Paul Deussen, the German philologist and philosopher, was the son of a Protestant clergyman in the village of Oberdreis in the Westerwald. He received a thorough classical training in the old secondary school of Pforta, where he developed a close friendship with Friedrich Nietzsche. Both Deussen and Nietzsche enrolled in the theological faculty at the University of Bonn, but Nietzsche soon shifted to classical philology and followed his teacher Ritschl to Leipzig. Deussen remained in Bonn for four semesters, then also shifted to classical philology and earned his doctorate at Berlin in 1869 with a dissertation on Plato's Sophist. After a brief period of teaching in secondary schools, he became the tutor for a Russian family in Geneva in 1872. There he intensified his study of Sanskrit, began a study of the Indian philosophical classics, and became an enthusiastic follower and interpreter of Arthur Schopenhauer (after...