life of the most perfect satisfaction at the price of ending it in
the torments which justice inflicted in a few hours on the late
unfortunate regicide in France" (_Sublime and Beautiful_, pt. I. sec.
vii.). The reference is, of course, to Damien.]

Nobody cared less than Schopenhauer for the wisdom that is drawn from
books, or has said such hard things of mere reading. In the short
piece to which I have already referred (p. 80), he works out the
difference between the Scholar who has read in books, and the
Thinkers, the Geniuses, the Lights of the World, and Furtherers of
the human race, who have read directly from the world's own pages.
Reading, he says, is only a _succedaneum_ for one's own thinking.
Reading is thinking with a strange head instead of one's own. People
who get their wisdom out of books are like those who have got their
knowledge of a country from the descriptions of travellers. Truth that
has been picked up from books only sticks to us like an artificial
limb, or a false tooth, or a rhinoplastic nose; the truth we have
acquired by our own thinking is like the natural member. At least, as
Goethe puts it in his verse,

Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,
Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen.

_What from thy fathers thou dost inherit, be sure thou
earn it, that so it may become thine own_.

It is only Goethe and Schiller, and especially Goethe, "the strong,
much-toiling sage, with spirit free from mists, and sane and clear,"
who combine the higher and the lower wisdom, and have skill to put
moral truths into forms of words that fix themselves with stings in