_Memoirs_ furnishes us with a scarcely prepossessing picture of Mrs.
Schopenhauer: "Madame Schopenhauer," he writes, "a rich widow. Makes
profession of erudition. Authoress. Prattles much and well,
intelligently; without heart and soul. Self-complacent, eager after
approbation, and constantly smiling to herself. God preserve us from
women whose mind has shot up into mere intellect."

Schopenhauer meanwhile was working out his philosophical system, the
idea of his principal philosophical work. "Under my hands," he wrote in
1813, "and still more in my mind grows a work, a philosophy which will
be an ethics and a metaphysics in one:--two branches which hitherto have
been separated as falsely as man has been divided into soul and body.
The work grows, slowly and gradually aggregating its parts like the
child in the womb. I became aware of one member, one vessel, one part
after another. In other words, I set each sentence down without anxiety
as to how it will fit into the whole; for I know it has all sprung from
a single foundation. It is thus that an organic whole originates, and
that alone will live.... Chance, thou ruler of this sense-world! Let me
live and find peace for yet a few years, for I love my work as the
mother her child. When it is matured and has come to birth, then exact
from me thy duties, taking interest for the postponement. But, if I sink
before the time in this iron age, then grant that these miniature
beginnings, these studies of mine, be given to the world as they are and
for what they are: some day perchance will arise a kindred spirit, who
can frame the members together and 'restore' the fragment of
antiquity."[1]

By March 1817 he had completed the preparatory work of his system, and
began to put the whole thing together; a year later _Die Welt als Wille
und Vorstellung: vier B�cher, nebst einem Anhange, der die Kritik der