of kindness and sympathy. Some of them will doubtless perish; but if one only lives, it will perfume our steps and rejoice our eyes.

There is nothing at all in life, except what we put there.

It is a mercy to the rich that there are poor. Alms is but the material life of the latter: it is, at least in a degree, the spiritual life of the former.

There are not good things enough in life to indemnify us for the neglect of a single duty.

There is a transcendent power in example. We reform others unconsciously when we walk uprightly.

We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.

The best advice on the art of being happy is about as easy to follow as advice to be well when one is sick.

To do nothing is not always to lose one's time. To do what we do carelessly, is to lose it inevitably. It is weariness without profit.

We forgive too little-forget too much.

Youth should be a savings-bank.

There are two ways of attaining an important end, — force and perseverance. Force falls to the lot only of the privileged few, but austere and sustained perseverance can be practised by the most insignificant.

SCHOPENHAUER

(A. D. 1788-1860.)

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, who is called the philosopher of Pessimism, was born at Dantzic, before it became a Prussian city, on the 22d of February, 1788, and died at Frankforton-the-Main, in September, 1860. His father was a wealthy merchant, of Dutch descent, a man of superior character and education, whose memory was held in reverence by the son, though he died while the latter was a youth. His mother was a woman of talent, but so different from himself in disposition that they lived apart, by common agreement, after the father's death. "As long as you are what you are," wrote his mother to him when he was nineteen, "I would rather bring any sacrifice than consent to live with you. Your eternal quibbles, your laments over the stupid world and human misery give me bad nights and unpleasant dreams." Thus early he had acquired the view of the world and of human life which inspired his pessimistic philosophy. According to his own statement, he had fully matured his philosophical system before he was twenty-seven. At thirty he had finished the work in which it is mainly set forth. This, of which the translated title is "The World as Will and as Idea," drew little attention for many years; but Schopenhauer lived to see it rank with the greatest productions of German thought. Its influence on the deeper thinking of the world and perhaps quite as much in the minds that reject its fundamental doctrine as in the minds that accept it has been of steady growth to the present day.

But his principal work is by no means the sole source of the influence which Schopenhauer has caused to be felt. He wrote on Ethics and on Art, especially on Music, not only with profound originality and suggestiveness, but with a charm of imagination and wit, and with a deftness of literary touch, which are unique in the writings of German philoso

phers. Of his ethical doctrines, a remarkably comprehensive summary is contained in a few sentences that we will quote from Miss Helen Zimmer's little book entitled "Arthur Schopenhauer: His Life and Philosophy." "Schopenhauer's ethics," says Miss Zimmer, “are implied in the leading principle of his system. Everything hinges upon the affirmation or negation of the Will to live.' . . . All wrongdoing is in the last analysis resolvable into contempt for the rights of others, into pursuit of one's own advantage, in affirmation of the Will to live' at their expense. In its coarsest form

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this implies the commission of crimes of violence punishable by the legislator, but between these and the most refined forms of egotism the difference is merely one of degree. Right moral action can spring only from the recognition of the essential evil of the phenomenal world, and the deliberate resolve to reduce it to a minimum. The secret of this lies in one word, abnegation. The Will to live' comprehends self-assertion in every form and shape, and as every charitable action involves the denial of self in some respect, it follows that Schopenhauer's morality is in the main equivalent to the inculcation of universal philanthropy.

will be at once apparent that in its practical ethical aspect Schopenhauer's teaching differs in nothing from Buddhism. The reference of all existence to egotistic desire, the conclusion that as such it must be essentially evil, the further corollary that the road to the extinction of sorrow can only lie through the extinction of desire, and that this can only be attained by the mortification of every passion; these are the very commonplaces of Buddhistic teaching. The spirit in which they are urged is indeed very different. No two things can be much more dissimilar than Schopenhauer's angry invective and Buddha's mild persuasiveness; nor perhaps is the whole body of his ethical doctrine so expressive as Buddha's matchless definition of virtue: The agreement of the Will with the Conscience.' Substantially, however, the accordance is perfect."

The practical inculcations to which his doctrines led are exemplified in the following maxims, culled from a translation of the first and second parts of Schopenhauer's "Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit."

SELECTED PASSAGES FROM SCHOPENHAUER'S "APHORISMS ON THE WISDOM OF LIFE."

(From a translation by T. Bailey Saunders, M. A., published by Messrs. Swan Sonnenschein & Co., in two parts, respectively entitled "The Wisdom of Life" and "Counsels and Maxims.")

What a man has in himself is . . . the chief element in his happiness.

What a man is, and so what he has in his own person, is always the chief thing to consider; for his individuality accompanies him always and everywhere, and gives its color to all his experiences. . . .

...

The man who is cheerful and merry has always a good reason for being so, the fact, namely, that he is so. Nothing contributes so little to cheerfulness as riches, or so much as health.

The most general survey shows us that the two foes of 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. Needy surroundings and poverty produce pain; while, if a man is more than well off he is bored. Nothing is so good a protection

as inward wealth, the wealth of the mind, because the greater it grows the less room it leaves for boredom.

Ordinary people think merely how they shall spend their time; a man of intellect tries to use it.

The conclusion we come to is that the man whom nature has endowed with intellectual wealth is the happiest. 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. . . .

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 every one 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.

Honour is, on its objective side, other people's 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 influ

ence.

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. . . .

Fame is something which must be won; honour, only something which must not be lost. The absence of fame is obscurity, which is only a negative; but loss of honour is shame, which is a positive quality. .

The first and foremost rule for the wise conduct of life seems to me to be contained in a view to which Aristotle parenthetically refers in the Nichomachean Ethics: .. not pleasure, but freedom from pain, is what the wise man will aim at.

A man who desires to make up the book of his life and determine where the balance of happiness lies, must put down in his accounts, not the pleasures which he has enjoyed, but the evils which he has escaped. To live happily only means to live less unhappily - to live a tolerable life. There is no doubt that life is