I had first launched when I attended the lectures of several Leipzig professors and in later years by reading Schelling and Hegel.  I seemed to understand the reason of their failure to satisfy me from the writings of Feuerbach, which I studied at the same time.  What fascinated me so enormously about Schopenhauer’s work was not only its extraordinary fate, but the clearness and manly precision with which the most difficult metaphysical problems were treated from the very beginning.

I had been greatly drawn towards the work on learning the opinion of an English critic, who candidly confessed that he respected German philosophy because of its complete incomprehensibility, as instanced by Hegel’s doctrines, until the study of Schopenhauer had made it clear to him that Hegel’s lack of lucidity was due not so much to his own incapacity as to the intentionally bombastic style in which this philosopher had clothed his problems.  Like every man who is passionately thrilled with life, I too sought first for the conclusions of Schopenhauer’s system.  With its aesthetic side I was perfectly content, and was especially astonished at his noble conception of music.  But, on the other hand, the final summing-up regarding morals alarmed me, as, indeed, it would have startled any one in my mood; for here the annihilation of the will and complete abnegation are represented as the sole true and final deliverance from those bonds of individual limitation in estimating and facing the world, which are now clearly felt for the first time.  For those who hoped to find some philosophical justification for political and social agitation on behalf of so-called ‘individual freedom’ there was certainly no support to be found here, where all that was demanded was absolute renunciation of all such methods of satisfying the claims of personality.  At first I naturally found his ideas by no means palatable, and felt I could not readily abandon that so-called ‘cheerful’ Greek aspect of the world, with which I had looked out upon life in my Kunstwerk der Zukunft.  As a matter of fact, it was Herwegh who at last, by a well-timed explanation, brought me to a calmer frame of mind about my own sensitive feelings.  It is from this perception of the nullity of the visible world—­so he said—­that all tragedy is derived, and such a perception must necessarily have dwelt as an intuition in every great poet, and even in every great man.  On looking afresh into my Nibelungen poem I recognised with surprise that the very things that now so embarrassed me theoretically had long been familiar to me in my own poetical conception.  Now at last I could understand my Wotan, and I returned with chastened mind to the renewed study of Schopenhauer’s book.  I had learned to recognise that my first essential task was to understand the first part, namely, the exposition and enlarging of Kant’s doctrine of the ideality of that world which has hitherto seemed to us so solidly founded in time and space, and I