has covered the earth with verdure and shaped the massifs of the Alps,
to such a man the whole literature the world produced until the
nineteenth century had well progressed, must needs be lacking in any
definite and pervading sense of the cardinal importance in the world of
this central reproductive aspect, of births and of the training and
preparation for future births. All that literature, great and imposing
as we are bound to admit it is, has an outlook less ample than quite
common men may have to-day. It is a literature, as we see it in the
newer view, of abstracted personalities and of disconnected passions
and impressions.

To one extraordinary and powerful mind in the earlier half of the
nineteenth century this realization of the true form of life came with
quite overwhelming force, and that was to Schopenhauer, surely at once
the most acute and the most biassed of mortal men. It came to him as a
most detestable fact, because it happened he was an intensely
egotistical man. But his intellect was of that noble and exceptional
sort that aversion may tint indeed but cannot blind, and we owe to him
a series of philosophical writings, written with an instinctive skill
and a clearness and a vigour uncommon in philosophers, in which a very
complete statement of the new view is presented to the reader in terms
of passionate protest. [Footnote: _Die Welt als Wille und
Vorstellung._] "Why," he asked, "must we be for ever tortured by
this passion and desire to reproduce our kind, why are all our pursuits
tainted with this application, all our needs deferred to the needs of
the new generation that tramples on our heels?" and he found the answer
in the presence of an overwhelming Will to Live manifesting itself
throughout the universe of Matter, thrusting us ruthlessly before it,
as a strong swimmer thrusts a wave before him as he swims. That the
personal egotism should be subordinated to and overwhelmed by a