is natural to the classes who inherit their position, their
aims, their duties; who are bound by links of love, and
custom, and obedience, to the generations that have
gone before. But to the rebel and the revolutionary,
to the heterodox and the isolated, to the new workers
and thinkers, who have to stand for themselves--for
that vast multitude in the modern world which is con-
tinually drifting or being driven from its ancient moorings
--the historical can never be the one thing needful.
Schopenhauer gained an audience amongst those thus
disinherited (by their own or others' act) of their ancestral
goods, spiritual or natural, because he cast away all those
paraphernalia of philological and historical erudition
which the cultured scholarly mind is liable to rank
as the very heart of the matter. People felt that here
was one who spoke directly to their needs, and who was
no mere "scribe" expounding a dogma which he had
been hired to defend, and which stood on the borrowed
authority of its historical lineage. One may be sorry
that such a division between the scholar and the mass
of the populace should exist. But it is unfortunately
the fact that this interposition of historical form and
material is what cuts off a great majority of the world
from any direct access to truth. It is what renders nine
out of every ten sermons so inefficacious, because really
meaningless, to their hearers. That historical partition-
wall Schopenhauer does not entirely break through; but,
at least, he is less encompassed and hampered by it than
most of his rivals. Hence his success in quarters where
philosophy rarely makes its name heard, still less its
influence felt.

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