boy had nearly forgotten German. In 1803 he was put in a boardingschool in England, where he
hated the cant and hypocrisy. Two years later, to please his father, he became a clerk in a
commercial house in Hamburg, but he loathed the prospect of a business career, and longed for a
literary and academic life. This was made possible by his father's death, probably by suicide; his
mother was willing that he should abandon commerce for school and university. It might be
supposed that he would, in consequence, have preferred her to his father, but the exact opposite
happened: he disliked his mother, and retained an affectionate memory of his father.
Schopenhauer's mother was a lady of literary aspirations, who settled in Weimar two weeks before
the battle of Jena. There she kept a literary salon, wrote books, and enjoyed friendships with men
of culture. She had little affection for her son, and a keen eye for his faults. She warned him
against bombast and empty pathos; he was annoyed by her philanderings. When he came of age he
inherited a modest competence; after this, he and his mother gradually found each other more and
more intolerable. His low opinion of women is no doubt due, at least in part, to his quarrels with
his mother.
Already at Hamburg he had come under the influence of the romantics, especially Tieck, Novalis,
and Hoffmann, from whom he learnt to admire Greece and to think ill of the Hebraic elements in
Christianity. Another romantic, Friedrich Schlegel, confirmed him in his admiration of Indian
philosophy. In the year in which he came of age ( 1809), he went to the university of Göttingen,
where he learnt to admire Kant. Two years later he went to Berlin, where he studied mainly
science; he heard Fichte lecture, but despised him. He remained indifferent throughout the
excitement of the war of liberation. In 1819 he became a Privatdozent at Berlin, and had the
conceit to put his lectures at the same hour as Hegel's; having failed to lure away Hegel's hearers,
he soon ceased to lecture. In the end he settled down to the life of an old bachelor in Dresden. He
kept a poodle named Atma (the world-soul), walked two hours every day, smoked a long pipe,
read the London Times, and employed correspondents to hunt up evidences of his fame. He was
anti-democratic, and hated the revolution of 1848; he believed in spiritualism and magic; in his
study he had a bust of Kant and a bronze Buddha. In his manner of life he tried to imitate Kant
except as regards early rising.