of mind, and his style is so pointed, direct, and wide-awake, that these detached discussions are interesting and most readable; but for the most part discussions they are, and not aphorisms.  Thus, in the saying that “The perfect man of the world should be he who never sticks fast in indecision, nor ever falls into overhaste,” the force of it lies in what goes before and what follows after.  The whole collection, winding up with the chapter of Counsels and Maxims, is in the main an unsystematic enforcement of those peculiar views of human happiness and its narrow limits which proved to be the most important part of Schopenhauer’s system.  “The sovereign rule in the wisdom of life,” he said, “I see in Aristotle’s proposition (Eth.  Nic. vii. 12), [Greek:  ho phronimos to alupon diokei, ou to haedu]:  Not pleasure but freedom from pain is what the sensible man goes after.”  The second volume, of Detached though systematically Ordered Thoughts on Various Circumstances, is miscellaneous in its range of topics, and is full of suggestion; but the thoughts are mainly philosophical and literary, and do not come very close to practical wisdom.  In truth, so negative a view of happiness, such pale hopes and middling expectations, could not guide a man far on the path of active prudence, where we naturally take for granted that the goal is really something substantial, serious, solid, and positive.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Burke says on the point raised above:  “I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure.  Without all doubt, the torments which we may be made to suffer are much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than any pleasures which the most learned voluptuary could suggest.  Nay, I am in great doubt whether any man could be found, who would earn a 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,