The idea of marriage seems to have more or less possessed Schopenhauer
about this time, but he could not finally determine to take the step.
There is sufficient to show in the following essays in what light he
regarded women. Marriage was a debt, he said, contracted in youth and
paid off in old age. Married people have the whole burden of life to
bear, while the unmarried have only half, was a characteristically
selfish apothegm. Had not all the true philosophers been
celibates--Descartes, Leibnitz, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Kant? The
classic writers were of course not to be considered, because with them
woman occupied a subordinate position. Had not all the great poets
married, and with disastrous consequences? Plainly, Schopenhauer was not
the person to sacrifice the individual to the will of the species.

In August 1831 he made a fortuitous expedition to
Frankfort-on-the-Main--an expedition partly prompted by the outbreak of
cholera at Berlin at the time, and partly by the portent of a dream (he
was credulous in such matters) which at the beginning of the year had
intimated his death. Here, however, he practically remained until his
death, leading a quiet, mechanically regular life and devoting his
thoughts to the development of his philosophic ideas, isolated at first,
but as time went on enjoying somewhat greedily the success which had
been denied him in his earlier days. In February 1839 he had a moment of
elation when he heard from the Scientific Society of Drontheim that he
had won the prize for the best essay on the question, "Whether free will
could be proved from the evidence of consciousness," and that he had
been elected a member of the Society; and a corresponding moment of
despondency when he was informed by the Royal Danish Academy of the
Sciences at Copenhagen, in a similar competition, that his essay on
"Whether the source and foundation of ethics was to be sought in an