Collected Essays and Reviews

But here begins the divergence. The aristocratic master has no hopes of the human or any other race as a whole, and his nirvana is restricted to the few who are ascetics and saints. In the witty words of Pfleiderer, the battle- cry with which he plunges into life’s fray and rallies his followers about him is the well-known “sauve qui peut.” The pupil, on the contrary, equipped with a Berlin education and imbued with notions of evolution and progress which to Schopenhauer (who wrote before Darwin) were profoundly distasteful, provides for a collective salvation, based on no less a performance than a unanimous resolve on the part of all sentient beings, penetrated at last through and through with tedium vitœ, and despair of gaining anything by fighting it out on the line of existence — to stop, and back out of it, when this world will cease at any rate.