 spond to the part a man has to play, or the presence or 
 absence of position and wealth. Since everything 
 which exists or happens for a man exists only in his 
 consciousness and happens for it alone, the most essen- 
 tial thing for a man is the constitution of this con- 
 sciousness, which is in most cases far more important 
 than the circumstances which go to form its contents. 
 All the pride and pleasure of the world, mirrored in 
 
DIVISION OF THE SUBJECT. 7 
 
 the dull consciousness of a fool, is poor indeed com* 
 pared with the imagination of Cervantes writing his 
 Don Quixote in a miserable prison. The objective half 
 of life and reality is in the hand of fate, and accord- 
 ingly takes various forms in different cases : the 
 subjective half is ourself, and in essentials it always 
 remains the same. 
 
 Hence the life of every man is stamped with the 
 same character throughout, however much his exter- 
 nal circumstances may alter ; it is like a series of 
 variations on a single theme. No one can get beyond 
 his own individuality. An animal, under whatever 
 circumstances it is placed, remains within the narrow 
 limits to which nature has irrevocably consigned it; so 
 that our endeavours to make a pet happy must always 
 keep within the compass of its nature, and be restricted 
 to what it can feel. So it is with man ; the measure 
 of the happiness he can attain is determined before- 
 hand by his individuality. More especially is this the 
 case with the mental powers, which fix once for all his 
 capacity for the higher kinds of pleasure.; If these powers 
 are small, no efforts from without, nothing that his 
 fellow-men or that fortune can do for him, will suffice to 
 raise him above the ordinary degree of human happi- 
 ness and pleasure, half animal though it be. His only 
 resources are his sensual appetite, — a cosy and cheerful 
 family life at the most, — low company and vulgar 
 pastime ; even education, on the whole, can avail 
 little, if anything, for the enlargement of his horizon. 
 For the highest, most varied and lasting pleasures are 
 those of the mind, however much our youth may 
 deceive us on this point ; and the pleasures of tho 
 
8 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 mind turn chiefly on the powers of the mind. It is 
 clear, then, that our happiness depends in a great 
 degree upon what we are, upon our individuality, 
 whilst lot or destiny is generally taken to mean only 
 what we have, or our refutation. Our lot, in this 
 sense, may improve ; but we do not ask much of it if 
 we are inwardly rich : on the other hand, a fool 
 remains a fool, a dull blockhead, to his last hour, even 
 though he were surrounded by houris in paradise. 
 This is why Goethe, in the West-ostlicher Divan, says 
 that every man, whether he occupy a low position in 
 life, or emerges as its victor, testifies to personality as 
 the greatest factor in happiness : — 
 
 Voile und Knecht und Ueberwinder 
 
 Sie gestehen, zu jeder Zeit, 
 Hb'chstes Gluclc der Erdeiikinder 
 
 Sei nur die Personlichkeit. 
 
 Common experience shows that the subjective 
 element in life is incomparably more important for 
 our happiness and pleasure than the objective, from 
 such sayings as Hunger is the best sauce, and Youth 
 and Age cannot live together, up to the life of the 
 Genius and the Saint. Health outweighs all other 
 blessings so much that one may really say that a 
 healthy beggar is happier than an ailing king. A 
 quiet and cheerful temperament, happy in the enjoy- 
 ment of a perfectly sound physique, an intellect clear, 
 lively, penetrating and seeing things as they are, a 
 moderate and gentle will, and therefore a good con- 
 science — these are privileges which no rank or wealth 
 can make up for or replace. For what a man is in 
 
DIVISION OF THE SUBJECT. 9 
 
 himself, what accompanies him when he is alone, what 
 no one can give or take away, is obviously more 
 essential to him than everything he has in the way of 
 possessions, or even what he may be in the e} 7 es of 
 the world. An intellectual man in complete solitude 
 has excellent entertainment in his own thoughts and 
 fancies, whilst no amount or diversity of social 
 pleasure, theatres, excursions and amusements, can 
 ward oif boredom from a dullard. A good, temperate, 
 gentle character can be happy in needy circumstances, 
 whilst a covetous, envious and malicious man, even if 
 he be the richest in the world, goes miserable. Nay 
 more ; to one who has the constant delight of a special 
 individuality, with a high degree of intellect, most of 
 the pleasures which are run after by mankind are 
 perfectly superfluous ; they are even a trouble 
 and a burden. And so Horace says of himself, that, 
 however many are deprived of the fancy-goods 
 of life, there is one at least who can live without 
 them : — 
 
 Gemmas, marmor, ebur, Tyrrhena sigilla, tabellas, 
 
 Argentum, vestes Ga&ulo murice tinctas 
 
 Sunt qui non habeant, est qui non curat habere ; 
 
 and when Socrates saw various articles of luxury 
 spread out for sale, he exclaimed : How much there is 
 in the world that I do not want. 
 
 So the first and most essential element in our life's 
 happiness is what we are, — our personality, if for no 
 other reason than that it is a constant factor coming 
 into play under all circumstances. Besides, unlike the 
 blessings which are described under the other two 
 
10 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 heads, it is not the sport of destiny and cannot be 
 wrested from us ;— and, so far, it is endowed with an 
 absolute value in contrast to the merely relative 
 worth of the other two. The consequence of this is 
 that it is much more difficult than people commonly 
 suppose to get a hold on a man from without. But 
 here the all-powerful agent, Time, comes in and claims 
 its rights, and before its influence physical and 
 mental advantages gradually waste away. Moral 
 character alone remains inaccessible to it. In view of 
 the destructive effect of time, it seems, indeed, as if 
 the blessings named under the other two heads, of 
 which time cannot directly rob us, were superior to 
 those of the first. Another advantage might be 
 claimed for them, namely, that being in their very 
 nature objective and external, they are attainable, 
 and every one is presented with the possibility, at 
 least, of coming into possession of them ; whilst what is 
 subjective is not open to us to acquire, but making its 
 entry by a kind of divine right, it remains for life, 
 immutable, inalienable, an inexorable doom. Let 
 me quote those lines in which Goethe describes how an 
 unalterable destiny is assigned to every man at the hour 
 of his birth, so that he can develope only in the lines 
 laid down for him, as it were, by the conjunctions of 
 the stars ; and how the Sibyl and the prophets declare 
 that himself a man can never escape, nor any power 
 of time avail to change the path on which his life 
 is cast : — 
 
 Wie an dem Tag, der dich der Welt verliehe?i, 
 Die Sonne stand zum Grusse der Planeten, 
 Bist alsobald void fort und fort gediehen, 
 
DIVISION OF THE SUBJECT. 11 
 
 Nack dem Gesetz, wonach du angetreten. 
 So musst du sein, dir Icawnst du nicht entjliehen, 
 So sagten schon Sibyllen und Propheten ; 
 TJnd keine Zeit und keine Macht zerstiiclielt 
 Geprdgte Form, die lebend sich enturiekelt. 
 
 The only thing that stands in our power to achieve, 
 is to make the most advantageous use possible of the 
 » personal qualities we possess, and accordingly to 
 follow such pursuits only as will call them into play, 
 to strive after the kind of perfection of which they 
 admit and to avoid every other ; consequently, to choose 
 the position, occupation and manner of life which are 
 most suitable for their development. 
 
 Imagine a man endowed with herculean strength 
 who is compelled by circumstances to follow a seden- 
 tary occupation, some minute exquisite work of the 
 hands, for example, or to engage in study and mental 
 labour demanding quite other powers, and just those 
 which he has not got, — compelled, that is, to leave 
 unused the powers in which he is pre-eminently 
 strong ; a man placed like this will never feel happy all 
 his life through. Even more miserable will be the lot 
 of the man with intellectual powers of a very high 
 order, who has to leave them undeveloped and un- 
 employed, in the pursuit of a calling which does not 
 require them, some bodily labour, perhaps, for which 
 his strength is insufficient. Still, in a case of this 
 kind, it should be our care, especially in youth, to 
 avoid the precipice of presumption, and not ascribe to 
 ourselves a superfluity of power which is not there. 
 
 Since the blessings described under the first head 
 decidedly outweigh those contained under the other 
 
12 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 two, *t> va manifestly a wiser course to aim at the 
 maintenance of our health and the cultivation of our 
 faculties, than at the amassing of wealth; but this 
 must not be mistaken as meaning that we should 
 neglect to acquire an adequate supply of the necessaries 
 of life. Wealth, in the strict sense of the word, that 
 is, great superfluity, can do little for our happiness ; 
 and many rich people feel unhappy just because they 
 are 'without any true mental culture or knowledge, 
 and consequently have no objective interests which 
 would qualify them for intellectual occupations. For 
 beyond the satisfaction of some real and natural 
 necessities, all that the possession of wealth can achieve 
 has a very small influence upon our happiness, in the 
 proper sense of the word ; indeed, wealth rather dis- 
 turbs it, because the preservation of property entails 
 a great many unavoidable anxieties. And still men 
 are a thousand times more intent on becoming rich 
 than on acquiring culture, though it is quite certain 
 that what a man is contributes much more to his 
 happiness than what he has. So you may see many 
 a man, as industrious as an ant, ceaselessly occupied 
 from morning to night in the endeavour to increase 
 his heap of gold. Beyond the narrow horizon of 
 means to this end, he knows nothing ; his mind is a 
 blank, and consequently unsusceptible to any other 
 influence. The highest pleasures, those of the in- 
 tellect, are to him inaccessible, and he tries in vain 
 to replace them by the fleeting pleasures of sense in 
 which he indulges, lasting but a brief hour and at 
 tremendous cost. And if he is lucky, his struggles 
 result in his having a really .great pile of gold, which 
 

 DIVISION OF THE SUBJECT. 13 
 
 he leaves to his heir, either to make it still larger, or 
 to squander it in extravagance. A life like this, 
 though pursued with a sense of earnestness and an 
 air of importance, is just as silly as many another 
 which has a fool's cap for its symbol. 
 
 What a man has in himself is, then, the chief 
 element in his happiness. Because this is, as a rule, 
 so very little, most of those who are placed beyond 
 the struggle with penury, feel at bottom quite as un- 
 happy as those who are still engaged in it. Their 
 minds are vacant, their imagination dull, their spirits 
 poor, and so they are driven to the company of those 
 like them — for siwdlis simili gaudet — where they 
 make common pursuit of pastime and entertainment, 
 consisting for the most part in sensual pleasure, 
 amusement of every kind, and finally, in excels 
 and libertinism. A young man of rich family enter,-* 
 upon life with a large patrimony, and often runs 
 through it in an incredibly short space of time, in 
 vicious extravagance ; and why ? Simply because, 
 here too, the mind is empty and void, and so the man 
 is bored with existence. He was sent forth into 
 the world outwardly rich but inwardly poor, and his 
 vain endeavour was to make his external wealth 
 compensate for his inner poverty, by trying to obtain 
 everything from without, like an old maii who seeks 
 to strengthen himself as King David or Marechal de 
 Ketz tried to do. And so in the end one who is in- 
 wardly poor comes to be also poor outwardly. 
 
 I need not insist upon the importance of the other 
 two kinds of blessings which make up the happiness 
 of human life ; now-a-days the value of possessing 
 
14 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 them is too well known to require advertisement. 
 The third class, it is true, may seem, compared with 
 the second, of a very ethereal character, as it consists 
 only of other people's opinions. Still everyone has to 
 strive for reputation, that is to say, a good name. Kank, 
 on the other hand, should be aspired to only by those 
 who serve the State, and fame by very few indeed. 
 In any case, reputation is looked upon as a priceless 
 treasure, and fame as the most precious of all the 
 blessings a man can attain, — the Golden Fleece, as it 
 were, of the elect : whilst only fools will prefer rank 
 to property. The second and third classes, moreover, 
 are reciprocally cause and effect ; so far that is, as 
 Petronius' maxim, habes habeberis, is true ; and con- 
 versely, the favour of others, in all its forms, of teu 
 puts us in the way of ^retting what we want 
 
\ 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 PERSONALITY, OR WHAT A MAN IS. 
 
 We have already seen, in general, that what a man ia 
 contributes much more to his happiness than what he 
 has, or how he is regarded by others. What a man is, 
 and so what he has in his own person, is always the 
 chief thing to consider ; for his individuality accom- 
 panies him always and everywhere, and gives its 
 colour to all his experiences. In every kind of enjoy- 
 ment, for instance, the pleasure depends principally 
 upon the man himself. Every one admits this in 
 regard to physical, and how much truer it is of intel- 
 lectual, pleasure. When we use that English expres- 
 sion, " to enjoy oneself," we are employing a very 
 striking and appropriate phrase ; for observe — one 
 says, not " he enjoys Paris," but " he enjoys himself in 
 Paris." To a man possessed of an ill-conditioned 
 individuality, all pleasure is like delicate wine in a 
 mouth made bitter with gall. Therefore, in the bless- 
 ings as well as in the ills of life, less depends upon 
 what befalls us than upon the way in which it is met, 
 that is, upon the kind and degree of our general 
 susceptibility. What a man is and has in himself, — in 
 a word, personality, with all it entails, is the only im- 
 mediate and direct factor in his happiness and welfare. 
 All else is mediate and indirect, and its influence czn 
 be neutralised and frustrated ; but the influence of 
 personality never. This is why the envy which per- 
 sonal qualities excite is the most implacable of all, — as 
 it is also the most carefulLy dissembled. 
 
 ; 
 V 
 
16 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 Further, the constitution of our consciousness is the 
 ever present and lasting element in all we do or suffer; 
 our individuality is persistently at work, more or less, 
 at every moment of our life : all other influences are 
 temporal, incidental, fleeting, and subject to every 
 kind of chance and change. This is why Aristotle 
 says : It is not wealth but character that lasts. 1 And 
 just for the same reason we can more easily bear a 
 misfortune which comes to us entirely from without, 
 than one which we have drawn upon ourselves ; for 
 fortune may always change, but not character. 
 Therefore, subjective blessings, — a noble nature, a 
 capable head, a joyful temperament, bright spirits, 
 a well-constituted, perfectly sound physique, in a 
 word, mens sana in corpore sano, are the first and 
 most important elements in happiness ; so that we 
 should be more intent on promoting and preserving 
 such qualities than on the possession of external wealth 
 and external honour. 
 
 And of all these, the one which makes us the most 
 directly happy is a genial flow of good spirits ; for 
 this excellent quality is its own immediate reward. 
 The man who is cheerful and merry has always a good 
 reason for being so, — the fact, namely, that he is so. 
 There is nothing which, like this quality, can so com- 
 pletely replace the loss of every other blessing. If 
 you know anyone who is young, handsome, rich and 
 esteemed, and you want to know, further, if he is 
 happy, ask, Is he cheerful and genial ? — and if he is, 
 
 1 Etli. Eud., vii. 2. 37 : — rj yap cfivcns /3e/3ouov, ov rot 
 ■^p-q/xara. 
 
PERSONALITY, OR WHAT A MAN IS. 17 
 
 what does it matter whether he is young or old, 
 straight or humpbacked, poor or rich ? — he is happy. 
 In my early days I once opened an old book and 
 found these words : If you laugh a great deal, you are 
 happy ; if you cry a great deal, you are unhappy ; — 
 a very simple remark, no doubt ; but just because it 
 is so simple I have never been able to forget it, 
 even though it is in the last degree a truism. So if 
 cheerfulness knocks at our door, we should throw it 
 wide open, for it never comes inopportunely. Instead 
 of that, we often make scruples about letting it in. 
 We want to be quite sure that we have every reason 
 to be contented ; then we are afraid that cheerfulness of 
 spirits may interfere with serious reflections or weighty 
 cares. Cheerfulness is a direct and immediate gain, 
 — the very coin, as it were, of happiness, and not, like all 
 else, merely a cheque upon the bank ; for it alone 
 makes us immediately happy in the present moment, 
 and that is the highest blessing for beings like us, whose 
 existence is but an infinitesimal moment between two 
 eternities. To secure and promote this feeling of 
 cheerfulness should be the supreme aim of all our 
 endeavours after happiness. 
 
 Now it is certain that nothing contributes so little 
 to cheerfulness as riches, or so much, as health. Is it 
 not in the lower classes, the so-called working classes, 
 more especially those of them who live in the 
 country, that we see cheerful and contented faces? 
 and is it not amongst the rich, the upper classes, that 
 we find faces full of ill-humour and vexation ? Con- 
 sequently we should try as much as possible to main- 
 tain a high degree of health ; for cheerfulness is the 
 
 B 
 

 18 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 very flower of it. I need hardly say what one must 
 do to be healthy — avoid every kind of excess, all 
 violent and unpleasant emotion, all mental overstrain, 
 take daily exercise in the open air, cold baths and 
 such like hygienic measures. For without a proper 
 amount of daily exercise no one can remain healthy ; 
 all the processes of life demand exercise for the due 
 performance of their functions, exercise not only of 
 the parts more immediately concerned, but also of the 
 whole body. For, as Aristotle rightly says, Life is 
 nnovement ; it is its very essence. Ceaseless and rapid 
 motion goes on in every part of the organism. The 
 heart, with its complicated double systole and diastole, 
 beats strongly and untiringly; with twenty-eight 
 beats it has to drive the whole of the blood through 
 arteries, veins and capillaries ; the lungs pump like a 
 steam-engine, without intermission ; the intestines are 
 always in peristaltic action ; the glands are all con- 
 stantly absorbing and secreting ; even the brain has a 
 double motion of its own, with every beat of the 
 pulse and every breath we draw. When people can 
 get no exercise at all, as is the case with the countless 
 numbers who are condemned to a sedentary life, there 
 is a glaring and fatal disproportion between outward 
 inactivity and inner tumult. For this ceaseless in- 
 ternal motion requires some external counterpart, and 
 the want of it produces effects like those of emotion 
 which we are obliged to suppress. Even trees must 
 be shaken by the wind, if they are to thrive. The 
 rule which finds its application here may be most 
 briefly expressed in Latin : omnis motus, quo celerior, 
 eo magis motus, 
 
PERSONALITY, OR WHAT A MAN IS. 19 
 
 How much our happiness depends upon our spirits, 
 and these again upon our state of health, may be 
 seen by comparing the influence which the same 
 external circumstances or events have upon us when 
 we are well and strong with the effect which they 
 have when we are depressed and troubled with ill- 
 health. It is not what things are objectively and in 
 themselves, but what they are for us, in our way of 
 looking at them, that makes us happy or the reverse. 
 As Epictetus says, Men are not influenced by things 
 but by their thoughts about things. And, in general, 
 nine-tenths of our happiness depends upon health 
 alone. With health, everything is a source of plea- 
 sure ; without it, nothing else, whatever it may be, 
 is enjoyable ; even the other personal blessings, 
 — a great mind, a happy temperament — are degraded 
 and dwarfed for want of it. So it is really with 
 good reason that, when two people meet, the first 
 thing they do is to inquire after each other's health, 
 and to express the hope that it is good ; for good 
 health is by far the most important element in human 
 happiness. It follows from all this that the greatest 
 of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind 
 of happiness, whatever it may be, for gain, advance- 
 ment, learning or fame, let alone, then, for fleeting 
 sensual pleasures. Everything else should rather be 
 postponed to it. 
 
 But however much health may contribute to that 
 flow of good spirits which is so essential to our 
 happiness, good spirits do not entirely depend upon 
 health ; for a man may be perfectly sound in his 
 physique and still possess a melancholy temperament 
 
/ 
 
 20 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 and be generally given up to sad thoughts. The 
 ultimate cause of this is undoubtedly to be found in 
 innate, &nd therefore unalterable, physical constitution, 
 especially in the more or less normal relation of a 
 man's sensitiveness to his muscular and vital ener<£y. 
 J ** r Abnormal sensitiveness produces inequality of spirits, a 
 predominating melancholy, with periodical fits of un- 
 I \ restrained liveliness. A genius is one whose nervous 
 ^ ^ poweror' sensitiveness is largely in excess ; as Aris- 
 totle * has very correctly observed, Men distinguished 
 in philosophy, politics, poetry or art, appear to be all 
 of a melancholy temperament This is doubtless the 
 passage which Cicero has in his mind when he says, 
 as he often does, Aristoteles ait omnes ingeniosos 
 melancholicos esse. 2 Shakespeare has very neatly 
 expressed this radical and innate diversity of tempera- 
 ment in those lines in The Merchant of Venice : 
 
 Nature has framed strange fellows in her time ; 
 Some that will evermore peep through their eyes, 
 And laugh, like parrots at a hag-piper ; 
 And others of such vinegar aspect, 
 Tliat they'll not show their teeth in way of smile, 
 Tlwugh Nestor swear the jest be laughable. 
 
 This is the difference which Plato draws between 
 cvkoXos and Bvo-koXos — the man of easy, and the man 
 of difficult disposition — in proof of which he refers 
 to the varying degrees of susceptibility which differ- 
 ent people show to pleasurable and painful impres- 
 sions; so that one man will laugh at what makes another 
 despair. As a rule, the stronger the susceptibility to un- 
 pleasant impressions, the weaker is the susceptibility to 
 1 Probl. xxx, ep. 1. 2 Tusc. i., 33. 
 
PERSONALITY, OR WHAT A MAN IS. - 21 
 
 pleasant ones, and vice versa. If it is equally possible 
 for an event to turn out well or ill, the Svo-koAos will 
 be annoyed or grieved if the issue is unfavourable, 
 and will not rejoice, should it be happy. On the 
 other hand, the evKoAo? will neither worry nor fret over 
 an unfavourable issue, but rejoice if it turns out well. 
 If the one is successful in nine out of ten undertak- 
 ings, he will not be pleased, but rather annoyed that 
 one has miscarried ; whilst the other, if only a single 
 one succeeds, will manage to find consolation in the 
 fact and remain cheerful. But here is another 
 instance of the truth, that hardly any evil is entirely 
 without its compensation ; for the misfortunes and 
 sufferings which the Svo-koXol, that is, people of 
 gloomy and anxious character, have to overcome, are, 
 on the whole, more imaginary and therefore less real 
 than those which befall the gay and careless ; for a 
 man who paints everything black, who constantly 
 fears the worst and takes measures accordingly, will 
 not be disappointed so often in this world, as one who 
 always looks upon the bright side of things. And 
 when a morbid affection of the nerves, or a derange- 
 ment of the digestive organs, plays into the hand of 
 an innate tendency to gloom, this tendency may 
 reach such a height that permanent discomfort pro- 
 duces a weariness of life. So arises an inclination to 
 suicide, which even the most trivial unpleasantness 
 may actually bring about ; nay, when the tendency 
 attains its worst form, it may be occasioned by 
 nothing in particular, but a man may resolve to put 
 an end to his existence, simply because he is per- 
 manently unhappy, and then coolly and firmly carry 
 
22 THE WISDOii OF LIFE. 
 
 out his determination ; as may be seen by the way in 
 which the sufferer, when placed under supervision, 
 as he usually is, eagerly waits to seize the first 
 unguarded moment, when, without a shudder, with- 
 out a struggle or recoil, he may use the now natural 
 and welcome means of effecting his release. 1 Even 
 the healthiest, perhaps even the most cheerful man, 
 may resolve upon death under certain circumstances ; 
 when, for instance, his sufferings, or his fears of some 
 inevitable misfortune, reach such a pitch as to out- 
 weigh the terrors of death. The only difference lies 
 in the degree of suffering necessary to bring about the 
 fatal act, a degree which will be high in the case of a 
 cheerful, and low in that of a gloomy man. The 
 greater the melancholy, the lower need the degree be ; 
 in the end, it may even sink to zero. But if a man 
 is cheerful, and his spirits are supported by good 
 health, it requires a high degree of suffering to make 
 him lay hands upon himself. There are countless 
 steps in the scale between the two extremes of suicide, 
 the suicide which springs merely from a morbid 
 intensification of innate gloom, and the suicide of the 
 healthy and cheerful man, who has entirely objective 
 grounds for putting an end to his existence. 
 
 Beauty is partly an affair of health. It may be 
 reckoned as a personal advantage ; though it does not, 
 properly speaking, contribute directly to our happi- 
 ness. It does so indirectly, by impressing other 
 people ; and it is no unimportant advantage, even in 
 man. Beauty is an open letter of recommendation, 
 
 1 For a detailed description of this condition of mind cf. 
 Esquirol Des maladies mentales. 
 
PERSONALITY, OR WHAT A MAN IS. 23 
 
 predisposing the heart to favour the person who 
 presents it. As is well said in those lines of Homer, 
 the gift of beauty is not lightly to be thrown away, 
 that glorious gift which none can bestow save the 
 gods alone — 
 
 ovtol aTTofSX-qT Icrrt deujv ZpiKvSta 8(opa, 
 
 ocrcra Ktv avrot Scocriv, Ikwv S'ovk av ris eAoiro. 1 
 
 The most general survey shows us that the two foes 
 of human happiness are pain and boredom. We may 
 go further, and say that in the degree in which we 
 are fortunate enough to get away from the one, we 
 approach the other. Life presents, in fact, a more or 
 less violent oscillation between the two. The reason 
 of this is that each of these two poles stands in a 
 double antagonism to the other, external or objective, 
 and inner or subjective. Needy surroundings and 
 poverty produce pain ; while, if a man is more than 
 well off, he is bored. Accordingly, while the lower 
 classes are engaged in a ceaseless struggle with need, 
 in other words, with pain, the upper carry on a con- 
 stant and often desperate battle with boredom. 2 The 
 inner or subjective antagonism arises from the fact 
 that, in the individual, susceptibility to pain varies 
 inversely with susceptibility to boredom, because sus- 
 ceptibility is directly proportionate to mental power. 
 Let me explain. A dull mind is, as a rule associated 
 with dull sensibilities, nerves which no stimulus can 
 
 i Iliad 3, 65. 
 
 2 And the extremes meet ; for the lowest state of civilization, 
 a nomad or wandering life, finds its counterpart in the highest, 
 v where everyone is at times a tourist. The earlier stage was a 
 case of necessity ; the latter is a remedy for boredom. 
 
 \ 
 
24 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 affect, a temperament, in short, which does not feel 
 pain or anxiety very much, however great or terrible 
 it may be. Now, intellectual dulness is at the 
 bottom of that vacuity of soul which is stamped on 
 so many faces, a state of mind which betrays itself by 
 v a constant and lively attention to all the trivial cir- 
 cumstances in the external world. This is the true 
 i source of boredom — a continual panting after excite- 
 ment, in order to have a pretext for giving the mind 
 and spirits something to occupy them. The kind 
 of things people choose for this purpose shows that 
 they are not very particular, as witness the miserable 
 pastimes they have recourse to, and their ideas of 
 social pleasure and conversation ; or again, the number 
 of people w T ho gossip on the doorstep or gape out of 
 the window. It is mainly because of this inner 
 vacuity of soul that people go in quest of society, 
 diversion, amusement, luxury of every sort, which 
 lead many to extravagance and misery. Nothing is 
 so good a protection against such misery as inward 
 wealth, the wealth of the mind, because the greater it 
 grows, the less room it leaves for boredom. The in- 
 exhaustible activity of thought! finding ever new 
 material to work upon in the multifarious phenomena 
 of self and nature, and able and ready to form new 
 combinations of them, — there you have something 
 that invigorates the mind, and apart from moments of 
 relaxation, sets it far above the reach of boredom. 
 
 But, on the other hand, this high degree of intelli- 
 gence is rooted in a high degree of susceptibility, 
 greater strength of will, greater passionateness ; and 
 from the union of these qualities comes an increased 
 
PERSONALITY, OR WHAT A MAN IS. 25 
 
 capacity for emotion, an enhanced sensibility to all 
 mental and even bodily pain, greater impatience of 
 obstacles, greater resentment of interruption ; — all of 
 which tendencies are augmented by the power of the 
 imagination, the vivid character of the whole range 
 of thought, including what is disagreeable. This 
 applies, in varying degrees, to every step in the long 
 scale of mental power, from the veriest dunce to the 
 greatest genius that ever lived. Therefore the nearer 
 anj^one is, either from a subjective or from an objec- 
 tive point of view, to one of these sources of suffering 
 in human life, the farther he is from the other. And 
 so a man's natural bent will lead him to make his 
 objective world conform to his subjective as much as 
 possible; that is to say, he will take the greatest 
 measures against that form of suffering to which he is 
 most liable. The wise man will, above all, strive after 
 freedom from pain and annoyance, quiet and leisure, 
 consequently a tranquil, modest life, with as few en- 
 counters as may be ; and so, after a little experience 
 of his so-called fellow-men, he will elect to live in 
 retirement, or even, if he is a man of great intellect, 
 in solitude. For the more a man has in himself, the 
 less he will want from other people, — the less, indeed, 
 other people can be to him. This is why a high 
 degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial. 
 True, if quality of intellect could be made up for by 
 quantity, it might be worth while to live even in the 
 great world ; but, unfortunately, a hundred fools 
 together will not make one wise man. 
 
 But the individual who stands at the other end of 
 the scale is no sooner free from the pangs of need 
 
26 - THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 than he endeavours to get pastime and society at any 
 cost, taking up with the first person he meets, and 
 avoiding nothing so much as himself. For in solitude, 
 where every one is thrown upon his own resources, 
 what a man has in himself comes to light : the fool in 
 fine raiment groans under the burden of his miserable 
 personality, a burden which he can never throw off, 
 whilst the man of talent peoples the waste places with 
 his animating thoughts. Seneca declares that folly is 
 its own burden, — omnis stultitia labor at fastidio sui, 
 — a very true saying, with which may be compared 
 theavords of Jesus, the son of Sirach, The life of a fool 
 is worse than death. 1 And, as a rule, it will be found 
 that a man is sociable just in the degree in which he 
 is intellectually poor and generally vulgar. For one's 
 choice in this world does not go much beyond solitude 
 on one side and vulgarity on the other. It is said 
 that the most sociable of all people are the negroes ;] 
 and they are at the bottom of the scale in intellect. 
 I remember reading once in a French paper 2 that the 
 blacks in North America, whether free or enslaved, 
 are fond of shutting themselves up in large numbers 
 in the smallest space, because they cannot have too 
 much of one another's snub-nosed company. 
 
 The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of 
 the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with 
 the body : and leisure, that is, the time one has for 
 the free enjoyment of one's consciousness or indi- 
 viduality, is the fruit or produce of the rest of exist- 
 ence, which is in general only labour and effort. But 
 
 1 Ecclesiasfcicus, xxii. 11. 
 
 2 Le Commerce, Oct. 19th, 1837. 
 
-~ PERSONALITY, OR WHAT A MAN IS. 27 
 
 what does most people's leisure yield ? — boredom and 
 dulness ; except, of course, when it is occupied with 
 sensual pleasure or folly. How little such leisure is 
 worth may be seen in the way in which it is spent : 
 and, as Ariosto observes, how miserable are the idle 
 hours of ignorant men ! — ozio lungo d'uomini ignor- 
 anti. Ordinary people think merely how they shall 
 spend their time ; a man of any talent tries to use it. 
 The reason why people of limited intellect are apt to 
 be bored is that their intellect is absolutely nothing 
 more than the means by which the motive power of 
 the will is put into force • and whenever there is 
 nothing particular to set the will in motion, it rests, 
 and their intellect takes a holiday, because, equally 
 with the will, it requires something external to bring 
 it into play. The result is an awful stagnation of 
 whatever power a man has — in a word, boredom. To 
 counteract this miserable feeling, men run to triviali- 
 ties which please for the moment they are taken up, 
 hoping thus to engage the will in order to rouse it to 
 action, and so set the intellect in motion ; for it is the 
 latter which has to give effect to these motives of the 
 will. Compared with real and natural motives, these 
 are but as paper money to coin ; for their value is 
 only arbitrary — card games and the like, which have 
 been invented for this very purpose. And if there is 
 nothing else to be done, a man will twirl his thumbs 
 or beat the devil's tattoo ; or a cigar may be a wel- 
 come substitute for exercising his brains. Hence, in 
 all countries the chief occupation of society is card- 
 playing, 1 and it is the gauge of its value, and an out- 
 1 Translator's Note. — Card-playing to this extent is now, no 
 
28 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 ward sign that it is bankrupt in thought. Because 
 people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, 
 and try and win one another's money. Idiots ! But 
 I do not wish to be unjust ; so let me remark that it 
 may certainly be said in defence of card-playing that 
 it is a preparation for the world and for business life, 
 because one learns thereby how to make a clever use 
 of fortuitous but unalterable circumstances, (cards, m 
 this case), and to get as much out of them as one can : 
 and to do this a man must learn a little dissimulation, 
 and how to put a good face upon a bad business. But, 
 on the other hand, it is exactly for this reason that 
 card-playing is so demoralising, since the whole object 
 of it is to employ every kind of trick and machination 
 in order to win what belongs to another. And a 
 habit of this sort, learnt at the card-table, strikes root 
 and pushes its way into practical life ; and in the 
 affairs of every day a man gradually comes to regard 
 meum and tuum in much the same light as cards, and 
 to consider that he may use to the utmost whatever 
 advantages he possesses, so long as he does not come 
 within the arm of the law. Examples of what I mean 
 are of daily occurrence in mercantile life. Since, 
 then, leisure is the flower, or rather the fruit, of ex- 
 istence, as it puts a man into possession of himself, 
 those are happy indeed who possess something real in 
 themselves. But what do you get from most people's 
 leisure ? — only a good-for-nothing fellow, who is ter- 
 ribly bored and a burden to himself. Let us, there- 
 doubt, a thing of the past, at any rate amongst the nations of 
 northern Europe. The present fashion is rather in favour of a 
 dilettante interest in art or literature. 
 Nfl^-t wt ***** TV/ 
 
PERSONALITY, OR WHAT A MAN IS. 29 
 
 fore, rejoice, dear brethren, for we are not children of 
 the bondwoman, but of the free. 
 
 Further, as no land is so well off as that which re- 
 quires few imports, or none at all, so the happiest man 
 is one who has enough in his own inner wealth, and 
 asks little or nothing from outside for his maintenance. 
 For imports are expensive things, reveal dependence, en- 
 tail danger, occasion trouble, and, when all is said and 
 done, are a poor substitute for home produce. No 
 man ought to expect much from others, or, in general, 
 from the external world. What one human being 
 can be to another is not a very great deal : in the end 
 every one stands alone, and the important thing is 
 who it is that stands alone. Here, then, is another 
 application of the general truth which Goethe recog- 
 nises in Dichtung und Wahrheit (Bk. III.), that in 
 everything a man has ultimately to appeal to himself; 
 or, as Goldsmith puts it in The Traveller : 
 
 Still to ourselves in every place consigned 
 Our own felicity we make or find. 
 
 Himself is the source of the best and most a man 
 can be or achieve. The more this is so — the more a 
 man finds his sources of pleasure in himself — the 
 happier he will be. Therefore, it is with great truth 
 that Aristotle 1 says, To be happy means to be self- — - 
 sufficient. For all other sources of happiness are in 
 their nature most uncertain, precarious, fleeting, the 
 sport of chance ; and so even under the most favour- 
 able circumstances they can easily bo exhausted ; nay, 
 this is unavoidable, because they are not always 
 1 Eth. Eud., vii. 2. 
 
30 THE WISDOM OF LIFE, a 
 
 ' P 
 
 within reach. And in old age tliese sources of happi- 
 ness most necessarily dry up : — love leaves us then, 
 and wit, desire to travel, delight in horses, aptitude 
 for social intercourse ; friends and relations, too, are 
 taken from us by death. Then more than ever, it 
 depends upon what a man has in himself ; for this 
 will stick to him longest ; and at any period of life it 
 it is the only genuine and lasting source of happiness. 
 There is not much to be got anywhere in the world. 
 It is filled with misery and pain ; and if a man 
 escapes these, boredom lies in wait for him at every 
 corner. Nay more ; it is evil which generally has the 
 upper hand, and folly makes the most noise. Fate is 
 cruel, and mankind pitiable. In such a world as this, 
 a man who is rich in himself is like a bright, warm, 
 happy room at Christmas tide, while without are 
 the frost and snow of a December night. Therefore, 
 without doubt, the happiest destiny on earth is to 
 have the rare gift of a rich individuality, and, more 
 especially, to be possessed of a good endowment 
 of intellect; this is the happiest destiny, though it 
 may not be, after all, a very brilliant one. There was 
 great wisdom in that remark which Queen Christina 
 of Sweden made, in her nineteenth year, about 
 Descartes, who had then lived for twenty years in 
 the deepest solitude in Holland, and, apart from 
 report, was known to her only by a single essay : M. 
 Descartes, she said, is the happiest of men, and his con- 
 dition seems to me much to be envied. 1 Of course, as 
 was the case with Descartes, external circumstances 
 must be favourable enough to allow a man to be 
 1 Vie de Descartes, par Baillet. Li v. vii., ch. 10, 
 
PERSONALITY, OR WHAT A MAN IS. 31 
 
 master of his life and happiness ; or, as we read in 
 Fcclesiastes, 1 — Wisdom is good together with an inheri- 
 tance, and profitable unto them that see the sun. The 
 man to whom nature and fate have granted the 
 blessing of wisdom, will be most anxious and careful 
 to keep open the fountains of happiness which he has 
 in himself ; and for this, independence and leisure are 
 necessary. To obtain them, he will be willing to 
 moderate his desires and harbour his resources; all the 
 more because he is not, like others, restricted to 
 the external world for his pleasures. So he will not 
 be misled by expectations of office, or money, or 
 the favour and applause of his fellow-men, into sur- 
 rendering himself in order to conform to low desires 
 and vulgar tastes ; nay, in such a case he will follow 
 the advice that Horace gives in his epistle to 
 Maecenas. 2 It is a great piece of folly to sacrifice the 
 inner for the outer man, to give the whole or the 
 greater part of one's quiet leisure and independence 
 for splendour, rank, pomp, titles and honour. This is 
 what Goethe did. My good luck drew me quite in 
 the other direction. 
 
 The truth which I am insisting upon here, the 
 truth, namely, that the chief source of human happi- 
 ness is internal, is confirmed by that most accurate 
 observation of Aristotle in the Nichomachean Ethics? 
 that every pleasure presupposes some sort of activity, 
 
 i vii. 12. 
 
 2 Lib. 1., ep. 7. 
 
 Nee somnum plebis laudo, satur altilnim, nee 
 Otia divitiis Arabum Uberrima muto, 
 
 3 i. 7 and vii, 13, 14, 
 
32 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 the application of some sort of power, without which 
 it cannot exist. The doctrine of Aristotle's, that a 
 man's happiness consists in the free exercise of his 
 highest faculties, is also enunciated by Stobasus in his 
 exposition of the Peripatetic philosophy 1 : Happiness, 
 \ he says, means vigorous and successful activity in all 
 your undertakings; and he explains that by vigour 
 (apkrrj) he means mastery in any thing, whatever it be. 
 Now, the original purpose of those forces with which 
 nature has endowed man is to enable him to struggle 
 against the difficulties which beset him on all sides. 
 But if this struggle comes to an end, his unemployed 
 forces become a burden to him ; and he has to set to 
 work and play with them, — use them, I mean, for no 
 purpose at all, beyond avoiding the other source oi 
 human suffering, boredom, to which he is at once ex- 
 posed. It is the upper classes, people of wealth, who 
 are the greatest victims of boredom. Lucretius long 
 ago described their miserable state, and the truth of 
 his description may be still recognised to-day in the 
 life of every great capital — where the rich man is 
 seldom in his own halls, because it bores him to be 
 there, and still he returns thither, because he is no 
 better off outside ; — or else he is away in post- 
 haste to his house in the country, as if it were on fire ; 
 and he is no sooner arrived there, than he is bored 
 again, and seeks to forget everything in sleep, or else 
 hurries back to town once more. 
 
 Exit saepeforas magnis ex cedibus ille, 
 
 Esse domi quern pertaesum est, subitoque reventat ; 
 
 Quippe foris nihilo melius qui sentiat esse. 
 
 1 Eel. eth. ii., ch. 7. 
 
PERSONALITY, OR WHAT A MAX IS. S3 
 
 Currit, agens mannos, ad villam precijntanter, 
 Auxilium tectis quasi ferre ardentibus instans : 
 Oscitat extemplo, tetigit quum lirnhia villac ; 
 Aut abit in somnum gravis, atque oblivia quaerit ; 
 Aut etiam properans urbem petit atque revisit. 1 
 
 In their youth, such people must have had a super- 
 fluity of muscular and vital energy, — powers which, 
 unlike those of the mind, cannot maintain their full 
 degree of vigour very long ; and in later years they 
 either have no mental powers at all, or cannot develope 
 any for want of employment which would bring them 
 into play ; so that they are in a wretched plight. 
 Will, however, they still possess, for this isjthe only 
 power that is inexhaustible ; and they try to stimulate 
 their will by passionate excitement, such as games of 
 chance for high stakes — undoubtedly a most degrading 
 form of vice. And one may say generally that if a 
 man finds himself with nothing to do, he is sure to 
 choose some amusement suited to the kind of power 
 in which he excels, — bowls, it may be, or chess ; hunt- 
 ing or painting ; horse-racing or music ; cards, or 
 poetry, heraldry, philosophy, or some other dilettante 
 interest. We might classify these interests methodi- 
 cally, by reducing them to expressions of the three 
 fundamental powers, the factors, that is to say, which go 
 to make up the physiological constitution of man ; and 
 further, by considering these powers by themselves, 
 and apart from any of the definite aims which they 
 may subserve, and simply as affording three sources 
 of possible pleasure, out of which every man will 
 choose what suits him, according as he excels in one 
 
 direction or another. 
 
 1 III. 1073. 
 
 D 
 
34 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 First of all come the pleasures of vital energy, 
 of food, drink, digestion, rest and sleep ; and there are 
 parts of the world where it can be said that these are 
 characteristic and national pleasures. Secondly, there 
 are the pleasures of muscular energy, such as walking, 
 running, wrestling, dancing, fencing, riding and similar 
 athletic pursuits, which sometimes take the form of 
 sport, and sometimes of a military life and real war- 
 fare. Thirdly, there are the pleasures of sensibility, 
 such as observation, thought, feeling, or a taste for 
 poetry or culture, music, learning, reading, meditation, 
 invention, philosophy and the like. As regards the 
 value, relative worth and duration of each of these 
 kinds of pleasure, a great deal might be said, which, 
 however, I leave the reader to supply. But every one 
 will see that the nobler the power which is brought 
 into play, the greater will be the pleasure which it 
 gives ; for pleasure always involves the use of one's 
 own powers, and happiness consists in a frequent 
 repetition of pleasure. No one will deny that in this 
 respect the pleasures of sensibility occupy a higher 
 place than either of the other two fundamental kinds; 
 which exist in an equal, nay, in a greater degree in 
 brutes ; it is his preponderating amount of sensibility 
 which distinguishes man from other animals. Now, 
 our mental powers are forms of sensibility, and there- 
 fore a preponderating amount of it makes us capable 
 of that kind of pleasure which has to do with mind, 
 so-called intellectual pleasure; and the more sensi- 
 bility predominates, the greater the pleasure will be. 1 
 
 1 Nature exhibits a continual progress, starting from the 
 mechanical and chemical activity of the inorganic world, pro- 
 
PERSONALITY, OR WHAT A MAN IS. 35 
 
 The normal, ordinary man takes a vivid interest in 
 anything only in so far as it excites his will, that is 
 to say, is a matter of personal interest to him. But 
 
 ceeding to the vegetable, with its dull enjoyment of self, from 
 that to the animal world, where intelligence and consciousness 
 begin, at first very weak, and only after many intermediate 
 stages ^attaining its last great development in man, whose 
 intellect is Nature's crowning point, the goal of all her efforts, 
 the most perfect and difficult of all her works. And even 
 within the range of the human intellect, there are a great many 
 observable differences of degree, and it is very seldom that 
 intellect reaches its highest point, intelligence properly so-called, 
 which in this narrow and strict sense of the word, is Nature's most 
 consummate product, and so the rarest and most precious thing 
 of which the world can boast. The highest product of Nature 
 is the clearest degree of consciousness, in which the world 
 mirrors itself more plainly and completely than anywhere else. 
 A man endowed with this form of intelligence is in possession of 
 what is noblest and best on earth ; and accordingly, he has a 
 source of pleasure in comparison with which all others are 
 small. From his surroundings he asks nothing but leisure for 
 the free enjoyment of what he has got, time, as it were, to 
 polish his diamond. All other pleasures that are not of the 
 intellect are of a lower kind ; for they are, one and all, move- 
 ments of will — desires, hopes, fears and ambitions, no matter to 
 what directed : they are always satisfied at the cost of pain, and 
 in the case of ambition, generally with more or less of illusion. 
 With intellectual pleasure, on the other hand, truth becomes 
 clearer and clearer. In the realm of intelligence pain has no 
 power. Knowledge is all in all. Further, intellectual pleasures 
 are accessible entirely and only through the medium of the in- 
 telligence, and are limited by its capacity. For aU the wit there 
 is in the world is useless to him who has none. Still this advan- 
 tage is accompanied by a substantial disadvantage; for the 
 whole of Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence 
 comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest 
 degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point. 
 
36 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 constant excitement of the will is never an unmixed 
 good, to say the least ; in other words, it involves 
 pain. Card -playing, that universal occupation of 
 " good society " everywhere, is a device for providing 
 this kind of excitement, and that, too, by means of 
 interests so small as to produce slight and momen- 
 tary, instead of real and permanent, pain. Card-play- 
 ing is, in fact, a mere tickling of the will. 1 
 
 On the other hand, a man of powerful intellect is 
 capable of taking a vivid interest in things in the 
 way of mere knowledge, with no admixture of will ; 
 nay, such an interest is a necessity to him. It places 
 him in a sphere where pain is an alien, a diviner air 
 where the gods live serene: — 
 
 1 Vulgarity is, at bottom, the kind of consciousness in which 
 the will completely predominates over the intellect, where the 
 latter does nothing more than perform the service of its master, 
 the will. Therefore, when the will makes no demands, supplies 
 no motives, strong or weak, the intellect entirely loses its power, 
 and the result is complete vacancy of mind. Now will without 
 intellect is the most vulgar and common thing in the world, 
 possessed by every blockhead, who, in the gratification of his 
 passions, shows the stuff of which he is made. This is the con- 
 dition of mind called vulgarity, in which the only active elements 
 are the organs of sense, and that small amount of intellect 
 which is necessary for apprehending the data of sense. Accord- 
 ingly, the vulgar man is constantly open to all sorts of impres- 
 sions, and immediately perceives all the little trifling things 
 that go on in his environment : the lightest whisper, the most 
 trivial circumstance, is sufficient to rouse his attention ; he is 
 just like an animal. Such a man's mental condition reveals 
 itself in his face, in his whole exterior ; and hence that vulgar, 
 repulsive appearance, which is all the more offensive, if, as ia 
 usually the case, his will — the only factor in his consciousness — 
 is a base, selfish and altogether bad one. 
 
PERSONALITY, OR WHAT A MAN IS. 37 
 
 6eol pela ^wovTe?. 1 
 
 Look on these two pictures — the life of the masses, 
 one long, dull record of struggle and effort entirely 
 devoted to the petty interests of personal welfare, to 
 misery in all its forms, a life beset by intolerable 
 boredom as soon as ever those aims are satisfied and 
 the man is thrown back upon himself, whence he can 
 be roused again to some sort of movement only by 
 the wild fire of passion. On the other side you have 
 a man endowed with a high degree of mental power, 
 leading an existence rich in thought and full of life 
 and meaning, occupied by worthy and interesting 
 objects as soon as ever he is free to give himself to 
 them, bearing in himself a source of the noblest plea- 
 sure. What external promptings he wants come from 
 the works of nature, and from the contemplation of 
 human affairs and the achievements of the great of all 
 ages and countries, which are thoroughly appreciated 
 by a man of this type alone, as being the only one 
 who can quite understand and feel with them. And 
 so it is for him alone that those great ones have really 
 lived ; it is to him that they make their appeal ; the 
 rest are but casual hearers who only half understand 
 either them or their followers. Of course, this char- 
 acteristic of the intellectual man implies that he has 
 one more need than the others, the need of reading, 
 observing, studying, meditating, practising, the need, 
 in short, of undisturbed leisure. For, as Voltaire has 
 very rightly said, there are no real pleasures without 
 real needs ; and the need of them is why to such a 
 
 1 Odyssey IV., 805. 
 
38 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 man pleasures are accessible which are denied to others, 
 — the varied beauties of nature and art and literature. 
 To heap these round people who do not want them 
 and cannot appreciate them, is like expecting grey- 
 hairs to fall in love. A man who is privileged in this 
 respect leads two lives, a personal and an intellectual, 
 life; and the latter gradually comes to be looked upon 
 as the true one, and the former as merely a means to 
 it. Other people make this shallow, empty and 
 troubled existence an end in itself. To the life of the 
 intellect such a man will give the preference over all 
 his other occupations : by the constant growth of in- 
 sight and knowledge, this intellectual life, like a 
 slowly-forming work of art, will acquire a consistency, 
 a permanent intensity, a unity which becomes ever 
 more and more complete ; compared with which, a 
 life devoted to the attainment of personal comfort, 
 a life that may broaden indeed, but can never be 
 deepened, makes but a poor show : and yet, as I have 
 said, people make this baser sort of existence an end 
 in itself. 
 
 The ordinary life of every day, so far as it is not 
 moved by passion, is tedious and insipid ; and if it is 
 so moved, it soon becomes painful. Those alone are 
 happy whom nature has favoured with some super- 
 fluity of intellect, something beyond what is just 
 necessary to carry out the behests of their will; for it 
 enables them to lead an intellectual life as well, a life 
 unattended by pain and full of vivid interests. Mere 
 leisure, that is to say, intellect unoccupied in the ser- 
 vice of the will, is not of itself sufficient : there must 
 tie a real superfluity of power, set free from the ser- 
 
PERSONALITY, OR WHAT A MAN IS. 39 
 
 vice of the will and devoted to that of the intellect ; 
 for, as Seneca says, otium sine litteris mors est et vivi 
 hominis sepultura — illiterate leisure is a form of 
 death, a living tomb. Varying with the amount of 
 the superfluity, there will be countless developments 
 in this second life, the life of the mind ; it may be the 
 mere collection and labelling of insects, birds, minerals, 
 coins, or the highest achievements of poetry and phil- 
 osophy. The life of the mind is not only a protection 
 against boredom, it also wards off the pernicious effects 
 of boredom ; it keeps us from bad company, from the 
 many dangers, misfortunes, losses and extravagances 
 which the man who places his happiness entirely in 
 the objective world is sure to encounter. My phil- 
 osophy, for instance, has never brought me in a six- 
 pence ; but it has spared me many an expense. 
 
 The ordinary man places his life's happiness in 
 things external to him, in property, rank, wife and 
 children, friends, society, and the like, so that when 
 he loses them or finds them disappointing, the founda- 
 tion of his happiness is destroyed. In other words, 
 his centre of gravity is not in himself; it is constantly 
 changing its place, with every wish and whim. If he 
 is a man of means, one day it will be his house in the 
 country, another buying horses, or entertaining friends, 
 or travelling, — a life, in short, of general luxury, the 
 reason being that he seeks his pleasure in things out- 
 side him. Like one whose health and strength are 
 gone, he tries to regain by the use of jellies and drugs, 
 instead of by developing his own vital power, the true 
 source of what he has lost. Before proceeding to the 
 opposite, let us compare with this common type the 
 
40 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 man who cotues midway between the two, endowed, 
 it may be, not exactly with distinguished powers of 
 mind, but with somewhat more than the ordinary 
 amount of intellect. He will take a dilettante interest 
 in art, or devote his attention to some branch of 
 science — botany, for example, or physics, astronomy, 
 history, and find a great deal of pleasure in such 
 studies, and amuse himself with them when external 
 sources of happiness are exhausted or fail to satisfy 
 him any more. Of a man like this it may be said that 
 his centre of gravity is partly in himself. But a 
 dilettante interest in art is a very different thing from 
 creative activity ; and an amateur pursuit of science is 
 apt to be superficial and not to penetrate to the heart 
 of the matter. A man cannot entirely identify himself 
 with such pursuits, or have his whole existence so 
 completely filled and permeated with them that he 
 loses all interest in everything else. It is only the 
 highest intellectual power, what we call genius, that 
 attains to this degree of intensity, making all time 
 and existence its theme, and striving to express its 
 peculiar conception of the world, whether it contem- 
 plates life as the subject of poetry or of philosophy. 
 Hence, undisturbed occupation with himself, his own 
 thoughts and works, is a matter of urgent necessity 
 to such a man; solitude is welcome, leisure is the 
 highest good, and everything else is unnecessary, nay, 
 even burdensome. 
 
 This is the only type of man of whom it can be 
 said that his centre of gravity is entirely in himself ; 
 which explains why it is that people of this sort — 
 and they are very rare — no matter how excellent their 
 
PERSONALITY, OR WHAT A MAX IS. 41 
 
 character may be, do not show that warm and un- 
 limited interest in friends, family, and the community 
 in general, of which others are so often capable ; for 
 if they have only themselves they are not inconsolable 
 for the loss of everything else. This gives an isola- 
 tion to their character, which is all the more effective 
 since other people never really quite satisfy them, as 
 being, on the whole, of a different nature : nay more, 
 since this difference is constantly forcing itself upon 
 their notice, they get accustomed to move about 
 amongst mankind as alien beings, and in thinking of 
 humanity in general, to say they instead of we. 
 
 So the conclusion we come to is that the man 
 whom nature has endowed with intellectual wealth is 
 the happiest; so true ib is that the subjective concerns 
 us more than the objective ; for whatever the latter 
 may be, it can work only indirectly, secondarily, and 
 through the medium of the former — a truth finely ex- 
 pressed by Lucian : — 
 
 UXovros 6 tt)s ftvxv s kXovtos jjlovos IcrTiv d\7]0rjs 
 TaAAa S'eX 66 <*T7;v TrXetova ruv Kreavcov 1 
 
 — the wealth of the soul is the only true wealth, for 
 with all other riches comes a bane even greater than 
 they. The man of inner wealth wants nothing from 
 outside but the negative gift of undisturbed leisure, 
 to develop and mature his intellectual faculties, that 
 is, to enjoy his wealth ; in short, he wants permission 
 to be himself, his whole life long, every day and every 
 hour. If he is destined to impress the character of 
 his mind upon a whole race, he has only one measure 
 1 Epigrammata, 12. 
 
V 
 
 42 tHE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 of happiness or unhappiness — to succeed or fail in 
 perfecting his powers and completing his work. AH 
 else is of small consequence. Accordingly, the greatest 
 minds of all ages have set the highest value upon 
 undisturbed leisure, as worth exactly as much as the 
 man himself. Happiness appears to consist in leisure, 
 says Aristotle; 1 and Diogenes Laertius reports that 
 Socrates praised leisure as the fairest of all possessions. 
 So, in the Nichomacliean Ethics, Aristotle concludes 
 that a life devoted to philosophy is the happiest ; or, 
 as he says in the Politics, 2 the free exercise of any 
 power, whatever it may be, is happiness. This, again, 
 tallies with what Goethe says in Wilhelm Meister : The 
 man who is born with a talent which he is meant to 
 use, finds his greatest happiness in using it. 
 
 But to be in possession of undisturbed leisure is 
 far from being the common lot; nay, it is something 
 alien to human nature, for the ordinary man's destiny 
 is to spend life in procuring what is necessary for the 
 subsistence of himself and his family ; he is a son of 
 struggle and need, not a free intelligence. So people 
 as a rule soon get tired of undisturbed leisure, and it 
 becomes burdensome if there are no fictitious and 
 forced aims to occupy it, play, pastime and hobbies of 
 every kind. For this very reason it is full of possible 
 danger, and dijficilis in otio quies is a true saying, 
 — it is difficult to keep quiet if you have nothing to 
 do. On the other hand, a measure of intellect far 
 surpassing the ordinary is as unnatural as it is 
 abnormal. But if it exists, and the man endowed 
 with it is to be happy, he will want precisely that 
 1 Eth. Nichom. x. 7. 2 iv. 1L 
 
PERSONALITY, OB WHAT A MAN IS. 43 
 
 undisturbed leisure which the others find burdensome 
 or pernicious; for without it he is a Pegasus in 
 harness, and consequently unhappy. If these two 
 unnatural circumstances, external and internal, undis- 
 turbed leisure and great intellect, happen to coincide 
 in the same person, it is a great piece of fortune ; and 
 if fate is so far favourable, a man can lead the higher 
 life, the life protected from the two opposite sources 
 of human suffering, pain and boredom, from the pain- 
 ful struggle for existence, and the incapacity for 
 enduring leisure (which is free existence itself) — 
 evils which may be escaped only by being mutually 
 neutralised. 
 
 But there is something to be said in opposition to 
 this view. Great intellectual gifts mean an activity 
 pre-eminently nervous in its character, and consequently 
 a very high degree of susceptibility to pain in every 
 form. Further, such gifts imply an intense tempera- 
 ment, larger and more vivid ideas, which, as the 
 inseparable accompaniment of great intellectual power, 
 entail on its possessor a corresponding intensity of the 
 emotions, making them incomparably more violent 
 than those to which the ordinary man is a prey. 
 Now, there are more things in the world productive 
 of pain than of pleasure. Again, a large endowment 
 of intellect tends to estrange the man who has it from 
 other people and their doings ; for the more a man 
 ^ has in himself, the less he will be able to find in them ; 
 and the hundred things in which they take delight, 
 he will think shallow and insipid. Here, then, per- 
 haps, is another instance of that law of compensation 
 which makes itself felt everywhere. How often on© 
 
44 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 hears it said, and said, too, with some plausibility, 
 that the narrow-minded man is at bottom the 
 happiest, even though his fortune is unenviable. I 
 shall make no attempt to forestall the reader's own 
 judgment on this point; more especially as Sophocles 
 himself has given utterance to two diametrically 
 opposite opinions : — 
 
 IIoAAw to cfipovciv evSaifiovias 
 irpdrov virapxci'. 1 
 
 he says in one place — wisdom is the greatest part of 
 happiness ; and again, in another passage, he declares 
 that the life of the thoughtless is the most pleasant 
 of all— 
 
 5 Ei/ ra <f>poveiv yap fxrjSlv r/SicrTOS J3ios. 2 
 
 The philosophers of the Old Testament find them- 
 selves in a like contradiction. 
 
 The life of a fool is worse than death 3 
 
 and — 
 
 In much wisdom is much grief ; 
 
 And he thai increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. 4 
 
 I may remark, however, that a man who has no 
 mental needs, because his intellect is of the narrow 
 and normal amount, is, in the strict sense of the word, 
 what is called a philistine — an expression at first 
 peculiar to the German language, a kind of slang term 
 at the Universities, afterwards used, by analogy, in a 
 
 1 Antigone, 1347-8. 8 Ecclesiasticus, xxii. 11. 
 
 2 Ajax, 554. 4 Ecclesiastes, i. 18. 
 
PERSONALITY, OR WHAT A MAX IS. 45 
 
 higher sense, though still in its original meaning, as 
 denoting one who is not a Son of the Muses. A 
 philistine is and remains apovo-os dvqp. I should prefer 
 to take a higher point of view, and apply the term 
 philistine to people who are always seriously occupied 
 
 ^ with realities which are no realities ; but as such a 
 definition would be a transcendental one, and there- 
 fore not generally intelligible, it would hardly be in 
 place in the present treatise, which aims at being 
 popular. The other definition can be more easily 
 elucidated, indicating, as it does, satisfactorily enough, 
 the essential nature of all those qualities which dis- 
 tinguish the philistine. He is defined to be a 
 
 x man without mental needs. From this it follows, 
 firstly, in relation to himself that he has no intel- 
 lectual pleasures ; for, as was remarked before, there 
 are no real pleasures without real needs. The philis- 
 tine's life is animated by no desire to gain knowledge 
 and insight for their own sake, or to experience that 
 true aesthetic pleasure which is so nearly akin to them. 
 If pleasures of this kind are fashionable, and the 
 philistine finds himself compelled to pay attention to 
 them, he will force himself to do so, but he will take as 
 little interest in them as possible. His only real pleasures 
 are of a sensual kind, and he thinks that these indemnify 
 him for the loss of the others. To him oysters and cham- 
 pagne are the height of existence ; the aim of his life 
 is to procure what will contribute to his bodily welfare, 
 and he is indeed in a happy way if this causes him some 
 trouble, If the luxuries of life are heaped upon him, 
 he will inevitably be bored, and against boredom he 
 has a great many fancied remedies, balls, theatres. 
 
46 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 parties, cards, gambling, horses, women, drinking, 
 travelling and so on ; all of which can not protect a 
 man from being bored, for where there are no intel- 
 lectual needs, no intellectual pleasures are possible. 
 The peculiar characteristic of the philistine is a dull, 
 dry kind of gravity, akin to that of animals. Nothing 
 really pleases, or excites, or interests him, for sensual 
 pleasure is quickly exhausted, and the society of 
 philistines soon becomes burdensome, and one may 
 even get tired of playing cards. True, the pleasures 
 of vanity are left, pleasures which he enjoys in his 
 own way, either by feeling himself superior in point 
 of wealth, or rank, or influence and power to other 
 people, who thereupon pay him honour ; or, at any 
 rate, by going about with those who have a super- 
 fluity of these blessings, sunning himself in the 
 reflection of their splendour — what the English call 
 a snob. 
 
 From the essential nature of the philistine it follows, 
 secondly, in regard to others, that, as he possesses no 
 intellectual, but only physical needs, he will seek the 
 society of those who can satisfy the latter, but not 
 the former. The last thing he will expect from his 
 friends is the possession of any sort of intellectual 
 capacity ; nay, if he chances to meet with it, it will 
 rouse his antipathy and even hatred ; simply because 
 in addition to an unpleasant sense of inferiority, he 
 experiences, in his heart, a dull kind of envy, which 
 has to be carefully concealed even from himself. 
 Nevertheless, it sometimes grows into a secret feeling 
 of rancour. But for all that, it wiD never occur to 
 him to make his own ideas of worth or value conform 
 
PERSONALITY, OR WHAT A MAN IS. 47 
 
 to the standard of such qualities ; he will continue to 
 give the preference to rank and riches, power and 
 influence, which in his eyes seem to be the only 
 genuine advantages in the world ; and his wish will 
 be to excel in them himself. All this is the conse- 
 quence of his being a man without intellectual needs. 
 The great affliction of all philistines is that they have 
 no interest in ideas, and that, to escape being bored, 
 they are in constant need of realities. Now realities 
 are either unsatisfactory or dangerous ; when they 
 lose their interest, they become fatiguing. But the 
 ideal world is illimitable and calm, 
 
 something afar 
 From the sphere of our sorrow. 
 
 Note. — In these remarks on the personal qualities 
 which go to make happiness, I have been mainly con- 
 cerned with the physical and intellectual nature of 
 man. For an account of the direct and immediate 
 influence of morality upon happiness, let me refer to 
 my prize essay on The Foundation of Morals (Sec 
 22.) 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 PROPERTY, OR WHAT A MAN HAS. 
 
 Epicurus divides the needs of mankind into three 
 classes, and the division made by this great professor 
 of happiness is a true and a fine one. First come 
 natural and necessary needs, such as, when not satis- 
 fied, produce pain, — food and clothing, victus et 
 amictus, needs which can easily be satisfied. Secondly, 
 there are those needs which, though natural, are not 
 necessary, such as the gratification of certain of the 
 senses. I may add, however, that in the report given 
 by Diogenes Laertius, Epicurus does not mention 
 which of the senses he means ; so that on this point 
 my account of his doctrine is somewhat more definite 
 and exact than the original. These are needs rather 
 more difficult to satisfy. The third class consists of 
 needs which are neither natural nor necessary, the 
 need of luxury and prodigality, show and splendour, 
 which never come to an end, and are very hard to 
 satisfy. 1 
 
 It is difficult, if not impossible, to define the limits 
 which reason should impose on the desire for wealth ; 
 for there is no absolute or definite amount of wealth 
 which will satisfy a man. The amount is always 
 relative, that is to say, just so much as will maintain 
 
 1 Cf. Diogenes Laertius, Bk. x., ch. xxvii., pp. 127 and 149 • 
 also Cicero definibus, i., 13. 
 
\ 
 
 PROPERTY, OR WHAT A MAN HAS. 49 
 
 the proportion between what he wants and what he 
 gets; for to measure a man's happiness only by what he 
 gets, and not also by what he expects to get, is as futile 
 as to try to express a fraction which shall have a 
 numerator but no denominator. A man never feels 
 the loss of things which it never occurs to him to ask 
 for ; he is just as happy without them ; whilst an- 
 other, who may have a hundred times as much, feels 
 miserable because he has not got the one thing which 
 he wants. In fact, here too, every man has an horizon 
 of his own. and he will expect just as much as he 
 thinks it possible for him to get. If an object within 
 his horizon looks as though he could confidently 
 reckon on getting it, he is happy ; but if difficulties 
 come in the way, he is miserable. What lies beyond 
 his horizon has no effect at all upon him. So it is 
 that the vast possessions of the rich do not agitate 
 the poor, and conversely, that a wealthy man is not 
 consoled by all his wealth for the failure of his hopes. 
 Riches, one may say, are like sea- water: the more you 
 drink, the thirstier you become ; and the same is true 
 of fame. The loss of wealth and prosperity leaves a 
 man, as soon as the first pangs of grief are over, in 
 very much the same habitual temper as before ; and 
 the reason of this is, that as soon as fate diminishes 
 the amount of his possessions, he himself immediately 
 reduces the amount of his claims. But when misfor- 
 tune comes upon us, to reduce the amount of our 
 claims is just what is most painful; when once we have 
 done so, the pain becomes less and less, and is felt no 
 more ; like an old wound which has healed. Con- 
 versely, when a piece of good fortune befalls us, our 
 
50 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 claims mount higher and higher, as there is nothing 
 to regulate them. It is in this feeling of expansion 
 that the delight of it lies. But it lasts no longer than 
 the process itself, and when the expansion is complete, 
 the delight ceases: we have become accustomed to the 
 increase in our claims, and consequently indifferent to 
 the amount of wealth which satisfies them. There is 
 a passage in the Odyssey 1 illustrating this truth, of 
 which I may quote the last two lines : 
 
 Totos yap voos ecrrlv kirL^doviinv dv9p(o7ro)V 
 Olov J<£ fjjxap ayet Trarrjp avSpwv re deiov re. 
 
 — the thoughts of man that dwells on the earth are as 
 the day granted him by the father of gods and men. 
 Discontent springs from a constant endeavour to in- 
 crease the amount of our claims, when we are power- 
 less to increase the amount which will satisfy them. 
 
 When we consider how full of needs the human 
 race is, how its whole existence is based upon them, it 
 is not a matter for surprise that wealth is held in 
 more sincere esteem, nay, in greater honour, than 
 anything else in the world ; nor ought we to wonder 
 that gain is made the only goal of life, and everything 
 that does not lead to it pushed aside or thrown over- 
 board — philosophy, for instance, by those who profess 
 it. People are often reproached for wishing for money 
 above all things, and for loving it more than anything 
 else ; but it is natural and even inevitable for people 
 to love that which, like an unwearied Proteus, is 
 always ready to turn itself into whatever object their 
 wandering wishes or manifold desires may for the 
 i xviii., 130-7. 
 
r 
 
 PROPERTY, OR WHAT A MAN HAS. 51 ' 
 
 moment fix upon Everything else can satisfy only 
 one wish, one need : food is good only if you are 
 hungry ; wine, if you are able to enjoy it ; drugs, if 
 you are sick ; fur for the winter ; love for youth, and 
 so on. These are all only relatively good, ayaOa tt/jos t«. 
 Money alone is absolutely good, because it is not only 
 a concrete satisfaction of one need in particular ; it is 
 an abstract satisfaction of all. 
 
 If a man has an independent fortune, he should 
 regard it as a bulwark against the many evils and 
 misfortunes which lie may encounter; he should not' ' <\<<^-** 
 look upon it as giving him leave to get what plea- 
 sure he can out of the world, or as rendering it 
 incumbent upon him to spend it in this way. /People 
 who are not born with a fortune, but end by making 
 a large one through the exercise of whatever talents 
 they possess, almost always come to think that their 
 talents are their capital, and that the money they 
 have gained is merely the interest upon it ; they do 
 not lay by a part of their earnings to form permanent 
 capital, but spend their money much as they have 
 earned it. Accordingly, they often fall into poverty : 
 their earmngs decrease, or come to an end altogether, 
 either because their talent is exhausted by becoming 
 antiquated, — as, for instance, very often happens in 
 the case of fine art — or else it was valid only under a 
 special conjunction of circumstances which has now 
 passed away. There is nothing to prevent those who 
 live on the common labour of their hands from treat- 
 ing their earnings in that way if they like ; because 
 their kind of skill is not likely to disappear, or, if it 
 does, it can be replaced by that of their fellow- work- 
 
52 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 men ; moreover, the kind of work they do is always 
 in demand ; so that what the proverb says is quite 
 true, a useful trade is a mine of gold. But with 
 artists and professionals of every kind the case is 
 quite different, and that is the reason why they are 
 well paid. They ought to build up a capital out of 
 their earnings; but they recklessly look upon them 
 as merely interest, and end in ruin. On the other 
 hand, people who inherit money know, at least, how 
 to distinguish between capital and interest, and most 
 of them try to make their capital secure and not 
 encroach upon it ; nay, if they can, they put by at 
 least an eighth of their interest in order to meet 
 future contingencies. So most of them maintain 
 their position. These few remarks about capital and 
 interest are not applicable to commercial life, for 
 merchants look upon money only as a means of 
 further gain, just as a workman regards his tools ; so 
 even if their capital has been entirely the result of 
 their own efforts, they try to preserve and increase it 
 by using it. Accordingly, wealth is nowhere so much 
 at home as in the merchant class. 
 
 It will generally be found that those who know 
 what it is to have been in need and destitution are 
 very much less afraid of it, and consequently more 
 inclined to extravagance, than those who know poverty 
 only by hearsay. People who have been born and 
 bred in good circumstances are as a rule much more 
 careful about the future, more economical, in fact, 
 than those who by a piece of good luck, have sud- 
 denly passed from poverty to wealth. This looks as 
 if poverty were not really such a very wretched thing 
 
PROPERTY, OR WHAT A MAN HAS. 53 
 
 as it appears from a distance. The true reason, 
 however, is rather the fact that the man who has 
 been born into a position of wealth comes to look 
 upon it as something without which he could no more 
 live than he could live without air ; he guards it as 
 he does his very life ; and so he is generally a lover 
 of order, prudent and economical. But the man who 
 has been born into a poor position looks upon it as 
 the natural one, and if by any chance he comes in for 
 a fortune, he regards it as a superfluity, something to 
 be enjoyed or wasted, because, if it comes to an end, 
 he can get on just as well as before, with one anxiety 
 the less ; or, as Shakespeare says in Henry VI., 1 
 
 .... the adage must be verified 
 That beggars mounted run their horse to death. 
 
 But it should be said that people of this kind have a 
 firm and excessive trust, partly in fate, partly in the 
 peculiar means which have already raised them out 
 of need and poverty, — a trust not only of the head, but 
 of the heart also ; and so they do not, like the man 
 born rich, look upon the shallows of poverty as 
 bottomless, but console themselves with the thought 
 that when they have touched ground again, they can 
 take another upward flight. It is this trait in human 
 character which explains the fact that women who 
 were poor before their marriage often make greater 
 claims, and are more extravagant, than those who 
 have brought their husbands a rich dowry ; because 
 as a rule, rich girls bring with them, not only a 
 fortune, but also more eagerness, nay, more of the 
 1 Part III., Act 1, Sc. 4. 
 
54 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 inherited instinct, to preserve it, than poor girls do. 
 If anyone doubts the truth of this, and thinks that it 
 is just the opposite, he will find authority for his 
 view in Ariosto's first Satire ; but, on the other hand, 
 Dr. Johnson agrees with my opinion. A woman of 
 fortune, he says, being used to the handling of money, 
 spends it judiciously ; but a woman who gets the 
 command of money for the first time upon her mar- 
 riage, has such a gusto in spending it, that she throws 
 it away with great profusion} And in any case let 
 me advise anyone who marries a poor girl not to 
 leave her the capital but only the interest, and to 
 take especial care that she has not the management 
 of the children's fortune. 
 
 I do not by any means think that I am touching 
 upon a subject which is not worth my while to 
 mention when I recommend people to be careful to 
 preserve what they have earned or inherited. For to 
 start life with just as much as will make one inde- 
 pendent, that is, allow one to live comfortably with- 
 out having to work — even if one has only just enough 
 for oneself, not to speak of a family — is an advantage 
 which cannot be over-estimated ; for it means exemp- 
 tion and immunity from that chronic disease of 
 penury, which fastens on the life of man like a 
 plague ; it is emancipation from that forced labour 
 which is the natural lot of every mortal. Only under 
 a favourable fate like this can a man be said to be 
 born free, to be, in the proper sense of the word, sui 
 juris, master of his own time and powers, and able to 
 say every morning, This day is my own. And just 
 1 Boswell's Life of Johnson : ann : 1776, setat : 67. 
 
PROPERTY, OR WHAT A MAX HAS. 55 
 
 for the same reason the difference between the man 
 who has a hundred a year and the man who has a 
 thousand, is infinitely smaller than the difference be- 
 tween the former and a man who has nothing at all. 
 But inherited wealth reaches its utmost value when it 
 falls to the individual endowed with mental powers 
 of a high order, who is resolved to pursue a line of 
 life not compatible with the making of money j for 
 he is then doubly endowed by fate and can live for 
 his genius ; and he will pay his debt to mankind a 
 hundred times, by achieving what no other could 
 achieve, by producing some work which contributes 
 to the general good, and redounds to the honour of 
 humanity at large. Another, again, may use his 
 wealth to further philanthropic schemes, and make 
 himself well-deserving of his fellow-men. But a man 
 who does none of these things, who does not even try 
 to do them, who never attempts to study thoroughly 
 some one branch of knowledge so that he may at 
 least do what he can towards promoting it — such a 
 one, born as he is into riches, is a mere idler and 
 thief of time, a contemptible fellow. He will not 
 even be happy, because, in his ease, exemption from 
 need delivers him up to the other extreme of human 
 suffering, boredom, which is such martyrdom to him, 
 that he would have been better off if poverty had 
 given him something to do. And as he is bored he is 
 apt to be extravagant, and so lose the advantage of 
 which he showed himself unworthy. Countless numbers 
 of people find themselves in want, simply because, when 
 they had money, they spent it only to get momentary 
 relief from the feeling of boredom which oppressed them. 
 
56 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 It is quite another matter if one's object is success m 
 political life, where favour, friends and connections 
 are all- important, in order to mount by their aid step 
 by step on the ladder of promotion, and perhaps gain 
 the topmost rung. In this kind of life, it is much 
 better to be cast on the world without a penny ; and 
 if the aspirant is not of noble family, but is a man of 
 some talent, it will redound to his advantage to be an 
 absolute pauper. For what every one most aims at 
 in ordinary contact with his fellows is to prove them 
 inferior to himself ; and how much more is this the 
 case in politics. Now, it is only an absolute 
 pauper who has such a thorough conviction of his 
 own complete, profound and positive inferiority from 
 every point of view, of his own utter insignificance 
 and worthlessness, that he can take his place quietly 
 in the political machine. 1 He is the only one who 
 can keep on bowing low enough, and even go right 
 down upon his face if necessary ; he alone can sub- 
 mit to everything and laugh at it ; he alone knows the 
 entire worthlessness of merit; he alone uses his 
 loudest voice and his boldest type whenever he has to 
 speak or write of those who are placed over his head, 
 or occupy any position of influence ; and if they do a 
 little scribbling, he is ready to applaud it as a master- 
 work. He alone understands how to beg, and so 
 
 1 Translator's Note. — Schopenhauer is probably here making 
 one of his many virulent attacks upon Hegel ; in this case on 
 account of what he thought to be the philosopher's abject 
 servility to the government of his day. Though the Hegelian 
 system has been the fruitful mother of many liberal ideas, there 
 can be no doubt that Hegel's influence, in his own life-time, was 
 an effective support of Prussian bureaucracy. 
 
PROPERTY, OR WHAT A MAN HAS. 57 
 
 betimes, when he is hardly out of his boyhood, he 
 becomes a high priest of that hidden mystery which 
 Goethe brings to light ; — 
 
 Utber's Niedertraehtige 
 Niemand sich beklage : 
 JDenn es ist das Machtige 
 Was man dir auch sage : 
 
 — it is no use to complain of low aims ; for, whatever 
 people may say, they rule the world. 
 
 On the other hand, the man who is born with 
 enough to live upon is generally of a somewhat inde- 
 pendent turn of mind ; he is accustomed to keep his 
 head up ; he has not learned all the arts of the 
 beggar ; perhaps he even presumes a little upon the 
 possession of talents which, as he ought to know, can 
 never compete with cringing mediocrity ; in the long 
 run he comes to recognise the inferiority of those who 
 are placed over his head, and when they try to put 
 insults upon him, he becomes refractory and shy. 
 This is not the way to get on in the world. Nay, 
 such a man may at last incline to the opinion freely 
 expressed by Voltaire: We have only two days to live ; 
 it is not worth our while to spend them in cringing to 
 contemptible rascals. But alas ! let me observe by the 
 way, that contemptible rascal is an attribute which 
 may be predicated of an abominable number of people. 
 What Juvenal says — it is difficult to rise if your 
 poverty is greater than your talent — 
 
 Hand facile emergunt qiwrum virtutibus obstat 
 Res angusta domi — 
 
 is more applicable to a eareer of art and literature 
 than to political and social ambition. 
 
58 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 Wife and children I have not reckoned amongst a 
 man's possessions : he is rather in their possession. It 
 would be easier to include friends under that head ; 
 but a man's friends belong to him not a whit more 
 than he belongs to them. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 POSITION, OR A MAN S PLACE IN THE ESTIMATION OF 
 OTHERS. 
 
 Section 1. — Reputation. 
 
 By a peculiar weakness of human nature, people gene- 
 rally think too much about the opinion which others 
 form of them; although the slightest reflection will show 
 that this opinion, whatever it may be, is not in itself 
 essential to happiness. Therefore it is hard to under- 
 stand why everybody feels so very pleased when he 
 sees that other people have a good opinion of him, or 
 say anything flattering to his vanity. If you stroke 
 a cat, it will purr ; and, as inevitably, if you praise a 
 man, a sweet expression of delight will appear on his 
 face ; and even though the praise is a palpable lie, it 
 will be welcome, if the matter is one on which he 
 prides himself. If only other people will applaud 
 him, a man may console himself for downright mis- 
 fortune, or for the pittance he gets from the two 
 sources of human happiness already discussed ; and 
 conversely, it is astonishing how infallibly a man will 
 be annoyed, and in some cases deeply pained, by any 
 wrong done to his feeling of self-importance, whatever 
 be the nature, degree, or circumstances of the injury, 
 or by any depreciation, slight, or disregard. 
 
60 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 If the feeling of honour rests upon this peculiarity 
 of human nature, it may have a very salutary effect 
 upon the welfare of a great many people, as a substi- 
 tute for morality; but upon their happiness, more 
 especially upon that peace of mind and independence 
 which are so essential to happiness, its effect will be 
 disturbing and prejudicial rather than salutary, 
 Therefore it is advisable, from our point of view, 
 to set limits to this weakness, and duly to con- 
 sider and rightly to estimate the relative value of ad- 
 vantages, and thus temper, as far as possible, this great 
 susceptibility to other people's opinion, whether the 
 opinion be one flattering to our vanity, or whether it 
 causes us pain ; for in either case it is the same feel- 
 ing which is touched. Otherwise, a man is the slave of 
 what other people are pleased to think, — and how 
 little it requires to disconcert or soothe the mind that 
 is greedy of praise :— 
 
 Sic leve, sic parvum est, animum quod laudis avarum 
 Subruit ac reficit. 1 
 
 Therefore it will very much conduce to our happi- 
 ness if we duly compare the value of what a man is 
 in and for himself with what he is in the eyes of 
 others. Under the former comes everything that fills 
 up the span of our existence and makes it what it is, 
 in short, all the advantages already considered and 
 summed up under the heads of personality and pro- 
 perty ; and the sphere in which all this takes place is 
 the man's own consciousness. On the other hand, the 
 
 1 Horace, Epist : II, 1, 180. 
 
REPUTATION. 61 
 
 sphere of what we are for other people is their con- 
 sciousness, not ours ; it is the kind of figure we make 
 in their eyes, together with the thoughts which this 
 arouses. 1 But this is something which has no direct 
 and immediate existence for us, but can affect us only 
 mediately and indirectly, so far, that is, as other 
 people's behaviour towards us is directed by it ; and 
 even then it ought to affect us only in so far as it can 
 move us to modify what we are in and for ourselves. 
 Apart from this, what goes on in other people's con- 
 sciousness is, as such, a matter of indifference to us : 
 and in time we get really indifferent to it, when we 
 come to see how superficial and futile are most people's 
 thoughts, how narrow their ideas, how mean their 
 sentiments, how perverse their opinions, and how 
 much of error there is in most of them ; when we 
 learn by experience with what depreciation a man 
 will speak of his fellow, when he is not obliged to fear 
 him, or thinks that what he says will not come to his 
 ears. And if ever we have had an opportunity of 
 seeing how the greatest of men will meet with nothing 
 but slight from half-a-dozen blockheads, we shall 
 understand that to lay great value upon what other 
 people say is to pay them too much honour. 
 
 At all events, a man is in a very bad way, who finds 
 no source of happiness in the first two classes of bless- 
 ings already treated of, but has to seek it in the third, 
 in other words, not in what he is in himself, but in 
 
 1 Let me remark that people in the highest positions in life, 
 with all their brilliance, pomp, display, magnificence and general 
 show, may well say : — Our happiness lies entirely outside us, for 
 \ it exists only in the heads of others. 
 
62 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 what he is in the opinion of others. For, after all, 
 the foundation of our whole nature, and, therefore, of 
 our happiness, is our physique, and the most essential 
 factor in happiness is health, and, next in importance 
 after health, the ability to maintain ourselves in inde- 
 pendence and freedom from caref) There can be no 
 competition or compensation between these essential 
 factors on the one side, and honour, pomp, rank and 
 reputation on the other, however much value we may 
 set upon the latter. No one would hesitate to sacri- 
 fice the latter for the former, if it were necessary. 
 We should add very much to our happiness by a 
 timely recognition of the simple truth that every 
 man's chief and real existence is in his own skin, and 
 not in other people's opinions; and, consequently, that 
 the actual conditions of our personal life, — health, 
 temperament, capacity, income, wife, children, friends, 
 home, are a hundred times more important for our 
 happiness than what other people are pleased to think 
 of us; otherwise we shall be miserable. And if people 
 insist that honour is dearer than life" itself, what they 
 really mean is that existence and well-being are as 
 nothing compared with other people's opinions. Of 
 course, this may be only an exaggerated way of stat- 
 ing the prosaic truth that reputation, that is, the 
 opinion others have of us, is indispensable if we are 
 to make any progress in the world ; but I shall come 
 back to that presently. When we see that almost 
 everything men devote their lives to attain, sparing 
 no effort and encountering a thousand toils and dangers 
 in the process, has, in the end, no further object than 
 to raise themselves in the estimation of others ; whep 
 

 DEPUTATION. 63 
 
 we see that not only offices, titles, decorations, but also 
 wealth, nay, even knowledge x and art, are striven f 01 
 only to obtain, as the ultimate goal of all effort, 
 greater respect from one's fellow-men, — is not this a 
 lamentable proof of the extent to which human folly 
 can go ? To set much too high a value on other 
 people's opinion is a common error everywhere ; an 
 error, it may be, rooted in human nature itself, or the 
 result of civilisation and social arrangements gener- 
 ally ; but, whatever its source, it exercises a very 
 immoderate influence on all we do, and is very preju- 
 dicial to our happiness. We can trace it from a. /s r7 f U j\ 
 timorous and slavish regard for what other people 
 will say, up to the feeling which made Virginius, 
 plunge the dagger into his daughter's heart, or induces f/ 
 many a man to sacrifice quiet, riches, health and even 
 life itself, for posthumous glory. ) Undoubtedly this 
 feeling is a very convenient instrument in the hands 
 of those who have the control or direction of their 
 fellow-men; and accordingly we find that in every 
 scheme for training up humanity in the way it should 
 go, the maintenance and strengthening of the feeling 
 of honour occupies an important place. But it is 
 quite a different matter in its effect on human happiness, 
 of which it is here our object to treat; and we should 
 rather be careful to dissuade people from setting too 
 much store by what others think of them. Daily ex- 
 perience shows us, however, that this is just the mis- 
 take people persist in making; most men set the 
 utmost value precisely on what other people think, 
 
 1 Scire tuum nihil est nisi te scire hoc sciat alter, (Persius i. 27) 
 *— knowledge is no use unless others know that you have it. 
 
64 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 and are more concerned about it than about what goes 
 on in their own consciousness, which is the thing most 
 immediately and directly present to them. They 
 reverse the natural order, — regarding the opinions o£ 
 others as real existence and their own consciousness 
 as something shadowy; making the derivative and 
 secondary into the principal, and considering the 
 picture they present to the world of more importance 
 than their own selves. By thus trying to get a direct 
 and immediate result out of what has no really direct 
 or immediate existence, they fall into the kind of folly 
 which is called vanity — the appropriate term for that 
 which has no solid or intrinsic value. Like a miser, 
 such people forget the end in their eagerness to obtain 
 the means. 
 
 The truth is that the value we set upon the opinion 
 of others, and our constant endeavour in respect of it, 
 are each quite out of proportion to any result we may 
 reasonably hope to attain ; so that this attention to 
 other people's attitude may be regarded as a kind of 
 universal mania which everyone inherits. In all we 
 do, almost the first thing we think about is : What will 
 people say ; and nearly half the troubles and bothers 
 of life may be traced to our anxiety on this score ; it 
 is the anxiety which is at the bottom of all that 
 feeling of self-importance, which is so often mortified 
 because it is so very morbidly sensitive. It is solici- 
 tude about what others will say that underlies all our 
 vanity and pretension, yes, and all our show and 
 swagger too. Without it, there would not be a tenth 
 part of the luxury which exists. Pride in every form, 
 "point d'honneur and punctilio, however varied their 
 
rvEPUTATIOX. G5 
 
 kind or sphere, are at bottom nothing but this — 
 anxiety about what others will say — and what sacri- 
 fices it often costs ! One can see it even in a child ; 
 and though it exists at every period of life, it is 
 strongest in age; because, when the capacity for 
 sensual pleasure fails, vanity and pride have only 
 avarice to share their dominion. Frenchmen, perhaps, 
 afford the best example of this feeling, and amongst 
 them it is a regular epidemic, appearing sometimes in 
 the most absurd ambition, or in a ridiculous kind of 
 national vanity and the most shameless boasting. 
 However, they frustrate their own aims, for other 
 people make fun of them and call them la grande 
 nation. 
 
 By way of specially illustrating this perverse and 
 exuberant respect for other people's opinion, let me 
 take a passage from the Times of March 31st, 1846, 
 giving a detailed account of the execution of one 
 Thomas Wix, an apprentice who, from motives of 
 vengeance, had murdered his master. Here we have 
 very unusual circumstances and an extraordinary 
 character, though one very suitable for our purpose ; 
 and these combine to give a striking picture of this 
 folly, which is so deeply rooted in human nature, and 
 allow us to form an accurate notion of the extent to 
 which it will go. On the morning of the execution, 
 jays the report, the rev. ordinary was early in 
 attendance upon him, but Wix, beyond a quiet 
 demeanour, betrayed no interest in his ministrations, 
 appearing to feel anxious only to acquit himself 
 " bravely " before the spectators of his ignominious 
 end In the procession Wix fell into his 
 
 E 
 
GO THE WISDOM OF LIFE 
 
 proper place with alacrity, and, as he entered the 
 Chapel-yard, remarked, sufficiently loud to be heard 
 by several persons near him, "Now, then, as Dr. J) odd 
 said, I shall soon know the grand secret" On reach- 
 ing the scaffold, the miserable wretch mounted the 
 drop without the slightest assistance, and when he 
 got to the centre, he bowed to the spectators twice, a 
 proceeding which called forth a tremendous cheer 
 from the degraded crowd beneath. 
 
 This is an admirable example of the way in which a 
 man, with death in the most dreadful form before his 
 very eyes, and eternity beyond it, will care for 
 nothing but the impression he makes upon a crowd of 
 gapers, and the opinion he leaves behind him in their 
 heads. There was much the same kind of thing in 
 the case of Lecomte, w T ho was executed at Frankfurt, 
 also in 1846, for an attempt on the king's life. At the 
 trial he was verj T much annoyed that he was not 
 allowed to appear, in decent attire, before the Upper 
 House ; and on the day of the execution it was a 
 special grief to him that he was not permitted to 
 shave. It is not only in recent times that this kind 
 of thing has been known to happen. Mateo Aleman 
 tells us, in the Introduction to his celebrated romance, 
 Guzman de Alfarache, that many infatuated criminals, 
 instead of devoting their last hours to the welfare of 
 their souls, as they ought to have done, neglect this 
 duty for the purpose of preparing and committing to 
 memory a speech to be made from the scaffold. 
 
 I take these extreme cases as being the best illus- 
 trations of what I mean ; for they give us a magnified 
 reflection of our own nature. The anxieties of all of 
 
REPUTATION. 6-7 
 
 us, our worries, vexations, bothers, troubles, uneasy 
 apprehensions and strenuous efforts are due, in perhaps 
 the large majority of instances, to what other people 
 will say; and we are just as foolish in this respect as 
 those miserable criminals. Envy and hatred are very 
 often traceable to a similar source. 
 
 Now, it is obvious that happiness, which consists 
 for the most part in peace of mind and contentment, 
 would be served by nothing so much as by reducing 
 this impulse of human nature within reasonable limits, 
 — which would perhaps make it one fiftieth part of 
 what it is now. By doing so, we should get rid of a 
 thorn in the flesh which is always causing us pain. 
 But it is a very difficult task, because the impulse in 
 question is a natural and innate perversity of human 
 nature. Tacitus says, The lust of fame is the last that 
 a wise man shakes off. 1 The only way of putting an 
 end to this universal folly is to see clearly that it is a 
 folly ; and this may be done by recognising the fact 
 that most of the opinions in men's heads are apt to be 
 false, perverse, erroneous and absurd, and so in them- 
 selves unworthy of any attention ; further, that other 
 people's opinions can have very little real and positive 
 influence upon us in most of the circumstances and 
 affairs of life. Again, this opinion is generally of such 
 an unfavourable character that it would worry a man 
 to death to hear everything that was said of him, or 
 the tone in which he was spoken of. And finally, 
 among other things, we should be clear about the fact 
 that honour itself has no really direct, but only an 
 indirect, value. If people were generally converted 
 1 Hist., iv., 6. 
 
s 
 
 68 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 from this universal folly, the result would be such an 
 addition to our peace of mind and cheerfulness as at 
 present seems inconceivable ; people would present a 
 firmer and more confident front to the world, and 
 generally behave with less embarrassment and re- 
 straint. It is observable that a retired mode of life 
 has an exceedingly beneficial influence on our peace of 
 mind, and this is mainly because we thus escape 
 having to live constantly in the sight of others, and 
 pay everlasting regard to their casual opinions ; in a 
 word, we are able to return upon ourselves. At the 
 same time a good deal of positive misfortune might be 
 avoided, which we are now drawn into by striving 
 after shadows, or, to speak more correctly, by indulg- 
 ing a mischievous piece of folly ; and we should con- 
 sequently have more attention to give to solid realities 
 and enjoy them with less interruption than at present. 
 But x a ^ e7I « T< * KaAa — what is worth doing is hard to do. 
 
 Section 2. — Pride. 
 
 The folly of our nature which we are discussing 
 puts forth three shoots, ambition, vanity and pride. 
 The difference between the last two is this : pride is 
 an established conviction of one's own paramount 
 worth in some particular respect ; while vanity is the 
 desire of rousing such a conviction in others, and it is 
 generally accompanied by the secret hope of ulti- 
 mately coming to the same conviction oneself. Pride 
 works from within ; it is the direct appreciation of 
 oneself. Vanity is the desire to arrive at this appre- 
 ciation indirectly, from without. So we find that vain 
 
PRIDE. 69 
 
 people are talkative, and proud, taciturn. But the 
 vain person ought to be aware that the good opinion 
 of others, which he strives for, may be obtained much 
 more easily and certainly by persistent silence than by 
 speech, even though he has very good things to say. 
 Anyone who wishes to affect pride is not therefore a 
 proud man ; but he will soon have to drop this, as 
 every other, assumed character. 
 
 It is only a firm, unshakeable conviction of pre- 
 eminent worth and special value which makes a man 
 proud in the true sense of the word, — a conviction 
 which may, no doubt, be a mistaken one or rest on 
 advantages which are of an adventitious and conven- 
 tional character : still pride is not the less pride for 
 all that, so long as it be present in real earnest. And 
 since pride is thus rooted in conviction, it resembles 
 every other form of knowledge in not being within 
 our own arbitrament. Pride's worst foe, — I mean its 
 greatest obstacle, — is vanity, which courts the ap- 
 plause of the world in order to gain the necessary 
 foundation for a high opinion of one's own worth, 
 whilst pride is based upon a pre-existing conviction 
 of it. 
 
 It is quite true that pride is something which is 
 generally found fault with, and cried down ; but 
 usually, I imagine, by those who have nothing upon 
 which they can pride themselves. In view of the 
 impudence and foolhardiness of most people, anyone 
 who possesses any kind of superiority or merit will 
 do well to keep his eyes fixed on it, if he does not 
 want it to be entirely forgotten; for if a man is good- 
 natured enough to ignore his own privileges, and 
 
70 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 hob-nob with the generality of other people, as if he 
 were quite on their level, they will be sure to treat 
 him, frankly and candidly, as one of themselves. 
 This is a piece of advice I would specially offer to 
 those whose superiority is of the highest kind — real 
 superiority, I mean, of a purely personal nature — 
 which cannot, like orders and titles, appeal to the eye 
 or ear at every moment ; as, otherwise, they will find 
 that familiarity breeds contempt, or, as the Romans 
 used to say, sus Minervam. Joke with a slave, and 
 he'll soon show his heels, is an excellent Arabian 
 proverb ; nor ought we to despise what Horace says, 
 
 Sume superbiam 
 Qucesitam meritis. 
 
 — usurp the fame }^ou have deserved. No doubt, 
 when modesty was ma le a virtue, it was a very ad- 
 vantageous thing for the fools ; for everybody is 
 expected to speak of himself as if he were one. This 
 is levelling down indeed ! for it comes to look as if 
 there were nothing but fools in the world. 
 
 The cheapest sort of pride is national pride ; for if 
 a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he 
 has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud; 
 otherwise, he would not have recourse to those which 
 he shares with so many millions of his fellow-men. 
 The man who is endowed with important personal 
 qualities will be only too ready to see clearly in what 
 respects his own nation falls short, since their failings 
 will be constantly before his eyes. But every miser- 
 able fool who has nothing at all of which he can be 
 
PRIDE. 71 
 
 proud adopts, as a last resource, pride in the nation 
 to which he belongs ; he is ready and glad to defer. d 
 all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus re-im- 
 bursing himself for his own inferiority. For example, 
 if you speak of the stupid and degrading bigotry of 
 the English nation with the contempt it deserves, you 
 will hardly find one Englishman in fifty to agree with 
 you ; but if there should be one, he will generally 
 happen to be an intelligent man. 
 
 The Germans have no national pride, which shows 
 how honest they are, as everybody knows ! and how 
 dishonest are those who, by a piece of ridiculous 
 affectation, pretend that they are proud of their coun- 
 try — the Deutsche Briider and the demagogues who 
 flatter the mob in order to mislead it. I have heard 
 it said that gunpowder was invented by a German. 
 I doubt it. Lichtenberg asks, Why is it that a man 
 who is not a German does not care about pretending 
 that he is one; and that if he makes any pretence 
 at all, it is to be a Frenchman or an Englishman ? 1 
 
 However that may be, individuality is a far more 
 important thing than nationality, and in any given 
 man deserves a thousand-fold more consideration. 
 And since you cannot speak of national character 
 without referring to large masses of people, it is im- 
 possible to be loud in your praises and at the same 
 time honest. National character is only another 
 
 1 Translators Note. It should be remembered that these 
 remarks were -written in the earlier part of the present century, 
 and that a German philosopher now-a-days, even though he 
 were as apt to say bitter things as Schopenhauer, could hardly 
 write in a similar strain. 
 
72 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 name for the particular form which the littleness, 
 perversity and baseness of mankind take in every 
 country. If we become disgusted with one, we praise 
 another, until we get disgusted with this too. Ever} 7 
 nation mocks at other nations, and all are right. 
 
 The contents of this chapter, which treats, as 1 
 have said, of what we represent in the world, or what 
 we are in the eyes of others, may be further distri- 
 buted under three heads : honour, rank and fame. 
 
 Section 3. — Rank. 
 
 Let us take rank first, as it may be dismissed in a 
 few words, although it plays an important part in 
 the eyes of the masses and of the philistines, and is a 
 most useful wheel in the machinery of the State. 
 
 It has a purely conventional value. Strictly 
 speaking, it is a sham ; its method is to exact an 
 artificial respect, and, as a matter of fact, the whole 
 thing is a mere farce. 
 
 Orders, it may be said, are bills of exchange drawn 
 on public opinion, and the measure of their value is 
 the credit of the drawer. Of course, as a substitute 
 for pensions, they save the State a good deal of 
 money ; and, besides, they serve a very useful purpose, 
 if they are distributed with discrimination and judg- 
 ment. For people in general have eyes and ears, it is 
 true ; but not much else, very little judgment indeed, 
 or even memory. There are many services to the 
 State quite beyond the range of their understanding ; 
 others, again, are appreciated and made much of for a 
 time, and then soon forgotten. It seems to me, there- 
 
\ 
 
 HONOUR. 73 
 
 fore, very proper, that a cross or a star should 
 proclaim to the mass of people always and every- 
 where, This man is not like you; he has done 
 something. But orders lose their value when they 
 are distributed unjustly, or without due selection, or 
 in too great numbers : a prince should be as careful in 
 conferring them as a man of business is in signing 
 a bill. It is a pleonasm to inscribe on any order for 
 distinguished service ; for every order ought to be for 
 distinguished service. That stands to reason. 
 
 Section 4- — Honour. 
 
 Honour is a much larger question than rank, and 
 more difficult to discuss. Let us begin by trying to 
 define it. 
 
 If I were to say Honour is external conscience, 
 and conscience is inward honour, no doubt a good 
 many people would assent ; but there would be more 
 show than reality about such a definition, and it 
 would hardly go to the root of the matter. I prefer 
 to say, Honour is, on its objective side, other people's 
 v opinion of what we are worth; on its subjective side, 
 it is the respect we pay to this opinion. From the 
 latter point of view, to be a man of honour is to 
 exercise what is often a very wholesome, but by no 
 means a purely moral, influence. 
 
 The feelings of honour and shame exist in every 
 man who is not utterly depraved, and honour is 
 everywhere recognised as something particularly 
 valuable. The reason of this is as follows. By and 
 in himself a man can accomplish very little ; he 
 
74 The wisdom of life. 
 
 is like Robinson Crusoe on a desert island. It is only 
 in society that a man's powers can be called into full 
 activity. He very soon finds this out when his 
 consciousness begins to develop, and there arises in 
 him the desire to be looked upon as a useful member 
 of society, as one, that is, who is capable of playing 
 his part as a man — pro parte virili — thereby acquir- 
 ing a right to the benefits of social life. Now, to be 
 a useful member of society, one must do two things : 
 firstly, what everyone is expected to do everywhere ; 
 and, secondly, what one's own particular position in the 
 world demands and requires. 
 
 But a man soon discovers that everything de- 
 pends upon his being useful, not in his own opinion, 
 but in the opinion of others ; and so he tries his best 
 to make that favourable impression upon the world, 
 to which he attaches such a high value. Hence, this 
 primitive and innate characteristic of human nature, 
 which is called the feeling of honour, or, under 
 another aspect, the feeling of shame — verecundia. It 
 is this which brings a blush to his cheek at the 
 thought of having suddenly to fall in the estimation 
 of others, even when he knows that he is innocent, 
 nay, even if his remissness extends to no absolute 
 obligation, but only to one which he has taken upon 
 himself of his own free will. Conversely, nothing in 
 life gives a man so much courage as the attainment 
 or renewal of the conviction that other people regard 
 him with favour ; because it means that everyone 
 joins to give him help and protection, which is an 
 infinitely stronger bulwark against the ills of life 
 than anything he can do himself. 
 
HONOUR. 
 
 75 
 
 The variety of relations in which a man can stand 
 to other people so as to obtain their confidence, that is, 
 their good opinion, gives rise to a distinction between 
 several kinds of honour, resting chiefly on the 
 different bearings that meum may take to tuum ; or, 
 again, on the performance of various pledges; or 
 finally, on the relation of the sexes. Hence, there are 
 three main kinds of honour, each of which takes 
 various forms— civic honour, official honour, and 
 sexual honour. 
 
 Civic honour has the widest sphere of all. It con- 
 sists in the assumption that we shall pay uncondi- 
 tional respect to the rights of others, and, therefore, 
 never use any unjust or unlawful means of getting 
 what we want. It is the condition of all peaceable 
 intercourse between man and man ; and it is destroyed 
 by anything that openly and manifestly militates 
 against this peaceable intercourse, anything, accord- 
 ingly, which entails punishment at the hands of the 
 law, always supposing that the punishment is a just 
 
 one. 
 
 The ultimate foundation of honour is the conviction 
 that moral character is unalterable: a single bad 
 action implies that future actions of the same kind 
 will, under similar circumstances, also be bad. This 
 is well expressed by the English use of the word 
 character as meaning credit, reputation, honour. 
 Hence honour, once lost, can never be recovered ; un- 
 less the loss rested on some mistake, such as may occur 
 if a man is slandered or his actions viewed in a false 
 light. So the law provides remedies against slander, 
 libel, and even insult; for insult, though it amount to 
 
76 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 no more than mere abuse, is a kind of summary slander 
 with a suppression of the reasons. What I mean may 
 be well put in the Greek phrase — not quoted from 
 
 any author — &mv rj XotSopta Sia/SoXr) (rvvrofxbs. It is 
 
 true that if a man abuses another, he is simply show- 
 ing that he has no real or true causes of complaint 
 against him ; as, otherwise, he would bring these 
 forward as the premises, and rely upon his hearers 
 to draw the conclusion themselves ; instead of which, 
 he gives the conclusion and leaves out the premises, 
 trusting that people will suppose that he has done so 
 only for the sake of being brief. 
 
 Civic honour draws its existence and name from 
 the middle classes ; but it applies equally to all, not 
 excepting the highest. No man can disregard it, and 
 it is a very serious thing, of which every one should 
 be careful not to make light. The man who breaks 
 confidence has for ever forfeited confidence, whatever 
 he may do, and whoever he may be ; and the bitter 
 consequences of the loss of confidence can never be 
 averted. 
 
 There is a sense in which honour may be said to 
 have a negative character in opposition to the positive 
 character of fame. For honour is not the opinion 
 people have of particular qualities which a man may 
 happen to possess exclusively : it is rather the opinion 
 they have of the qualities which a man may be ex- 
 pected to exhibit, and to which he should not prove 
 false. Honour, therefore, means that a man is not 
 exceptional; fame, that he is. Fame is something 
 /which must be won ; honour, only something which 
 [must not be lost. The absence of fame is obscurity, 
 
\ 
 
 HONOUR. 77 
 
 which is only a negative ; but loss of honour is shame, 
 which is a positive quality. This negative character 
 of honour must not be confused with any thing passive ; 
 for honour is above all things active in its working. It 
 is the only quality which proceeds directly from the 
 man who exhibits it : it is concerned entirely with 
 what he does and leaves undone, and has nothing to 
 do with the actions of others or the obstacles they 
 place in his way. It is something entirely in our own 
 power — twv £$rnio)v. This distinction, as we shall see 
 presently, marks off true honour from the sham honour 
 of chivalry. 
 
 Slander is the only weapon by which honour can be 
 attacked from without ; and the only way to repel 
 the attack is to confute the slander with the proper 
 amount of publicity, and a due unmasking of him who 
 utters it. 
 
 The reason why respect is paid to age is that old 
 people have necessarily shown in the course of their 
 lives whether or not they have been able to maintain 
 their honour unblemished ; while that of young people 
 has not yet been put to the proof, though they are 
 credited with the possession of it. For neither length 
 of years, — equalled, as it is, and even excelled, in the 
 case of some of the lower animals, — nor, again, experi- 
 ence, which is only a closer knowledge of the world's 
 ways, can be any sufficient reason for the respect 
 which the young are everywhere required to show 
 towards the old : for if it were merely a matter of 
 years, the weakness which attends on age would call 
 rather for consideration than for respect. It is, how- 
 ever, a remarkable fact that white hair always com- 
 
\ 
 
 78 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 mands reverence — a reverence really innate and in- 
 stinctive. Wrinkles — a much surer sign of old age — 
 command no reverence at all : you never hear any one 
 speak of venerable wrinkles ; but venerable white hair 
 is a common expression. 
 
 Honour has only an indirect value. For, as I ex- 
 plained at the beginning of this chapter, what other 
 people think of us, if it affects us at all, can affect us 
 only in so far as it governs their behaviour towards 
 us, and only just so long as we live with, or have to 
 do with, them. But it is to society alone that we owe 
 that safety which we and our possessions enjoy in a 
 state of civilisation ; in all we do we need the help of 
 others, and they, in their turn, must have confidence 
 in us before they can have anything to do with us. 
 Accordingly, their opinion of us is, indirectly, a matter 
 of great importance ; though I cannot see how it can 
 have a direct or immediate value. This is an opinion 
 also held by Cicero, I quite agree, he writes, ivith 
 what Ghrysippus and Diogenes used to say, that a 
 good reputation is not worth raising a finger to obtain, 
 if it were not that it is so useful. 1 This truth has 
 been insisted upon at great length by Helvetius in his 
 chief work Be VEsprit, 2 the conclusion of which is 
 that we love esteem not for its own sake, but solely for 
 the advantages which it brings. And as the means 
 can never be more than the end, that saying, of which 
 so much is made, Honour is dearer than life itself is, 
 as I have remarked, a very exaggerated statement. 
 So much, then, for civic honour. 
 
 1 Definibus iii., 17. 
 
 2 Disc: iii., 13. 
 
HONOUR. 79 
 
 Official honour is the general opinion of other 
 people that a man who fills any office really has the 
 necessary qualities for the proper discharge of all the 
 duties which appertain to it. The greater and more 
 important the duties a man has to discharge in the 
 State, and the higher and more influential the office 
 which he fills, the stronger must be the opinion which 
 people have of the moral and intellectual qualities 
 which render him fit for his post. Therefore, the 
 higher his position, the greater must be the degree of 
 honour paid to him, expressed, as it is, in titles, orders 
 and the generally subservient behaviour of others 
 towards him. As a rule, a man's official rank implies 
 the particular degree of honour which ought to be 
 paid to him, however much this degree may be modi- 
 fied by the capacity of the masses to form any notion 
 of its importance. Still, as a matter of fact, greater 
 honour is paid to a man who fulfils special duties 
 than to the common citizen, whose honour mainly 
 consists in keeping clear of dishonour. 
 
 Official honour demands, further, that the man who 
 occupies an office must maintain respect for it, for the 
 sake both of his colleagues and of those who will come 
 after him. This respect an official can maintain by a 
 proper observance of his duties, and by repelling any 
 attack that may be made upon the office itself or 
 upon its occupant : he must not, for instance, pass 
 over unheeded any statement to the effect that the 
 duties of the office are not properly discharged, or that 
 the office itself does not conduce to the public welfare. 
 He must prove the unwarrantable nature of such 
 attacks by enforcing the legal penalty for them. 
 
\ 
 
 80 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 Subordinate to the honour of official personages 
 comes that of those who serve the State in any other 
 capacity, as doctors, lawyers, teachers, anyone, in 
 short, who by graduating in any subject, or by any 
 other public declaration that he is qualified to exer- 
 cise some special skill, claims to practise it; in a 
 word, the honour of all those who take any 
 public pledges whatever. Under this head comes 
 military honour, in the true sense of the word, the 
 opinion that people who have bound themselves to 
 defend their country really possess the requisite 
 qualities which will enable them to do so, especially 
 courage, personal bravery and strength, and that they 
 are perfectly ready to defend their country to the 
 death, and never and under no circumstances desert 
 the flag to which they have once sworn allegiance. I 
 have here taken official honour in a wider sense than 
 that in which it is generally used, namely, the respect 
 due by citizens to an office itself. 
 
 In treating of sexual honour and the principles on 
 which it rests, a little more attention and analysis are 
 necessary ; and what I shall say will support my con- 
 tention that all honour really rests upon a utilitarian 
 basis. There are two natural divisions of the subject 
 — the honour of women and the honour of men, in 
 either side issuing in a well-understood esprit de corps. 
 The former is by far the more important of the two, 
 because the most essential feature in woman's life is 
 her relation to man. 
 
 Female honour is the general opinion in regard to a 
 girl that she is pure, and in regard to a wife that she 
 is faithful. The importance of this opinion rests upon 
 
HONOUR. 81 
 
 the following considerations. Women depend upon 
 men in all the relations of life ; men upon women, it 
 might be said, in one only. So an arrangement is 
 made for mutual interdependence — man undertaking 
 responsibility for all woman's needs and also for the 
 children that spring from their union — an arrange- 
 ment on which is based the welfare of the whole 
 female race. To carry out this plan, women have to 
 band together with a show of esprit cle corps, and 
 present one undivided front to their common enemy, 
 man, — who possesses all the good things of the earth, in 
 virtue of his superior physical and intellectual power, — 
 in order to lay siege to and conquer him, and so get 
 possession of him and a share of those good things. 
 To this end the honour of all women depends upon 
 the enforcement of the rule that no woman should give 
 herself to a man except in marriage, in order that 
 every man may be forced, as it were, to surrender and 
 ally himself with a woman ; by this arrangement pro- 
 vision is made for the whole of the female race. This 
 is a result, however, which can be obtained only by a 
 strict observance of the rule ; and, accordingly, women 
 everywhere show true esprit de corps in carefully in- 
 sisting upon its maintenance. Any girl who commits 
 a breach of the rule betrays the whole female race, 
 because its welfare would be destroyed if every woman 
 were to do likewise ; so she is cast out with shame as 
 one who has lost her honour. No woman will have 
 anything more to do with her ; she is avoided like 
 the plague. The same doom is awarded to a woman 
 who breaks the marriage tie ; for in so doing she is 
 false to the terms upon which the man capitulated; 
 
82 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 and as her conduct is such as to frighten other men 
 from making a similar surrender, it imperils the wel- 
 fare of all her sisters. Nay more ; this deception and 
 coarse breach of troth is a crime punishable by the 
 loss, not only of personal, but also of civic honour. 
 This is why we minimise the shame of a girl, but not 
 of a wife ; because, in the former case, marriage can 
 restore honour, while in the latter, no atonement can 
 be made for the breach of contract. 
 
 Once this esprit de corps is acknowledged to be the 
 foundation of female honour, and is seen to be a 
 wholesome, nay, a necessary arrangement, as at bottom 
 a matter of prudence and interest, its extreme import- 
 ance for the welfare of women will be recognised. But 
 it does not possess anything more than a relative 
 value. It is no absolute end, lying beyond all other 
 aims of existence and valued above life itself. In 
 this view, there will be nothing to applaud in the 
 forced and extravagant conduct of a Lucretia or a 
 Virginius — conduct which can easily degenerate into 
 tragic farce, and produce a terrible feeling of revulsion. 
 The conclusion of Emilia Galotti, for instance, makes 
 one leave the theatre completely ill at ease ; and, on the 
 other hand, all the rules of female honour cannot pre- 
 vent a certain sympathy with Clara in Egmont. To 
 carry this principle of female honour too far is to 
 forget the end in thinking of the means — and this is 
 just what people often do; for such exaggeration 
 suggests that the value of sexual honour is absolute ; 
 while the truth is that it is more relative than any 
 other kind. One might go so far as to say that its 
 value is purely conventional, when one sees from 
 
HONOUR. 83 
 
 Thomasius how in all ages and countries, up to the 
 time of the Reformation, irregularities were permitted 
 and recognised by law, with no derogation to female 
 honour, — not to speak of the temple of Mylitta at 
 Babylon. 1 
 
 There are also, of course, certain circumstances in 
 civil life which make external forms of marriage 
 impossible, especially in Catholic countries, where 
 there is no such thing as divorce. Ruling princes 
 everywhere, would, in my opinion, do much better, 
 from a moral point of view, to dispense with forms 
 altogether rather than contract a morganatic mar- 
 riage, the descendants of which might raise claims to 
 the throne if the legitimate stock happened to die 
 out ; so that there is a possibility, though, perhaps, a 
 remote one, that a morganatic marriage might pro- 
 duce a civil war. And, besides, such a marriage, 
 concluded in defiance of all outward ceremony, is a 
 concession made to women and priests — two classes of 
 persons to whom one should be most careful to give 
 as little tether as possible. It is further to be re- 
 marked that every man in a country can marry the 
 woman of his choice, except one poor individual, 
 namely, the prince. His hand belongs to his country, 
 and can bo given in marriage only for reasons of 
 State, that is, for the good of the country. Still, for 
 all that, he is a man; and, as a man, he likes to follow 
 whither his heart leads, It is an unjust, ungrateful 
 and priggish thing to forbid, or to desire to forbid, a 
 prince from following his inclinations in this matter ; 
 of course, as long as the lady has no influence upon 
 1 Perodotus, i. 199. 
 
84 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 the Government of the country. From her point of 
 view she occupies an exceptional position, and does 
 not come under the ordinary rules of sexual honour ; 
 for she has merely given herself to a man who loves 
 her, and whom she loves but cannot marry. And in 
 general, the fact that the principle of female honour 
 has no origin in nature, is shown by the many bloody 
 sacrifices which have been offered to it, — the murder 
 of children and the mother's suicide. No doubt a girl 
 who contravenes the code commits a breach of faith 
 against her whole sex ; but this faith is one which is 
 only secretly taken for granted, and not sworn to. 
 And since, in most cases, her own prospects suffer 
 most immediately, her folly is infinitely greater than 
 her crime. 
 
 The corresponding virtue in men is a product of 
 the one I have been discussing. It is their esprit de 
 corps, which demands that, when a man has made that 
 surrender of himself in marriage which is so advan- 
 tageous to his conqueror, he shall take care that the 
 terms of the treaty are maintained; both in order 
 that the agreement itself may lose none of its force 
 by the permission of any laxity in its observance, and 
 that men, having given up everything, may, at least, 
 be assured of their bargain, namely, exclusive posses- 
 sion. Accordingly, it is part of a man's honour to 
 resent a breach of the marriage tie on the part of his 
 wife, and to punish it, at the very least by separating 
 from her. If he condones the offence, his fellow-men 
 cry shame upon him ; but the shame in this case is 
 not nearly so foul as that of the woman who has lost 
 her honour ; the stain is by no means of so deep a 
 
HONOUR. 85 
 
 dye — levioris notae macula; — because a man's relation 
 to woman is subordinate to many other and more 
 important affairs in his life. The two great dramatic 
 poets of modern times have each taken man's honour 
 as the theme of two plays ; Shakespeare in Othello 
 and The Winter's Tale, and Calderon in El medico de 
 su honra, (the Physician of his Honour), and A secreto 
 agravio secreta venganza, (for Secret Insult Secret 
 Vengeance). It should be said, however, that honour 
 demands the punishment of the wife only ; to punish 
 her paramour too, is a work of supererogation. This 
 confirms the view I have taken, that a man's honour 
 originates in esprit de corps. 
 
 The kind of honour which I have been discussing 
 hitherto has always existed in its various forms and 
 principles amongst all nations and at all times ; 
 although the history of female honour shows that its 
 principles have undergone certain local modifications 
 at different periods. But there is another species of 
 honour which differs from this entirely, a species of 
 honour of which the Greeks and Romans had no con- 
 ception, and up to this day it is perfectly unknown 
 amongst Chinese, Hindoos or Mohammedans. It is a 
 kind of honour which arose only in the Middle Age, 
 and is indigenous only to Christian Europe, nay, only 
 to an extremely small portion of the population, that 
 is to say, the higher classes of society and those who 
 ape them. It is knightly honour, or point d'honneur. 
 Its principles are quite different from those which 
 underlie the kind of honour I have been treating 
 until now, and in some respects are even opposed to 
 them. The sort I am referring to produces the 
 
86 ->" THE WISDOM OP LIFE. 
 
 cavalier; while the other kind creates the man of 
 honour. As this is so, I shall proceed to give an 
 explanation of its principles, as a kind of code or 
 mirror of knightly courtesy. 
 
 (1.) To begin with, honour of this sort consists, not 
 in other people's opinion of what we are worth, but 
 wholly and entirely in whether they express it or not, 
 no matter whether they really have any opinion at all, 
 let alone whether they know of reasons for having 
 one. Other people may entertain the worst opinion 
 of us in consequence of what we do, and may despise 
 us as much as they like ; so long as no one dares to 
 give expression to his opinion, our honour remains 
 untarnished. So if our actions and qualities compel 
 the highest respect from other people, and they have 
 no option but to give this respect, — as soon as anyone, 
 no matter how wicked or foolish he may be, utters 
 something depreciatory of us, our honour is offended, 
 nay, gone for ever, unless we can manage to restore it 
 A superfluous proof of what I say, namely, that 
 knightly honour depends, not upon what people think, 
 but upon what they say, is furnished by the fact that 
 insults can be withdrawn, or, if necessary, form the 
 subject of an apology, which makes them as though 
 they had never been uttered. Whether the opinion 
 which underlay the expression has also been rectified, 
 and why the expression should ever have been used, 
 are questions which are perfectly unimportant : so 
 long as the statement is withdrawn, all is well. The 
 truth is that conduct of this kind aims, not at earning 
 respect, but at extorting it. 
 
 (2.) In the second place, this sort of honour rests, 
 
HONOUR. 87 
 
 not on what a man does, but on what he suffers, the 
 obstacles he encounters ; differing from the honour 
 which prevails in all else, in consisting, not in what 
 he says or does himself, but in what another man says 
 or does. His honour is thus at the mercy of every 
 man who can talk it away on the tip of his tongue ; 
 and if he attacks it, in a moment it is gone for ever, — 
 unless the man who is attacked manages to wrest it 
 back again by a process which I shall mention pre- 
 sently, a process which involves danger to his life, 
 health, freedom, property and peace of mind. A 
 man's whole conduct may be in accordance with th^ 
 most righteous and noble principles, his spirit may be 
 the purest that ever breathed, his intellect of the very 
 highest order ; and yet his honour may disappear the 
 moment that anyone is pleased to insult him, anyone 
 at all who has not offended against this code of honour 
 himself, let him be the most worthless rascal or the 
 most stupid beast, an idler, gambler, debtor, a man, in 
 short, of no account at all. It is usually this sort of 
 fellow who likes to insult people ; for, as Seneca 1 
 rightly remarks, ut quisque contemtissimus et ludibrio 
 est, ita sol'iitissimce iinguce est — the more contemptible 
 and ridiculous a man is, the readier he is with his 
 tongue. His insults are most likely to be directed 
 against the very kind of man I have described, because 
 people of different tastes can never be friends, and the 
 sight of pre-eminent merit is apt to raise the secret ire 
 of a ne'er-do-well. What Goethe says in the West- 
 ostlicher Divan is quite true, that it is useless to com- 
 plain against your enemies ; for they can never 
 1 De Constantia, 11. 
 
88 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 become your friends, if your whole being is a standing 
 reproach to them : — 
 
 Was Hagst du iiber Feinde ? 
 Sollten fiolcheje werden Freunde 
 Denen das Wesen, wie du bist, 
 Ira stillen ein euriger Vorwurf ist ? 
 
 It is obvious that people of this worthless descrip- 
 tion have good cause to be thankful to the principle 
 of honour, because it puts them on a level with people 
 who in every other respect stand far above them. If 
 a fellow likes to insult any one, attribute to him, for 
 example, some bad quality, this is taken prima facie 
 as a well-founded opinion, true in fact ; a decree, as it 
 were, with all the force of law ; nay, if it is not at 
 once wiped out in blood, it is a judgment which 
 holds good and valid to all time. In other words, the 
 man who is insulted remains — in the eyes of all 
 honourable people — what the man who uttered the 
 insult — even though he were the greatest wretch on 
 earth — was pleased to call him; for he h&s put up 
 with the insult — the technical term, I believe. 
 Accordingly, all honourable people will have nothing 
 more to do with him, and treat him like a leper, and, 
 it may be, refuse to go into any company where he 
 may be found, and so on. 
 
 This wise proceeding may, I think, be traced back 
 to the fact that in the Middle Age, up to the fifteenth 
 century, it was not the accuser in any criminal 
 process who had to prove the guilt of the accused, but 
 the accused who had to prove his innocence. 1 This 
 
 1 See C. G. von Wachter's Beitrage zur deutschen GeschicJde^ 
 especially the chapter on criminal law. 
 
HONOUR. 89 
 
 he could do by swearing he was not guilty ; and his 
 backers — consacramentales — had to come and swear 
 that in their opinion he was incapable of perjury. If 
 he could find no one to help him in this way, or the 
 accuser took objection to his backers, recourse was 
 had to trial by the Judgment of God, which generally 
 meant a duel. For the accused was now in disgrace, 1 
 and had to clear himself. Here, then, is the origin of 
 the notion of disgrace, and of that whole system 
 which prevails now-a-days amongst honourable people, 
 — only that the oath is omitted. This is also the 
 explanation of that deep feeling of indignation which 
 honourable people are called upon to show if they are 
 given the lie ; it is a reproach which they say must 
 be wiped out in blood. It seldom comes to this 
 pass, however, though lies are of common occur- 
 rence ; but in England, more than elsewhere, it is a 
 superstition which has taken very deep root. As a 
 matter of order, a man who threatens to kill another 
 for telling a lie should never have told one himself. 
 The fact is, that the criminal trial of the Middle Age 
 also admitted of a shorter form. In reply to the charge, 
 the accused answered: That is a lie; whereupon it was 
 left to be decided by the Judgment of God. Hence, 
 the code of knightly honour prescribes that, when the 
 lie is given, an appeal to arms follows as a matter of 
 course. So much, then, for the theory of insult. 
 But there is something even worse than insult, 
 
 1 Translatcn^s Note. It is true that this expression has 
 another and special meaning in the technical terminology of 
 Chivalry, but it is the nearest English equivalent which I can find 
 for the German— ein Bescholtetier. 
 
90 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 something so dreadful that I must beg pardon of all 
 honourable people for so much as mentioning it in 
 this code of knightly honour ; for I know they will 
 shiver, and their hair will stand on end, at the very 
 thought of it — the summuwn malum, the greatest evil 
 on earth, worse than death and damnation. A man 
 may give another — korribile dictu! — a slap or a blow. 
 This is such an awful thing, and so utterly fatal to all 
 honour, that, while any other species of insult may be 
 healed by blood-letting, this can be cured only by the 
 coup- de- grace. 
 
 (3.) In the third place, this kind of honour has 
 absolutely nothing to do with what a man may be in 
 and for himself ; or, again, with the question whether 
 his moral character can ever become better or worse, 
 and ail such pedantic inquiries. If your honour 
 happens to be attacked, or to all appearances gone, it 
 can very soon be restored in its entirety if you are 
 only quick enough in having recourse to the one 
 universal remedy — a duel. But if the aggressor does 
 not belong to the classes which recognise the code of 
 knightly honour, or has himself once offended against 
 it, there is a safer way of meeting any attack upon 
 your honour, whether it consists in blows, or merely 
 in words. If you are armed, you can strike down 
 your opponent on the spot, or perhaps an hour later. 
 This will restore your honour. 
 
 But if you wish to avoid such an extreme step, from 
 fear of any unpleasant consequences arising therefrom, 
 or from uncertainty as to whether the aggressor is 
 subject to the laws of knightly honour or not, there is 
 another means of making your position good, namely, 
 
s HONOUR. 91 
 
 the Avantage. This consists in returning rudeness 
 with still greater rudeness ; and if insults are no use, 
 you can try a blow, which forms a sort of climax in 
 the redemption of your honour ; for instance, a box 
 on the ear may be cured by a blow with a stick, and 
 a blow with a stick by a thrashing with a horsewhip ; 
 and, as the approved remedy for this last, some people 
 recommend you to spit at your opponent. 1 If all 
 these means are of no avail, you must not shrink from 
 drawing blood. And the reason for these methods of 
 wiping out insult is, in this code, as follows : 
 
 (4.) To receive an insult is disgraceful ; to give one, 
 honourable. Let me take an example. My opponent 
 has truth, right and reason on his side. Very well. 
 I insult him. Thereupon right and honour leave him 
 and come to me, and, for the time being, he has lost 
 them — until he gets them back, not by the exercise of 
 right or reason, but by shooting and sticking me. 
 Accordingly, rudeness is a quality which, in point of 
 honour, is a substitute for any other and outweighs 
 them all. The rudest is always right. What more 
 do you want ? However stupid, bad or wicked a man 
 may have been, if he is only rude into the bargain, he 
 condones and legitimises all his faults. If in any 
 discussion or conversation, another man shows more 
 knowledge, greater love of truth, a sounder judgment, 
 better understanding than we, or generally exhibits 
 intellectual qualities which cast ours into the shade, 
 
 1 Translator's Note. It must be remembered that Schopen- 
 hauer is here describing, or perhaps caricaturing, the manners 
 and customs of the German aristocracy of half a century ago. 
 Now, of course, nous avons change tout cela I 
 
92 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 we can at once annul his superiority and our own 
 shallowness, and in our turn be superior to him, by 
 being insulting and offensive. For rudeness is better 
 'than any argument ; it totally eclipses intellect. If 
 our opponent does not care for our mode of attack, 
 and will not answer still more rudely, so as to plunge 
 us into the ignoble rivalry of the Avantage, we 
 are the victors and honour is on our side. Truth, 
 knowledge, understanding, intellect, wit, must beat 
 a retreat and leave the field to this almighty 
 insolence. 
 
 Honourable people immediately make a show of 
 mounting their war-horse, if anyone utters an opinion 
 adverse to theirs, or shows more intelligence than they 
 can muster ; and if in any controversy they are at 
 a loss for a reply, they look about for some weapon of 
 rudeness, which will serve as well and come readier to 
 hand ; so they retire masters of the position. It must 
 now be obvious that people are quite right in applaud- 
 ing this principle of honour as having ennobled the 
 tone of society. This principle springs from another, 
 which forms the heart and soul of the entire code. 
 
 (5.) Fifthly, the code implies that the highest court 
 to which a man can appeal in any differences he may 
 have with another on a point of honour is the court 
 of physical force, that is, of brutality. Every piece of 
 rudeness is, strictly speaking, an appeal to brutality ; 
 for it is a declaration that intellectual strength and 
 moral insight are incompetent to decide, and that the 
 battle must be fought out by physical force — a 
 struggle which, in the case of man, whom Franklin 
 defines as a tool-making animal, is decided by the 
 
HONOUR. 93 
 
 weapons peculiar to the species ; and the decision is 
 irrevocable. This is the well-known principle of the 
 right of might — irony, of course, like the wit of a fool, 
 a parallel phrase. The honour of a knight may be 
 called the glory of might. 
 
 (6.) Lastly, if, as we saw above, civic honour is very 
 scrupulous in the matter of meum and tuum, paying 
 great respect to obligations and a promise once made, 
 the code we are here discussing displays, on the other 
 hand, the noblest liberality. There is only one word 
 which may not be broken, the word of honour — upon 
 my honour, as people say — the presumption being, of 
 course, that every other form of promise may be broken. 
 Nay, if the worst comes to the worst, it is easy to break 
 even one's word of honour, and still remain honour- 
 able — again by adopting that universal remedy, the 
 duel, and fighting with those who maintain that we 
 pledged our word. Further, there is one debt, and 
 one alone, that under no circumstances must be left 
 unpaid — a gambling debt, which has accordingly been 
 called a debt of honour. In all other kinds of debt you 
 may cheat Jews and Christians are much as you 
 like; and your knightly honour remains without a 
 stain. 
 
 The unprejudiced reader will see at once that such 
 a strange, savage and ridiculous code of honour as 
 this has no foundation in human nature, nor any 
 warrant in a healthy view of human affairs. The 
 extremely narrow sphere of its operation serves only 
 to intensify the feeling, which is exclusively confined 
 to Europe since the Middle Age, and then only to the 
 upper classes, officers and soldiei's, and people who 
 
94 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 imitate them. Neither Greeks nor Romans knew 
 anything of this code of honour or of its principles ; 
 nor the highly civilised nations of Asia, ancient or 
 modern. Amongst them no other kind of honour is 
 recognised but that which I discussed first, in virtue 
 of which a man is what he shows himself to be by his 
 actions, not what any wagging tongue is pleased to 
 say of him. They thought that what a man said or 
 did might perhaps affect his own honour, but not any 
 other man's. To them, a blow was but a blow — and 
 any horse or donkey could give a harder one — a blow 
 which under certain circumstances might make a man 
 angry and demand immediate vengeance ; but it had 
 nothing to do with honour. No one kept account of 
 blows or insulting words, or of the satisfaction which 
 was demanded or omitted to be demanded. Yet in 
 personal bravery and contempt of death, the ancients 
 were certainly not inferior to the nations of Christian 
 Europe, The Greeks and Romans were thorough 
 heroes, if you like* but they knew nothing about 
 point d'honneur, If they had any idea of a duel, it 
 was totally unconnected with the life of the nobles ; 
 it was merely the exhibition of mercenary gladiators, 
 slaves devoted to slaughter, condemned criminals, 
 who, alternately with wild beasts, were set to butcher 
 one another to make a Roman holiday, When Ghris^ 
 tianity was introduced, gladiatorial shows were done 
 away with, and their place taken, in Christian times, 
 by the duel, which was a way of settling difficulties 
 by the Judgment of God. If the gladiatorial fight was 
 a cruel sacrifice to the prevailing desire for great 
 spectacles, duelling is a cruel sacrifice to existing pre- 
 
HONOUR. 95 
 
 judices — a sacrifice, not of criminals, slaves and 
 prisoners, but of the noble and the free. 1 
 
 There are a great many traits in the character of 
 the ancients which show that they were entirely free 
 from these prejudices. When, for instance, Marius 
 was summoned to a duel by a Teutonic chief, he re- 
 turned answer to the effect that, if the chief were 
 tired of his life, he might go and hang himself ; at 
 the same time he offered him a veteran gladiator for 
 a round or two. Plutarch relates in his life of The- 
 mistocles that Eurybiades, who was in command of 
 the fleet, once raised his stick to strike him ; where- 
 upon Themistocles, instead of drawing his sword, 
 simply said: Strike, but hear one. How sorry the 
 reader must be, if he is an honourable man, to find 
 that we have no information that the Athenian 
 officers refused in a body to serve any longer under 
 Themistocles, if he acted like that ! There is a modern 
 French writer who declares that if anyone considers 
 Demosthenes a man of honour, his ignorance will ex- 
 cite a smile of pity ; and that Cicero was not a man 
 of honour either ! 2 In a certain passage in Plato's 
 Laws, 3 the philosopher speaks at length of cu'/aa or 
 assault, showing us clearly enough that the ancients 
 had no notion of any feeling of honour in connection 
 with such matters. Socrates' frequent discussions 
 were often followed by his being severely handled, 
 
 1 Translator's Note. These and other remarks on duelling 
 will no doubt wear a belated look to English readers ; but they 
 are hardly yet antiquated for most parts of the Continent. 
 
 2 Soirees litteraires : par C. Durand. Rouen, 1828. 
 s £k, IX. 
 
\ 
 
 96 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 and he bore it all mildly. Once, for instance, when 
 somebody kicked him, the patience with which he 
 took the insult surprised one of his friends. Do you 
 think, said Socrates, that if an ass happened to kick me, 
 I should resent it ? 1 On another occasion, when he 
 was asked, Has not that fellow abused and insulted you ? 
 No, was his answer, what he says is not addressed to 
 me. 2 Stobaeus has preserved a long passage from 
 Musonius, from which we can see how the ancients 
 treated insults. They knew no other form of satis- 
 faction than that which the law provided, and wise 
 people despised even this. If a Greek received a box 
 on the ear, he could get satisfaction by the aid of the 
 law ; as is evident from Plato's Gorgias, where 
 Socrates' opinion may be found. The same thing 
 may be seen in the account given by Gellius of one 
 Lucius Veratius, who had the audacity to give some 
 Roman citizens whom he met on the road a box on 
 the ear, without any provocation whatever; but to avoid 
 any ulterior consequences, he told a slave to bring a 
 bag of small money, and on the spot paid the trivial 
 legal penalty to the men whom he had astonished by 
 his conduct. 
 
 Crates, the celebrated Cynic philosopher, got such 
 a box on the ear from Nicodromus, the musician, that 
 his face swelled up and became black and blue; 
 whereupon he put a label on his forehead, with the 
 inscription, Nicodromus fecit, which brought much 
 disgrace to the fluteplayer who had committed such 
 a piece of brutality upon the man whom all Athens 
 
 1 Diogenes Laertius, ii., 21. 
 3 Ibid 3G. 
 
HONOUR. 97 
 
 honoured as a household god. 1 And in a letter to 
 Melesippus, Diogenes of Sinope tells us that he got a 
 beating from the drunken sons of the Athenians ; but 
 he adds that it was a matter of no importance. 2 And 
 Seneca devotes the last few chapters of his Be Con- 
 stantia to a lengthy discussion on insult — contumelia; 
 in order to show that a wise man will take no notice 
 of it. In Chapter XIV. he says, What shall a wise 
 man do, if he i$ given a blow ? What Cato did, when 
 sortie one struolc him on the mouth ; — not fire up or 
 avenge the insult, or even return the blow, but simply 
 ignore it. 
 
 Yes, you say, but these men were philosophers. — And 
 you are fools, eh ? Precisely. 
 
 It is clear that the whole code of knightly honour 
 was utterly unknown to the ancients ; for the simple 
 reason that they always took a natural and unpre- 
 judiced view of human affairs, and did not allow 
 themselves to be influenced by any such vicious and 
 abominable folly. A blow in the face was to them a 
 blow and nothing more, a trivial physical injury ; 
 whereas the moderns make a catastrophe out of it, a 
 theme for a tragedy ; as, for instance, in the Cid of 
 Corneille, or in a recent German comedy of middle- 
 class life, called The Power of Circumstance, which 
 should have been entitled The Power of Prejudice. If a 
 member of the National Assembly at Paris got a blow 
 on the ear, it would resound from one end of Europe 
 to the other. The examples which I have given of 
 ihe way in which such an occurrence would have been 
 
 1 Diogenes Laertius, vi. 87, and Apul : Flor : p. 126. 
 * Cf. Casaubon's Note, ad Diog. Laert., vi. 33. 
 
98 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 treated in classic times may not suit the ideas of 
 honourable 'people; so let me recommend to their 
 notice, as a kind of antidote, the story of Monsieur 
 Desglands in Diderot's masterpiece, Jacques le fata- 
 liste. It is an excellent specimen of modern knightly 
 honour, which, no doubt, they will find enjoyable and 
 edifying. 1 
 
 From what I have said it must be quite evident 
 that the principle of knightly honour has no essential 
 and spontaneous origin in human nature. It is an 
 artificial product, and its source is not hard to find. 
 Its existence obviously dates from the time when 
 people used their fists more than their heads, when 
 priestcraft had enchained the human intellect, the 
 much bepraised Middle Age, with its system of 
 chivalry. That was the time when people let the 
 
 1 Translator's Note, The story to which Schopenhauer here 
 refers is briefly as follows : Two gentlemen, one of whom was 
 named Desglands, were paying court to the same lady. As 
 they sat at table side by side, with the lady opposite, Desglands 
 did his best to charm her with his conversation ; but she pre- 
 tended not to hear him, and kept looking at his rival. In the 
 agony of jealousy, Desglands, as he was holding a fresh egg in his 
 hand, involuntarily crushed it ; the shell broke, and its contents 
 bespattered his rival's face. Seeing him raise his hand, Des- 
 glands seized it and whispered : Sir, I take it as given. The 
 next day Desglands appeared with a large piece of black stick- 
 ing-plaster upon his right cheek. In the duel which followed, 
 Desglands severely wounded his rival ; upon which he reduced 
 the size of the plaster. When his rival recovered, they had 
 another duel ; Desglands drew blood again, and again made his 
 plaster a little smaller ; and so on for five or six times. After 
 every duel Desglands' plaster grew less and less, until at last his 
 rival was killed. 
 
HONOUR, 99 
 
 Almighty not only care for them but judge for them 
 too ; when difficult cases were decided by an ordeal, a 
 Judgment of God; which, with few exceptions, meant 
 a duel, not only where nobles were concerned, but in 
 the case of ordinary citizens as welL There is a neat 
 illustration of this in Shakespeare's Henry VI. 1 
 Every judicial sentence was subject to an appeal to 
 arms — a court, as it were, of higher instance, namely, 
 the Judgment of God: and this really meant thai- 
 physical strength and activity, that is, our animal 
 nature, usurped the place of reason on the judgment 
 seat, deciding in matters of right and wrong, not by 
 what a man had done, but by the force with which 
 he was opposed, the same system, in fact, as prevails 
 to-day under the principles of knightly honour. If 
 any one doubts that such is really the origin of our 
 modern duel, let him read an excellent work by J. B. 
 Millingen, The History of Duelling. 2 Nay, you may 
 still find amongst the supporters of the system, — who, 
 by the way, are not usually the most educated or 
 thoughtful of men, — some who look upon the result of 
 a duel as really constituting a divine judgment in the 
 matter in dispute ; no doubt in consequence of the 
 traditional feeling on the subject. 
 
 But leaving aside the question of origin, it must 
 now be clear to us that the main tendency of the 
 principle is to use physical menace for the purpose 
 of extorting an appearance of respect which is deemed 
 too difficult or superfluous to acquire in reality ; a 
 proceeding which comes to much the same thing as if 
 
 1 Part II., Act 2, Sc. 3. 
 * Published in 1849. 
 
100 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 you were to prove the warmth of your room by holding 
 your hand on the thermometer and so make it rise. 
 In fact, the kernel of the matter is this: whereas 
 civic honour aims at peaceable intercourse, and con- 
 sists in the opinion of other people that we deserve 
 full confidence, because we pay unconditional respect 
 to their rights, knightly honour, on the other hand, 
 lays down that we are to be feared, as being deter- 
 mined at all costs to maintain our own. 
 
 As not much reliance can be placed upon human 
 integrity, the principle that it is more essential to 
 arouse fear than to invite confidence would not, 
 perhaps, be a false one, if we were living in a state of 
 nature, where every man would have to protect him* 
 self and directly maintain his own rights. But in 
 civilised life, where the State undertakes the protec- 
 tion of our person and property, the principle is no 
 longer applicable : it stands, like the castles and 
 watch-towers of the age when might was right, a 
 useless and forlorn object, amidst well- tilled fields and 
 frequented roads, or even railways. 
 
 Accordingly, the application of knightly honour, 
 which still recognises this principle, is confined to 
 those small cases of personal assault which meet with 
 but slight punishment at the hands of the law, or 
 even none at all, for de minimis non, — mere trivial 
 wrongs, committed sometimes only in jest. The con- 
 sequence of this limited application of the principle is 
 that it has forced itself into an exaggerated respect 
 for the value of the person, — a respect utterly alien to 
 the nature, constitution or destiny of man — which it 
 has elevated into a species of sanctity : and as it con- 
 
HONOUR. 101 
 
 siders that the State has imposed a very insufficient 
 penalty on the commission of such trivial injuries, it 
 takes upon itself to punish them by attacking the 
 aggressor in life or limb. The whole thing manifestly 
 rests upon an excessive degree of arrogant pride, 
 which, completely forgetting what man really is, 
 claims that he shall be absolutely free from all attack 
 or even censure. Those who determine to carry out 
 this principle by main force, and announce, as their 
 rule of action, whoever insults or strikes me shall die ! 
 ought for their pains to be banished the country. 1 
 
 As a palliative to this rash arrogance, people are 
 in the habit of giving way on everything. If two 
 intrepid persons meet, and neither will give way, the 
 
 1 Knightly honour is the child of pride and folly, and it is need, 
 not pride, which is the heritage of the human race. It is a very 
 remarkable fact that this extreme form of pride should be found 
 exclusively amongst the adherents of the religion which teaches 
 the deepest humility. Still, this pride must not be put down to 
 religion, but, rather, to the feudal system, which made every 
 nobleman a petty sovereign who recognised no human judge, 
 and learned to regard his person as sacred and inviolable, and 
 any attack upon it, or any blow or insulting word, as an offence 
 punishable by death. The principle of knightly honour and of 
 the duel was at first confined to the nobles, and, later on, also to 
 officers in the army, who, enjoying a kind of off-and-on relation- 
 ship with the upper classes, though they were never incorporated 
 with them, were anxious not to be behind them. It is true that 
 duels were the product of the old ordeals ; but the latter are not 
 the foundation, but rather the consequence and application of 
 the principle of honour : the man who recognised no human 
 judge appealed to the divine. Ordeals, however, are not pecu- 
 liar to Christendom : they may be found in great force among 
 the Hindoos, especially of ancient times ; and there are traces of 
 them even now. 
 
102 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 slightest difference may cause a shower of abuse, then 
 fisticuffs, and, finally, a fatal blow ; so that it would 
 really be a more decorous proceeding to omit the 
 intermediate steps and appeal to arms at once. An 
 appeal to arms has its own special formalities ; and 
 these have developed into a rigid and precise system 
 of laws and regulations, together forming the most 
 solemn farce there is, — a regular temple of honour 
 dedicated to folly ! For if two intrepid persons dis- 
 pute over some trivial matter, (more important affairs 
 are dealt with by law), one of them, the cleverer of the 
 two, will of course yield; and they will agree to differ. 
 That this is so is proved by the fact that common 
 people, — or, rather, the numerous classes of the com- 
 munity who do not acknowledge the principle of 
 knightly honour, let any dispute run its natural 
 course. Amongst these classes homicide is a hundred- 
 fold rarer than among those — and they amount, per- 
 haps, in all, to hardly one in a thousand, — who pay 
 homage to the principle: and even blows are of no 
 very frequent occurrence. 
 
 Then it has been said that the manners and tone of 
 good society are ultimately based upon this principle 
 of honour, which, with its system of duels, is made out 
 to be a bulwark against the assaults of savagery and 
 rudeness. But Athens, Corinth and Rome could 
 assuredly boast of good, nay, excellent society, and 
 manners and tone of a high order, without any sup- 
 port from the bogey of knightly honour. It is true 
 that women did not occupy that prominent place in 
 ancient society which they hold now, when conversa- 
 tion has taken on a frivolous and trifling character, to 
 
HONOUR. 103 
 
 the exclusion of that weighty discourse which dis- 
 tinguished the ancients. This change has certainly 
 contributed a great deal to bring about the tendency, 
 which is observable in good society now-a-days, to 
 prefer personal courage to the possession of any other 
 quality. The fact is that personal courage is really a 
 very subordinate virtue, — merely the distinguishing 
 mark of a subaltern, — a virtue, indeed, in which we 
 are surpassed by the lower animals; or else you would 
 ^ not hear people say, as brave as a lion. Far from 
 being the pillar of society, knightly honour affords a 
 sure asylum, in general for dishonesty and wickedness, 
 and also for small incivilities, want of consideration 
 and unmannerliness. Rude behaviour is often passed 
 over in silence because no one cares to risk his neck in 
 correcting it. 
 
 After what I have said, it will not appear strange 
 that the duelling system is carried to the highest pitch 
 of sanguinary zeal precisely in that nation whose 
 political and financial records show that they are not 
 too honourable. What that nation is like in its 
 private and domestic life, is a question which may be 
 best put to those who are experienced in the matter. 
 Their urbanity and social culture have long been con- 
 spicuous by their absence. 
 
 There is no truth, then, in such pretexts. It can 
 be urged with more justice that as, when you snarl at 
 a dog, he snarls in return, and when you pet him, he 
 fawns ; so it lies in the nature of men to return 
 hostility by hostility, and to be embittered and irri- 
 tated at any signs of depreciatory treatment or hatred: 
 and, as Cicero says, there is something so penetrating 
 
104 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 in the shaft of envy that even men of wisdom and worth 
 find its wound a painful one; and nowhere in the 
 world, except, perhaps, in a few religious sects, is an 
 insult or a blow taken with equanimity. And yet a 
 natural view of either would in no case demand any- 
 thing more than a requital proportionate to the offence, 
 and would never go the length of assigning death as 
 the proper penalty for anyone who accuses another of 
 lying or stupidity or cowardice. The old German 
 theory of blood for a blow is a revolting superstition 
 of the age of chivahy. And in any case the return 
 or requital of an insult is dictated by anger, and not 
 by any such obligation of honour and duty as the ad- 
 vocates of chivalry seek to attach to it. The fact is 
 that, the greater the truth, the greater the slander ; 
 and it is clear that the slightest hint of some real 
 delinquency will give much greater offence than a 
 most terrible accusation which is perfectly baseless : 
 so that a man who is quite sure that he has done 
 nothing to deserve a reproach may treat it with con- 
 tempt, and will be safe in doing so. The theory of 
 honour demands that he shall show a susceptibility 
 which he does not possess, and take bloody vengeance 
 for insults which he cannot feel. A man must him- 
 self have but a poor opinion of his own worth who 
 hastens to prevent the utterance of an unfavourable 
 opinion by giving his enemy a black eye. 
 
 True appreciation of his own value will make a man 
 really indifferent to insult ; but if he cannot help resent- 
 ing it, a little shrewdness and culture will enable him 
 to save appearances and dissemble his anger. If we 
 could only get rid of this superstition about honour — 
 
HONOUR. 10 ° 
 
 the idea, I mean, that it disappears when you ai. in- 
 sulted, and can be restored by returning the , msoH 
 if we could only stop people from flunking that wrong, 
 brntality and insolence can be legalised by expressing 
 readiness to give satisfaction, that is, to fight m de- 
 fence of it, we should all soon come o the ge-ral 
 opinion that insult and depreciation are like a battle in 
 which the loser wins ; and that, as Vincenzo Monti says, 
 abuse resembles a church-procession, because it always 
 returns to the point from which it se out H we 
 could only get people to look upon insnl t in this light 
 we should no longer have to say something rude in 
 order to prove that we are in the right. Now un- 
 fortunately, if we want to take a serious view of any 
 question, we have first of all to consider ^whether _* 
 will not give offence in some way or other to the 
 dullard, who generally shows alarm and resentmen at 
 the merest sign of intelligence: and i may eas.ly 
 happen that the head which contains the mtelugen 
 view has to be pitted against the noddle which is 
 empty of everything but narrowness and stupidity. 
 If all this were done away with, intellectual superio- 
 rity could take the leading place in society which is 
 its due-a Place now occupied, though people do not 
 like to confess it, by excellence of physique mere 
 fitting pluck, in fact; and the natural effect of such 
 a°change would be that the best kind of people would 
 have one reason the less for withdrawing from society 
 This would pave the way for the introduction of real 
 courtesy and genuinely good society such as un- 
 doubtedly existed in Athens, Corinth and Borne. 
 If anyone wants to see a good example of what 
 
ll)<3 THE WISDOM! OF LIFE. 
 
 I mean, I should like him to read Xenophon's 
 Banquet 
 
 The last argument in defence of knightly honour 
 no doubt is, that, but for its existence, the world — 
 awful thought ! — would be a regular bear-garden. To 
 which I may briefly reply that nine hundred and 
 ninety-nine people out of a thousand who do not re- 
 cognise the code, have often given and received a blow 
 without any fatal consequences ; whereas amongst the 
 adherents of the code a blow usually means death to 
 one of the parties. But let me examine this argument 
 more closely. 
 
 I have often tried to find some tenable or, at any 
 rate, plausible basis — other than a merely conventional 
 one — some positive reasons, that is to say, for the 
 rooted conviction which a portion of mankind enter- 
 tains, that a blow is a very dreadful thing ; but I have 
 looked for it in vain, either in the animal or in the 
 rational side of human nature. A blow is, and always 
 will be, a trivial physical injury which one man can 
 do to another ; proving, thereby, nothing more than 
 his superiority in strength or skill, or that his enemy 
 was off his guard. Analysis will carry us no further. 
 The same knight who regards a blow from the human 
 hand as the greatest of evils, if he gets a ten times 
 harder blow from his horse, will give you the assurance, 
 as he limps away in suppressed pain, that it is a 
 matter of no consequence whatever. So I have come 
 to think that it is the human hand which is at the 
 bottom of the mischief. And yet in a battle the 
 knight may get cuts and thrusts from the same hand, 
 and still assure you that his wounds are not worth 
 
HONOUR. 107 
 
 mentioning. Now, I hear that a blow from the fiat of 
 a sword is not by any means so bad as a blow with a 
 stick ; and that, a short time ago, cadets were liable to 
 be punished by the one but not the other, and that 
 the very greatest honour of all is the accolade. This 
 is all the psychological or moral basis that I can find ; 
 and so there is nothing left me but to pronounce the 
 whole thing an antiquated superstition that has taken 
 deep root, and one more of the many examples which 
 show the force of tradition. My view is confirmed 
 by the well-known fact that in China a beating with 
 a bamboo is a very frequent punishment for the com- 
 mon people, and even for officials of every class ; 
 which shows that human nature, even in a highly 
 civilized state, does not run in the same groove here 
 and in China. 
 
 On the contrary, an unprejudiced view of human 
 nature shows that it is just as natural for man to beat 
 as it is for savage animals to bite and rend in pieces, 
 or for horned beasts to butt or push. Man may be 
 said to be the animal that beats. Hence it is re- 
 volting to our sense of the fitness of things to hear, as 
 we sometimes do, that one man has bitten another ; 
 on the other hand, it is a natural and everyday 
 occurrence for him to get blows or give them. It is 
 intelligible enough that, as we become educated, we 
 are glad to dispense with blows by a system of mutual 
 restraint. But it is a cruel thing to compel a nation 
 or a single class to regard a blow as an awful mis- 
 fortune which must have death and murder for its 
 consequences. There are too many genuine evils in 
 the world to allow of our increasing them by 
 
108 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 imaginary misfortunes, which bring real ones in their 
 train ; and yet this is the precise effect of the super- 
 stition, which thus proves itself at once stupid and 
 malign. 
 
 It does not seem to me wise of governments and 
 legislative bodies to promote any such folly by 
 attempting to do away with flogging as a punishment 
 in civil or military life. Their idea is that they are 
 acting in the interests of humanity ; but, in point of 
 fact, they are doing just the opposite; for the abolition 
 of flogging will serve only to strengthen this inhuman 
 and abominable superstition, to which so many sacri- 
 fices have already been made. For all offences, except 
 the worst, a beating is the obvious and therefore the 
 natural penalty ; and a man who will not listen to 
 reason will yield to blows. It seems to me right and 
 proper to administer corporal punishment to the man 
 who possesses nothing and therefore cannot be fined, 
 or cannot be put in prison because his master's interests 
 would suffer by the loss of his services. There are 
 really no arguments against it ; only mere talk about 
 the dignity of man — talk which proceeds, not from 
 any clear notions on the subject, but from the per- 
 nicious superstition I have been describing. That it 
 is a superstition which lies at the bottom of the whole 
 business is proved by an almost laughable example. 
 Not long ago, in the military discipline of many 
 countries, the cat was replaced by the stick. In either 
 case the object was to produce physical pain ; but the 
 latter method involved no disgrace, and was not 
 derogatory to honour. 
 
 By promoting this superstition, the State is playing 
 
HONOUR. 109 
 
 into the hands of the principle of knightly honour, 
 and therefore of the duel ; while at the same time it 
 is trying, or at any rate it pretends that it is trying, 
 to abolish the duel by legislative enactment. As a 
 natural consequence we find that this fragment of the 
 theory that might is right, which has come down to 
 us from the most savage days of the Middle Age, has 
 still in this nineteenth century a good deal of life left 
 in it — more shame to us ! It is high time for the 
 principle to be driven out bag and baggage. Now-a- 
 days, no one is allowed to set dogs or cocks to fight 
 each other, — at any rate, in England it is a penal 
 offence, — but men are plunged into deadly strife, 
 against their will, by the operation of this ridiculous, 
 superstitious and absurd principle, which imposes 
 upon us the obligation, as its narrow-minded sup- 
 porters and advocates declare, of fighting with one 
 another like gladiators, for any little trifle. Let me 
 recommend our purists to adopt the expression halting} 
 instead of duel, which probably comes to us, not from 
 the Latin duellum, but from the Spanish duelo, — 
 meaning suffering, nuisance, annoyance. 
 
 In any case, we may well laugh at the pedantic 
 excess to which this foolish system has been carried 
 It is really revolting that this principle, with its absurd 
 code, can form a power within the State — imperium 
 in imperio — a power too easily put in motion, which, 
 recognising no right but might, tyrannises over the 
 classes which come within its range, by keeping up a 
 sort of inquisition, before which any one may be haled 
 on the most flimsy pretext, and there and then be 
 
 1 Ritterhetze. 
 
110 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 tried on an issue of life and death between himself and 
 his opponent. This is the lurking place from which 
 every rascal, if he only belongs to the classes in ques- 
 tion, may menace and even exterminate the noblest and 
 best of men, who, as such, must of course be an object 
 of hatred to him. Our system of justice and police- 
 protection has made it impossible in these days for 
 any scoundrel in the street to attack us with — Your 
 money or your life ! and common sense ought now to 
 be able to prevent rogues disturbing the peaceable 
 intercourse of society by coming at us with — Your 
 honour or your life ! An end should be put to the 
 burden which weighs upon the higher classes — the 
 burden, I mean, of having to be ready every moment 
 to expose life and limb to the mercy of anyone who 
 takes it into his rascally head to be coarse, rude, 
 foolish or malicious. It is perfectly atrocious that a 
 pair of silly, passionate boys should be wounded, 
 maimed or even killed, simply because they have had 
 a few words. 
 
 The strength of this tyrannical power within the 
 State, and the force of the superstition, may be 
 measured by the fact that people who are prevented 
 from restoring their knightly honour by the superior 
 or inferior rank of their aggressor, or anything else 
 that puts the persons on a different level, often come 
 to a tragic-comic end by committing suicide in sheer 
 despair. You may generally know a thing to be 
 false and ridiculous by finding that, if it is carried to 
 its logical conclusion, it results in a contradiction ; 
 and here, too, we have a very glaring absurdity. For 
 an officer is forbidden to take part in a duel ; but if 
 
HONOUR. 1 i 1 
 
 he is challenged and declines to come out, he is 
 punished by being dismissed the service. 
 
 As I am on the matter* let me be more frank still. 
 The important distinction, which is often insisted 
 upon, between killing your enemy in a fair fight with 
 equal weapons, and lying in ambush for him, is 
 entirely a corollary pf the fact that the power within 
 the State, of which I have spoken, recognises no other 
 right than might, that is, the right of the stronger, 
 and appeals to a Judgment of God as the basis of the 
 whole code. For to kill a man in a fair fio-ht, is to 
 prove that you are superior to him in strength or 
 skill ; and to justify the deed, you must assume that the 
 right of the stronger is recdly a right 
 
 But the truth is that, if my opponent is unable to 
 defend himself, it gives me the possibility, but not by 
 any means the right, of killing him. The right, the 
 moral justification, must depend entirely upon the 
 motives which I have for taking his life. Even sup- 
 posing that I have sufficient motive for taking a man's 
 life, there is no reason why I should make his death 
 depend upon whether I can shoot or fence betterlhan 
 he. In such a case, it is immaterial in what way I 
 kill him, whether I attack him from the front or the 
 rear. From a moral point of view, the right of the 
 stronger is no more convincing than the right of the 
 more skilful ; and it is skill which is employed if you 
 murder a man treacherously. Might and skill are in 
 this case equally right : in a duel, for instance, both 
 the one and the other come into play ; for a feint is 
 only another name for treachery. If I consider my- 
 self morally justified in taking a ma«'s life, it is stupid 
 
112 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 of me to try first of all whether he can shoot or fence 
 better than I ; as, if he can, he will not only have 
 wronged me, but have taken my life into the bargain. 
 
 It is Rousseau's opinion that the proper way to 
 avenge an insult is, not to fight a duel with your 
 aggressor, but to assassinate him, — an opinion, however, 
 which he is cautious enough only just to indicate in 
 a mysterious note to one of the books of his Emile 
 This shows the philosopher so completely under the 
 influence of the mediaeval superstition of knightly 
 honour that he considers it justifiable to murder a 
 man who accuses you of lying • whilst he must have 
 known that every man, and himself especially, has 
 deserved to have the lie given him times without 
 number. 
 
 The prejudice which justifies the killing of your 
 adversary, so long as it is done in an open contest and 
 with equal weapons, obviously looks upon might as 
 really right, and a duel as the interference of GocL 
 The Italian who, in a fit of rage, falls upon his 
 aggressor wherever he finds hira, and despatches him 
 without any ceremony, acts, at any rate, consistently 
 and naturally : he may be cleverer, but he is not 
 worse, than the duellist. If you say, I am justified 
 in killing my adversary in a duel, because he is at the 
 moment doing his best to kill me, I can reply that it 
 is your challenge which has placed him under the 
 necessity of defending himself ; and that by mutually 
 putting it on the ground of self-defence, the combat- 
 ants are seeking a plausible pretext for committing 
 murder. I should rather justify the deed by the legal 
 maxim Volenti non ,JU iryuria ; because the parties 
 
HONOUR. 113 
 
 mutually agree to set their life upon the issue. This 
 argument may, however, be rebutted by showing that 
 the injured party is not injured volens ; because it is 
 this tyrannical principle of knightly honour, with its 
 absurd code, which forcibly drags one at least of the 
 combatants before a bloody inquisition. 
 
 I have been rather prolix on the subject of knightly 
 honour, but I had good reasons for being so, because 
 the Augean stable of moral and intellectual enormity 
 in this world can be cleaned out only with the 
 besom of philosophy. There are two things which 
 more than all else serve to make the social arrange- 
 ments of modern life compare unfavourably with 
 those of antiquity, by giving our age a gloomy, dark 
 and sinister aspect, from which antiquity, fresh, 
 natural and, as it were, in the morning of life, is com- 
 pletely free ; I mean modern honour and modern 
 disease, — par nobile fratrum ! — which have combined 
 to poison all the relations of life, whether public or 
 private. The second of this noble pair extends its 
 influence much farther than at first appears to be the 
 case, as being not merely a physical, but also a moral 
 disease. From the time that poisoned arrows have 
 been found in Cupid's quiver, an estranging, hostile, 
 nay, devilish element has entered into the relations of 
 men and women, like a sinister thread of fear and 
 mistrust in the warp and woof of their intercourse ; 
 indirectly shaking the foundations of human fellow- 
 ship, and so more or less affecting the whole tenor of 
 existence. But it would be beside my present purpose 
 to pursue the subject further. 
 
114 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 An influence analogous to this, though working on 
 other lines, is exerted by the principle of knightly 
 honour, — that solemn farce, unknown to the ancient 
 world, which makes modern society stiff, gloomy and 
 timid, forcing us to keep the strictest watch on every 
 word that falls. Nor is this all. The principle is a 
 universal Minotaur ; and the goodly company of the 
 sons of noble houses which it demands in yearly 
 tribute, comes, not from one country alone, as of old, 
 but from every land in Europe. It is high time to 
 make a regular attack upon this foolish system ; and 
 this is what I am trying to do now. Would that 
 these two monsters of the modern world might dis- 
 appear before the end of the century ! 
 
 Let us hope that medicine may be able to find some 
 means of preventing the one, and that, by clearing 
 our ideas, philosophy may put an end to the other ; 
 for it is only by clearing our ideas that the evil can 
 be eradicated. Governments have tried to do so by 
 legislation, and failed. 
 
 Still, if they are really concerned to suppress the 
 duelling system ; and if the small success that has 
 attended their efforts is really due only to their in- 
 ability to cope with the evil, I do not mind proposing 
 a law the success of which I am prepared to guarantee. 
 It will involve no sanguinary measures, and can be 
 put into operation without recourse either to the 
 scaffold or the gallows, or to imprisonment for life. 
 It is a small homoeopathic pilule, with no serious 
 after-effects. If any man send or accept a challenge, 
 let the corporal take him before the guard house, and 
 there give him, in broad daylight, twelve strokes with 
 
HONOUR. 115 
 
 a stick a la Chinoise ; a non-commissioned officer or a 
 private to receive six. If a duel has actually taken 
 place, the usual criminal proceedings should be 
 instituted. 
 
 A person with knightly notions might, perhaps, object 
 that, if such a punishment were carried out, a man of 
 honour would possibly shoot himself ; to which I 
 should answer that it is better for a fool like that to 
 shoot himself rather than other people. However, 1 
 know very well that governments are not really in 
 earnest about putting down duelling. Civil officials, 
 and much more so, officers in the army, (except those 
 in the highest positions), are paid most inadequately 
 for the services they perform ; and the deficiency is 
 made up by honour, which is represented by titles 
 and orders, and, in general, by the system of rank 
 and distinction. The duel is, so to speak, a very 
 serviceable extra-horse for people of rank: so they 
 are trained in the knowledge of it at the universities. 
 The accidents which happen to those who use it make 
 up in blood for the deficiency of the pay. 
 
 Just to complete the discussion, let me here men- 
 tion the subject of national honour. It is the honour 
 of a nation as a unit in the aggregate of nations. 
 And as there is no court to appeal to but the court of 
 force ; and as every nation must be prepared to 
 defend its own interests, the honour of a nation 
 consists in establishing the opinion, not only that it 
 may be trusted (its credit), but also that it is to be 
 feared. An attack upon its rights must never be 
 
116 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 allowed to pass unheeded. It is a combination of 
 civic and of knightly honour. 
 
 Section S. — Fame. 
 
 Under the heading of place in the estimation of the 
 world we have put Fame; and this we must now 
 proceed to consider. 
 
 Fame and honour are twins ; and twins, too, like 
 Castor and Pollux, of whom the one was mortal and 
 the other was not. Fame is the undying brother of 
 ephemeral honour. I speak, of course, of the highest 
 kind of fame, that is, of fame in the true and genuine 
 sense of the word; for, to be sure, there are many 
 sorts of fame, some of which last but a day. Honour 
 is concerned merely with such qualities as eve^one 
 may be expected to show under similar circumstances ; 
 fame only with those which cannot be required 
 of any man. Honour is of qualities which everyone 
 has a right to attribute to himself; fame only of 
 those which should be left to others to attribute. 
 Whilst our honour extends as far as people have 
 knowledge of us ; fame runs in advance, and makes 
 us known wherever it finds its way. Every one 
 can make a claim to honour; very few to fame, as 
 being attainable only in virtue of extraordinary 
 achievements. 
 
 These achievements may be of two kinds, either 
 actions or works; and so to fame there are two paths 
 open. On the path of actions, a great heart is the 
 chief recommendation ; on that of works, a great head. 
 Each of the two paths has its own peculiar advantages 
 
FAME. 117 
 
 and detriments; and the chief difference between 
 them is that actions are fleeting, while works remain. 
 The influence of an action, be it never so noble, can 
 last but a short time ; but a work of genius is a living 
 influence, beneficial and ennobling throughout the 
 ages. All that can remain of actions is a memory, 
 and that becomes weak and disfigured by time — a 
 matter of indifference to us, until at last it is extin- 
 guished altogether ; unless, indeed, history takes it up, 
 and presents it, fossilized, to posterity. Works are 
 immortal in themselves, and once committed to writ- 
 ing, may live for ever. Of Alexander the Great we 
 have but the name and the record : but Plato and 
 Aristotle, Homer and Horace are alive, and as directly 
 at work to-day as they were in their own life-time. 
 The Vedas, and their Upanishads, are still with us ; 
 but of all contemporaneous actions not a trace has 
 come down to us. 1 
 
 1 Accordingly it is a poor compliment, though sometimes a 
 fashionable one, to try to pay honour to a work by calling it an 
 action. For a work is something essentially higher in its nature. 
 An action is always something based on motive, and, therefore, 
 fragmentary and fleeting — a part, in fact, of that Will which is 
 the universal and original element in the constitution of the 
 world. But a great and beautiful work has a permanent char- 
 acter, as being of universal significance, and sprung from the 
 Intellect, which rises, like a perfume, above the faults and follies 
 of the world of Will. 
 
 The fame of a great action has this advantage, that it gene- 
 rally starts with a loud explosion, so loud, indeed, as to be 
 heard all over Europe, whereas the fame of a great work is slow 
 and gradual in its beginnings ; the noise it makes is at first slight, 
 but it goes on growing greater, until at last, after a hundred 
 years perhaps, it attains its full force ; but then it remains, 
 
118 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 Another disadvantage under which actions labour is 
 that they depend upon chance for the possibility of 
 coming into existence ; and hence, the fame they win 
 does not flow entirely from their intrinsic value, but 
 also from the circumstances which happened to lend 
 them importance and lustre. Again, the fame of 
 actions, if, as in war, they are purely personal, depends 
 upon the testimony of fewer witnesses ; and these are 
 not always present, and even if present, are not always 
 just or unbiassed observers. This disadvantage, how- 
 ever, is counterbalanced by the fact that actions have 
 the advantage of being of a practical character, and, 
 therefore, within the range of general human intelli- 
 gence; so that when the facts have been correctly re- 
 ported, justice is immediately done ; unless, indeed, the 
 motive underlying the action is not at first properly 
 understood or appreciated. No action can be really 
 understood apart from the motive which prompted it. 
 
 It is just the contrary with works. Their inception 
 does not depend upon chance, but wholly and entirely 
 upon their author; and whatever they are in and for 
 themselves, that they remain as long as they live. 
 Further, there is a difficulty in properly judging them, 
 which becomes all the harder, the higher their character; 
 often there are no persons competent to understand 
 the work, and often no unbiassed or honest critics. 
 Their fame, however, does not depend upon one judge 
 
 because the works remain, for thousands of years. But in the 
 other case, when the first explosion is over, the noise it makes 
 grows less and less, and is heard by fewer and fewer persons ; 
 until it ends by the action having only a shadowy existence in 
 the pages of history. 
 
FAME. 119 
 
 only; they can enter an appeal to another. In the 
 case of actions, as I have said, it is only their memory 
 which comes down to posterity, and then only in the 
 traditional form ; but works are handed down them- 
 selves, and, except when parts of them have been lost, 
 in the form in which they first appeared. In this 
 ca<e there is no room for any disfigurement of the 
 i'acos; and any circumstances which may have preju- 
 diced them in their origin, fall away with the lapse of 
 time. Nay, it is often only after the lapse of time 
 that the persons really competent to judge them ap- 
 pear — exceptional critics sitting in judgment on ex- 
 ceptional works, and giving their weighty verdicts in 
 succession. These collectively form a perfectly just 
 appreciation ; and though there are cases where it has 
 taken some hundreds of years to form it, no further 
 lapse of time is able to reverse the verdict ; — so secure 
 and inevitable is the fame of a great work. 
 
 Whether authors ever live to see the dawn of their 
 fame depends upon the chance of circumstance ; and 
 the higher and more important their works are, the 
 less likelihood there is of their doing so. That was an 
 incomparably fine saying of Seneca's, that fame follows 
 merit as surely as the body casts a shadow ; sometimes 
 falling in front, and sometimes behind. And he goes 
 on to remark that though the envy of contemporaries 
 be shoivn by universal silence, there will come those who 
 will judge without enmity or favour. From this re- 
 mark it is manifest that even in Seneca's age there 
 were rascals who understood the art of suppressing 
 , merit by maliciously ignoring its existence, and of 
 concealing good work from the public in order to 
 
120 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 favour the bad. It is an art well understood in our 
 day, too, manifesting itself, both then and now, in an 
 envious conspiracy of silence. 
 
 As a general rule, the longer a man's fame is likely 
 to last, the later it will be in coming ; for all excellent 
 products require time for their development. The 
 fame which lasts to posterity is like an oak, of very 
 slow growth ; and that which endures but a little 
 while, like plants which spring up in a year and then 
 die ; whilst false fame is like a fungus, shooting up in 
 a night and perishing as soon. 
 
 And why ? For this reason : the more a man 
 belongs to posterity, in other words, to humanity in 
 general, the more of an alien he is to his contem- 
 poraries; since his work is not meant for them as 
 such, but only for them in so far as they form part of 
 mankind at large ; there is none of that familiar local 
 colour about his productions which would appeal to 
 them; and so what he does, fails of recognition because 
 it is strange. People are more likely to appreciate 
 the man who serves the circumstances of his own brief 
 hour, or the temper of the moment, — belonging to it, 
 and living and dying with it. 
 
 The general history of art and literature shows that 
 the highest achievements of the human mind are, as a 
 rule, not favourably received at first ; but remain in 
 obscurity until they win notice from intelligence of a 
 higher order, by whose influence they are brought 
 into a position which they then maintain, in virtue of 
 the authority thus given them. 
 
 If the reason of this should be asked, it will be 
 found that ultimately, a man can really understand 
 
FAME. 121 
 
 and appreciate those things only which are of like 
 nature with himself. The dull person will like what 
 is dull, and the common person what is common ; a 
 man whose ideas are mixed will be attracted by con - 
 fusion of thought ; and folly will appeal to him who 
 has no brains at all; but best of all, a man will like 
 his own works, as being of a character thoroughly at 
 one with himself. This is a truth as old as Epichar- 
 mus of fabulous memory — 
 
 OavfMKJTov ovSev kcni /xe ravO' ovto> Aeyeiv 
 Kcu avBdvetv avTolcrtv avTOvs, kcll SokgTv 
 
 KciAoJS 7T€(fiVK€VaL' KOU yap 6 KViOV KVVl 
 
 KciAAmttoi/ eTfxev <f>div€Tai, kcu fSovs fiot 
 
 "OvOS C*' OV(£> KaXXtCTTOV [tCTTtv], V<$ 8' vt. 
 
 The sense of this passage — for it should not be lost — 
 is that we should not be surprised if people are pleased 
 with themselves, and fancy that they are in good case; 
 for to a dog the best thing in the world is a dog ; to 
 an ox, an ox ; to an ass, an ass ; and to a sow, a sow. 
 
 The strongest arm is unavailing to give impetus to 
 a feather-weight ; for, instead of speeding on its way 
 and hitting its mark with effect, it will soon fall to the 
 ground, having expended what little energy was given 
 to it, and possessing no mass of its own to be the 
 vehicle of momentum. So it is with great and noble 
 thoughts, nay, with the very masterpieces of genius, 
 when there are none but little, weak, and perverse 
 minds to appreciate them, — a fact which has been 
 deplored by a chorus of the wise in all ages. Jesus, 
 the son of Sirach, for instance, declares that He that 
 
122 TflE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 telleth a tale to a fool speaketh to one in slumber: 
 when he hath told his tale, he will say, What is the 
 matter ? l And Hamlet says, A knavish speech sleeps 
 in a fool's ear. 2 And Goethe is of the same opinion, 
 that a dull ear mocks at the wisest word, 
 
 i Das gliichlichste fVort es wird vcrhb'hnt, 
 
 Wenn der Rarer ein Schiefotvr ist: 
 
 and again, that we should not be discouraged if people 
 are stupid, for you can make no rings if you throw 
 your stone into a marsh : — 
 
 Du wirhest nicht, Alles bleibt so dmnpf: 
 
 Sei guter Dinge I 
 Der Stein in Sumpf 
 
 Macht keine Binge. 
 
 Liohtenberg asks : When a head and a book come 
 into collision, and one sounds hollow, is it always the 
 book ? And in another place : Works like this are as 
 a mirror ; if an ass looks in, you cannot expect an 
 apostle to look out. "We should do well to remember 
 old Gellert's fine and touching lament, that the best 
 gifts of all find the fewest admirers, and that most 
 men mistake the bad for the good, — a daily evil that 
 nothing can prevent, like a plague which no remedy 
 can cure. There is but one thing to be done, though 
 how difficult ! — the foolish must become wise, — and 
 that they can never be. The value of life they never 
 know ; they see with the outer eye but never with 
 
 1 Ecclesiasticus, xxii., 8. 
 
 2 Act iv. , sc. 2. 
 
FAME. 
 
 123 
 
 the mind, and praise the trivial because the good is 
 strange to them : — 
 
 Nie kennen sie den Werth der Dinge, 
 Ihr Auge schliesst, nicht ihr Verstand ; 
 
 Sie loben ewig das Geringe 
 
 Weil sie das Gh.de nie gekannt. 
 
 To the intellectual incapacity which, as Goethe 
 says, fails to recognize and appreciate the good which 
 exists, must be added something which comes into 
 play everywhere, the moral baseness of mankind, 
 here taking the form of envy. The new fame that a 
 man wins raises him afresh over the heads of his 
 fellows, who are thus degraded in proportion. All 
 conspicuous merit is obtained at the cost of those who 
 possess none ; or, as Goethe has it in the West Ostlicher 
 Divan, another's praise is one's own depreciation— 
 
 Wenn wir Andern Ehre geben 
 Miissen toir uns selbst entadeln. 
 
 We see, then, how it is that, whatever be the form 
 which excellence takes, mediocrity, the common lot of 
 by far the greatest number, is leagued against it in a 
 conspiracy to resist, and if possible, to suppress it. 
 The pass-word of this league is A bas le merite. Nay 
 more; those who have done something themselves, 
 and enjoy a certain amount of fame, do not care about 
 the appearance of a new reputation, because its 
 success is apt to throw theirs into the shade. Hence, 
 Goethe declares that if we had to depend for our life 
 upon the favour of others, we should never have 
 
\ 
 
 N 
 
 124 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 lived at all; from their desire to appear important 
 themselves, people gladly ignore our very existence : — 
 
 Hcitte ich gezaudert zu werden, 
 Bis man mii J s Leben gegonnt, 
 Ich ware noch nicht auf Erden, 
 Wie ihr begreifen kb'nnt, 
 Wenn ihr seht, wie sie sich geberden, 
 Die, wn etwas zu scheinen, 
 Mich geme mdchten verneinen. 
 
 Honour, on the contrary, generally meets with fair 
 appreciation, and is not exposed to the onslaught of 
 envy ; nay, every man is credited with the possession 
 of it until the contrary is proved. But fame has to 
 be won in despite of envy, and the tribunal whicli 
 awards the laurel is composed of judges biassed 
 against the applicant from the very first. Honour is 
 something which we are able and ready to share with 
 everyone ; fame suffers encroachment and is rendered 
 more unattainable in proportion as more people come 
 by it. Further, the difficulty of winning fame by any 
 given work stands in inverse ratio to the number of 
 people who are likely to read it ; and hence it is 
 so much harder to become famous as the author of a 
 learned work than as a writer who aspires only to 
 amuse. It is hardest of all in the case of philoso- 
 phical works, because the result at which they aim is 
 rather vague, and, at the same time, useless from a 
 material point of view. They appeal chiefly to readers 
 who are working on the same lines themselves. 
 
 It is clear, then, from what I have said as to the 
 difficulty of winning fame, that those who labour, not 
 out of love for their subject, nor from pleasure in 
 
FAME. 125 
 
 pursuing it, but under the stimulus of ambition, rarely 
 or never leave mankind a legacy of immortal works. 
 The man who seeks to do what is good and genuine, 
 must avoid what is bad, and be ready to defy the 
 opinions of the mob, nay, even to despise it and its 
 misleaders. Hence the truth of the remark, (especi- 
 ally insisted upon byOsorius de Gloria), that fame shuns 
 those who seek it, and seeks those who shun it ; for 
 the one adapt themselves to the taste of their con- 
 temporaries, and the others work in defiance of it. 
 
 But, difficult though it be to acquire fame, it is an 
 easy thing to keep it when once acquired. Here, 
 again, fame is in direct opposition to honour, with 
 which everyone is presumably to be accredited. 
 Honour has not to be won; it must only not be lost. 
 But there lies the difficulty ! For by a single un- 
 worthy action, it is gone irretrievably. But fame, in 
 the proper sense of the word, can never disappear ; 
 for the action or w T ork by which it was acquired can 
 never be undone ; and fame attaches to its author, 
 even though he does nothing to deserve it anew. The 
 fame which vanishes, or is outlived, proves itself 
 thereby to have been spurious, in other words, un- 
 merited, and due to a momentary over-estimate of a 
 man's work ; not to speak of the kind of fame which 
 Hegel enjoyed, and which Lichtenberg describes as 
 trumpeted forth by a clique of admiring under- 
 graduates — the resounding echo of empty heads; — 
 such a fame as will make posterity smile when it lights 
 upon a grotesque architecture of words, a fine nest 
 with the birds long ago flown ; it will knock at the 
 door of this decayed structure of conventionalities 
 
126 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 and find it utterly empty! — not even a trace oj 
 thought there to invite the passer-by. 
 
 The truth is that fame means nothing but what a 
 man is in comparison with others. It is essentially 
 relative in character, and therefore onty indirectly 
 valuable; for it vanishes the moment other people 
 become what the famous man is. Absolute value can 
 be predicated only of what a man possesses under any 
 and all circumstances, — here, what a man is directly 
 and in himself. It is the possession of a great heart or a 
 great head, and not the mere fame of it, which is 
 worth having, and conducive to happiness. Not 
 fame, but that which deserves to be famous, is what 
 a man should hold in esteem. This is, as it were, the 
 true underlying substance, and fame is only an acci- 
 dent, affecting its subject chiefly as a kind of external 
 symptom, which serves to confirm his own opinion of 
 himself. Light is not visible unless it meets witb 
 something to reflect it ; and talent is sure of itself 
 only when its fame is noised abroad. But fame is not 
 a certain symptom of merit ; because you can have 
 the one without the other ; or, as Lessing nicely puts 
 it, Some people obtain fame, and others deserve it. 
 
 It would be a miserable existence which should 
 make its value or want of value depend upon what 
 other people think ; but such would be the life of a 
 hero or a genius if its worth consisted in fame, that 
 is, in the applause of the world. Every man lives 
 and exists on his own account, and, therefore, mainly 
 in and for himself; and what he is and the whole 
 manner of his being concern himself more than any- 
 one else; so if he is not worth much in this respect, 
 
FAME. 127 
 
 he cannot be worth much otherwise. The idea which 
 other people form of his existence is something 
 secondary, derivative, exposed to all the chances of 
 fate, and in the end affecting him but very indirectly. 
 Besides, other people's heads are a wretched place to 
 be the home of a man's true happiness — a fanciful 
 happiness perhaps, but not a real one. 
 
 And what a mixed company inhabits the Temple 
 of Universal Fame ! — generals, ministers, charlatans, 
 jugglers, dancers, singers, millionaires and Jews ! It 
 is a temple in which more sincere recognition, more 
 genuine esteem, is given to the several excellences of 
 such folk, than to superiority of mind, even of a high 
 order, which obtains from the great majority only a 
 verbal acknowledgment. 
 
 From the point of view of human happiness, fame 
 is, surely, nothing but a very rare and delicate morsel 
 for the appetite that feeds on pride and vanity — an 
 appetite which, however carefully concealed, exists to 
 an immoderate degree in every man, and is, perhaps, 
 strongest of all in those who set their hearts on be- 
 coming famous at any cost. Such people generally 
 have to wait some time in uncertainty as to their own 
 value, before the opportunity comes which will put it 
 to the proof and let other people see what they are 
 made of; but until then, they feel as if they were 
 suffering secret injustice. 1 
 
 But, as I explained at the beginning of this chapter, 
 
 1 Our greatest pleasure consists in being admired ; but those 
 who admire us, even if they have every reason to do so, are slow 
 to express their sentiments. Hence he is the happiest man 
 who, no matter how, manages sincerely to admire himself — so 
 long as other people leave him alone. 
 
128 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 an unreasonable value is set upon other people's 
 opinion, and one quite disproportionate to its real 
 worth. Hobbes has some strong remarks on this sub- 
 ject; and no doubt he is quite right. Mental pleasure, 
 he writes, and ecstasy of any kind, arise when, on com- 
 paring ourselves with others, ive come to the conclusion 
 that we may think well of ourselves. So we can easily 
 understand the great value which is always attached 
 to fame, as worth any sacrifices if there is the slightest 
 hope of attaining it. 
 
 Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise 
 
 (That last infirmity of noble mind) 
 
 To scorn delights and live laborious days. x 
 
 And again : 
 
 How hard it is to climb 
 The heights where Fame's proud temple sh ines afar ! 
 
 We can thus understand how it is that the vainest 
 people in the world are always talking about la gloire, 
 with the most implicit faith in it as a stimulus to 
 great actions and great works. But there can be no 
 doubt that fame is something secondary in its char- 
 acter, a mere echo or reflection — as it were, a shadow 
 or symptom — of merit; and, in any case, what excites 
 admiration must be of more value than the admiration 
 itself. The truth is that a man is made happy, not 
 by fame, but by that which brings him fame, by his 
 merits, or to speak more correctly, by the disposition 
 and capacity from which his merits proceed, whether 
 they be moral or intellectual. The best side of a 
 
 1 Milton. Lycidas 
 
FAME. 129 
 
 man'-* nature must of necessity be more important for 
 him than for anyone else : the reflection of it, the 
 opinion which exists in the heads of others, is a matter 
 that can affect him only in a very subordinate degree. 
 He who deserves fame without getting it possesses by 
 far the more important element of happiness, which 
 should console him for tbe loss of the other. It is not 
 that a man is thought to be great by masses of in- 
 competent and often infatuated people, but that he 
 really is great, which should move us to envy his 
 position ; and his happiness lies, not in the fact that 
 posterity will hear of him, but that he is the creator 
 of thoughts worthy to be treasured up and studied 
 for hundreds of years. 
 
 Besides, if a man has done this, he possesses some- 
 thing which cannot be wrested from him; and, unlike 
 fame, it is a possession dependent entirely upon 
 himself. If admiration were his chief aim, there 
 would be nothing in him to admire. This is just 
 what happens in the case of false, that is, unmerited, 
 fame ; for its recipient lives upon it without actually 
 possessing the solid substratum of which fame is the 
 outward and visible sign. False fame must often put 
 its possessor out of conceit with himself ; for the 
 time may come when, in spite of the illusions born of 
 self-love, he will feel giddy on the heights which he 
 was never meant to climb, or look upon himself as 
 spurious coin; and in the anguish of threatened 
 discovery and well-merited degradation, he will read 
 the sentence of posterity on the foreheads of the wise 
 — like a man who owes his property to a forged will. 
 
 The truest fame, the fame that comes after death. 
 
 J 
 
130 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 is never heard of by its recipient ; and yet he ig 
 called a happy man. His happiness lay both in the 
 possession of those great qualities which won him 
 fame, and in the opportunity that was granted him 
 of developing them — the leisure he had to act as he 
 pleased, to dedicate himself to his favourite pursuits. 
 It is only work done from the heart that ever gains 
 the laurel. 
 
 Greatness of soul, or wealth of intellect, is what 
 makes a man happy — intellect, such as, when stamped 
 on its productions, will receive the admiration of cen- 
 turies to come, — thoughts which made him happy at 
 the time, and will in their tarn be a source of study 
 and delight to the noblest minds of the most remote 
 posterity. The value of posthumous fame lies in 
 deserving it ; and this is its own reward. Whether 
 works destined to fame attain it in the lifetime of 
 their author is a chance affair, of no very great im- 
 portance. For the average man has no critical power 
 of his own, and is absolutely incapable of appreciating 
 the difficulty of a great work. People are always 
 swayed by authority ; and where fame is widespread, 
 it means that ninety -nine out of a hundred take it 
 on faith alone. If a man is famed far and wide in 
 his own life-time, he will, if he is wise, not set too 
 much value upon it, because it is no more than the 
 echo of a few voices, which the chance of a day has 
 touched in his favour. 
 
 Would a musician feel flattered by the loud ap- 
 plause of an audience if he knew that they were 
 nearly all dgaf, and that, to conceal their infirmity, 
 they set to work to clap vigorously as soon as ever 
 
FAME. 131 
 
 they saw one or two persons applauding ? And what 
 would he say if he got to know that those one or two 
 persons had often taken bribes to secure the loudest 
 applause for the poorest player ! 
 
 It is easy to see why contemporary praise so 
 seldom developes into posthumous fame. D'Alembert, 
 in an extremely fine description of the temple of 
 literary fame, remarks that the sanctuary of the 
 temple is inhabited by the great dead, who during 
 their life had no place there, and by a very few living 
 persons, who are nearly all ejected on their death. 
 Let me remark, in passing, that to erect a monument 
 to a man in his lifetime is as much as declaring that 
 posterity is not to be trusted in its judgment of him* 
 If a man does happen to see his own true fame, it can 
 very rarely be before he is old, though there have 
 been artists and musicians who have been exceptions 
 to this rule, but very few philosophers. This is 
 confirmed by the portraits of people celebrated by 
 their works ; for most of them are taken only after 
 their subjects have attained celebrity, generally de- 
 picting them as old and grey ; more especially if 
 philosophy has been the work of their lives. From a 
 eudsemonistic standpoint, this is a very proper 
 arrangement ; as fame and youth are too much for a 
 mortal at one and the same time. Life is such a 
 poor business that the strictest economy must be 
 exercised in its good things. Youth has enough and 
 to spare in itself, and must rest content with what it 
 has. But when the delights and joys of life fall away 
 in old age, as the leaves from a tree in autumn, fame 
 buds forth opportunely, like a plant that is green in 
 
132 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 winter. Fame is, as it were, the fruit that must grow 
 all the summer before it can be enjoyed at Yule. 
 There is no greater consolation in age than the feeling 
 of having put the whole force of one's youth into 
 works which still remain young. 
 
 Finally, let us examine a little more closely the 
 kinds of fame which attach to various intellectual 
 pursuits ; for it is with fame of this sort that my re- 
 marks are more immediately concerned. 
 
 I think it may be said broadly that the intellectual 
 superiority it denotes consists in forming theories, 
 that is, new combinations of certain facts. These 
 facts may be of very different kinds ; but the better 
 they are known, and the more they come within 
 everyday experience, the greater and wider will be 
 the fame which is to be won by theorising about them. 
 For instance, if the facts in question are numbers or 
 lines or special branches of science, such as physics, 
 zoology, botany, anatomy, or corrupt passages in 
 ancient authors, or undecipherable inscriptions, written, 
 it may be, in some unknown alphabet, or obscure points 
 in history ; the kind of fame which may be obtained 
 by correctly manipulating such facts will not extend 
 much beyond those who make a study of them — a 
 small number of persons, most of whom live retired 
 lives and are envious of others who become famous in 
 their special branch of knowledge. 
 
 But if the facts be such as are known to everyone, 
 for example, the fundamental characteristics of the 
 liuman mind or the human heart, which are shared by 
 all alike, or the great physical agencies which are 
 constantly in operation before our eyes, or the general 
 
FAME. 133 
 
 course of natural laws, the kind of fame which is to 
 be won by spreading the light of a new and mani- 
 festly true theory in regard to them, is such as in time 
 will extend almost all over the civilised world : for if 
 the facts be such as everyone can grasp, the theory 
 also will be generally intelligible. But the extent of 
 the fame will depend upon the difficulties overcome ; 
 and the more generally known the facts are, the harder 
 it will be to form a theory that shall be both new and 
 true; because a great many heads will have been 
 occupied with them, and there will be little or no possi- 
 bility of saying anything that has not been said before. 
 On the other hand, facts which are not accessible to 
 everybody, and can be got at only after much diffi- 
 culty and labour, nearly always admit of new combi- 
 nations and theories; so that, if sound understanding 
 and judgment are brought to bear upon them — quali- 
 ties which do not involve very higli intellectual power 
 — a man may easily be so fortunate as to light upon 
 some new theory in regard to them which shall be 
 also true. But fame won on such paths does not ex- 
 tend much beyond those who possess a knowledge of 
 the facts in question. To solve problems of this sort 
 requires, no doubt, a great deal of study and labour, 
 if only to get at the facts ; whilst on the path where 
 the greatest and most widespread fame is to be won, 
 the facts may be grasped without any labour at all. 
 But just in proportion as less labour is necessary, more 
 talent or genius is required ; and between such quali- 
 ties and the drudgery of research no comparison is 
 possible, in respect either of their intrinsic value, or of 
 the estimation in which they are held. 
 
134 THE WISDOM OF LIFE. 
 
 And so people who feel that they possess solid in- 
 tellectual capacity and a sound judgment, and yet 
 cannot claim the highest mental powers, should not 
 be afraid of laborious study ; for by its aid they may 
 work themselves above the great mob of humanity 
 who have the facts constantly before their eyes, and 
 reach those secluded spots which are accessible to 
 learned toil. For this is a sphere where there are 
 infinitely fewer rivals, and a man of only moderate 
 capacity may soon find an opportunity of proclaiming 
 a theory that shall be both new and true ; nay, the 
 merit of his discovery will partly rest upon the diffi- 
 culty of coming at the facts. But applause from one's 
 fellow-students, who are the only persons with a 
 knowledge of the subject, sounds very faint to the 
 far-off multitude. And if we follow up this sort of 
 fame far enough, we shall at last come to a point 
 where facts very difficult to get at are in themselves 
 sufficient to lay a foundation of fame, without any 
 necessity for forming a theory ; — travels, for instance, 
 in remote and little-known countries, which make a 
 man famous by what he has seen, not by what he has 
 thought. The great advantage of this kind of fame 
 is that to relate what one has seen, is much easier 
 than to impart one's thoughts, and people are apt to 
 understand descriptions better than ideas, reading 
 the one more readily than the other ; for, as Asmus 
 says, 
 
 When one goes forth a-voyaging 
 He has a tale to tell. 
 
 And yet, for all that, a personal acquaintance with 
 
FAME. 135 
 
 celebrated travellers often reminds us of a line from 
 Horace — new scenes do not always mean new ideas — 
 
 Coelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt. 1 
 
 But if a man finds himself in possession of great 
 mental faculties, such as alone should venture on the 
 solution of the hardest of all problems — those which 
 concern nature as a whole and humanity in its widest 
 range, he will do well to extend his view equally in 
 all directions, without ever straying too far amid the 
 intricacies of various by-paths, or invading regions 
 little known ; in other words, without occupying him- 
 self with special branches of knowledge, to say nothing 
 of their petty details. There is no necessity for him 
 to seek out subjects difficult of access, in order to 
 escape a crowd of rivals ; the common objects of life 
 will give him material for new theories at once serious 
 and true ; and the service he renders will be appreci- 
 ated by all those — and they form a great part of man- 
 kind — who know the facts of which he treats. What 
 a vast distinction there is between students of physics, 
 chemistry, anatomy, mineralogy, zoology, philology, 
 history, and the men who deal with the great facts of 
 human life, the poet and the philosopher ! 
 1 Epist. I. II. 
 
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