After some stay at Dresden he began to lec ture, without much success, in Berlin. He soon abandoned the attempt, attributing his failure to Hegelian intrigues. Thus, ex cept for some attention to physiology, the first two years at Berlin were wasted. In May 1822 he set out by way of Switzerland for Italy. After spending the winter at Florence and Rome, he left in the spring of 1823 for Munich, where he stayed for nearly a year, the prey of illness and isolation. When, at the end of this wretched time, he left for Gastein, in May 1824, he had almost entirely lost the hearing of his right ear. Dresden, which he reached in August, no longer presented the same hospitable aspect as of old, and he was reluctantly drawn onwards to Berlin in May 1825. The next six years, in Berlin, were a dismal period in the life of Schopenhauer. Hegelianism reigned in the schools and in literature and basked in the sunshine of authority. Schopenhauer fell into morbid meditations. The sexual passion had a strong at traction for him at all times, and, according to his biographers, the notes he set down in English, when he was turned 30, on marriage and kindred topics are unfit for publication.
In 1833 he settled finally at Frankfurt, gloomily waiting for the recognition of his work, and terrified by fears of assassination and robbery. As the years passed he noted down every confirmation he found of his own opinion, already expressed in Die Welt als Wille and V orstellung, in the writings of others, and every instance in which his views appeared to be illustrated by new researches. He gave each apercu a place in his alphabetically arranged note-book. Everything he published in later life may be called a commentary, an excursus or a scholium to his main book. Meanwhile he grew more and more embittered by the neglect of his own work and the triumph of the Hegelians. His accumulated ill-humour found vent in the wild outcry against the philosophy of the professoriate, entitled Uber den Willen in der Natur (1836; revised and enlarged, 1854; Eng. trans., 1889). In 1841 he published, under the title Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, two essays which he had sent in 1838-39 in competition for prizes offered by Norwegian and Danish academies of science ; he was awarded the Norwegian prize but the Danish academy denied it to him, although he was the only competitor.
In 1844 appeared the second edition of Die Welt als Wille and Vorstellung (2 vols.). The first volume was a slightly altered reprint of the earlier issue ; the second con sisted of a series of chapters forming a commentary parallel to those into which the original work was now first divided. The longest of these new chapters deal with the primacy of the will, with death and with the metaphysics of sexual love. But, though only a small edition was struck off (zoo copies of vol. i. and 75o of vol. ii.), the report of sales which Brockhaus rendered in 1846 was unfavourable, and the price had afterwards to be reduced. Yet there were faint indications of coming fame, and Schopen hauer welcomed eagerly each new tribute from critic and admirer. His principal admirer was Frauenstadt, who made his personal ac quaintance in 1846. It was Frauenstadt who succeeded in finding a publisher for the Parerga and Paralipomena, which appeared at Berlin in 1851 (2 vols., pp. 465, 531; selected trans. by J. B. Saunders, 1889; French by A. Dietrich, 1909). For this bulky collection of essays, philosophical and others, Schopenhauer re ceived as honorarium only ten free copies of the work. Soon
afterwards, Dr. E. 0. Lindner, assistant editor of the Vossische Zeitung, began a series of Schopenhauerite articles. Amongst them may be reckoned a translation by Mrs. Lindner of an article by John Oxentord which appeared in the Westminster Review for April 1853, entitled "Iconoclasm in German Philosophy," being an outline of Schopenhauer's system. In 1854 Frauenstadt's Letters on the Schopenhauerean Philosophy showed that the new doctrines were becoming a subject of discussion, and the Uni versity of Leipzig offered a prize for the best exposition and examination of the principles of Schopenhauer's system. Between 1847 and 186o new editions of his works were called for. In 1854 Richard Wagner sent him a copy of the Ring of the Nibelung, with some words of thanks for a theory of music which had fallen in with his own conceptions. Schopenhauer died at Frankfurt on Sept. 21, 1860.
More than others the philosopher leads a second life in the spirit or intellect alongside of his life in the flesh—the life of knowledge beside the life of will. It is inevitable that he should be especially struck by the points in which the sensible and temporal life comes in conflict with the intellectual and eternal. It was thus that Schopenhauer by his own experience saw in the primacy of the will the fundamental fact of his philosophy, and found in the engrossing interests of the selfish gpon the perennial hindrances of the higher life. For his absolute individualism, which recognizes in the State, the Church, the family only so many superficial and incidental provisions of human craft, the means of relief was absorption in the intel lectual and purely ideal aims which prepare the way for the cessation of temporal individuality altogether. But theory is one thing and practice another and he will often lay most stress on the theory who is most conscious of defects in the practice. It need not, therefore, surprise us that the man who formulated the sum of virtue in justice and benevolence was unable to be just to his own kinsfolk and reserved his compassion largely for the brutes, and that the delineator of asceticism was more than moder ately sensible of the comforts and enjoyments of life. The philoso phy of Schopenhauer, like almost every 'system of the 19th cen tury, can hardly be understood without reference to the ideas of Kant. But in various ways a reaction arose against this ab sorption of everything in reason. In Fichte the source of being is primeval activity, the groundless and incomprehensible deed-action (That-Handlung) of the absolute ego. The innermost character of that ego is an infinitude in act and effort. "The will is the living principle of reason," he says again. "In the last resort," says Schelling (1809), in his Inquiries into the Nature of Human Free dom, "there is no other being but will. Wollen ist Ursein (will is primal being) ; and to this alone apply the predicates fathomless, eternal, independent of time, self-affirming." Idealism was never without a protest that there is a heart of existence, life, will, action, which is presupposed by all knowledge and is not itself amenable to explanation. We may, if we like, call this element, which is assumed as the basis of all scientific method, irrational— will instead of reason, feeling rather than knowledge.