they are used to illumine what he considers to be the truth. Rien n’est beau que le vrai; le vrai seul est aimable, he quotes; he was a deliberate and diligent searcher after truth, always striving to attain the heart of things, to arrive at a knowledge of first principles.  It is, too, not without a sort of grim humour that this psychological vivisectionist attempts to lay bare the skeleton of the human mind, to tear away all the charming little sentiments and hypocrisies which in the course of time become a part and parcel of human life.  A man influenced by such motives, and possessing a frank and caustic tongue, was not likely to attain any very large share of popular favour or to be esteemed a companionable sort of person.  The fabric of social life is interwoven with a multitude of delicate evasions, of small hypocrisies, of matters of tinsel sentiment; social intercourse would be impossible, if it were not so.  There is no sort of social existence possible for a person who is ingenuous enough to say always what he thinks, and, on the whole, one may be thankful that there is not.  One naturally enough objects to form the subject of a critical diagnosis and exposure; one chooses for one’s friends the agreeable hypocrites of life who sustain for one the illusions in which one wishes to live.  The mere conception of a plain-speaking world is calculated to reduce one to the last degree of despair; it is the conception of the intolerable.  Nevertheless it is good for mankind now and again to have a plain speaker, a “mar feast,” on the scene; a wizard who devises for us a spectacle of disillusionment, and lets us for a moment see things as he honestly conceives them to be, and not as we would have them to be.  But in estimating the value of a lesson of this sort, we must not be carried too far, not be altogether convinced.  We may first take into account the temperament of the teacher; we may ask, is his vision perfect?  We may indulge in a trifling diagnosis on our own account.  And in an examination of this sort we find that Schopenhauer stands the test pretty well, if not with complete success.  It strikes us that he suffers perhaps a little from a hereditary taint, for we know that there is an unmistakable predisposition to hypochondria in his family; we know, for instance, that his paternal grandmother became practically insane towards the end of her life, that two of her children suffered from some sort of mental incapacity, and that a third, Schopenhauer’s father, was a man of curious temper and that he probably ended his own life.  He himself would also have attached some importance, in a consideration of this sort, to the fact, as he might have put it, that his mother, when she married, acted in the interests of the individual instead of unconsciously fulfilling the will of the species, and that the offspring of the union suffered in consequence.  Still, taking all these things into account, and attaching to them what importance they may be worth, one is amazed at