Excerpt from Thomas Hardy, an Illustration of the Philosophy of Schopenhauer

After all, what could be more natural? Literature must reflect the interests of its time or lose its vitality. There are certainly eternal laws of beauty which cannot be evaded, there are just as certainly eternal laws of life which cannot be neglected, and the ever-insistent problem of art is to keep these two harnessed together, a task as difficult as that of driving the famous chariot Of Plato.

Some politics, some economics, some religious unrest, some philosophy must be reflected in the literature of to-day. If the abstruse and difficult philosophical systems of a Kant, a Fichte, and a Hegel could profoundly affect a Coleridge and an Emerson, how much more will the works of a Schopenhauer, a Nietzsche, a Von Hartmann affect the writing, and even the reading public! For the one person who can enjoy Kant's subtleties, there are twenty who can grasp Nietzsche's vagaries. Perhaps we have grown wiser, perhaps the philosophers speak more clearly, perhaps the great spirits are no longer with us. 'at any rate, we have learned to regard Mill and Huxley and Spencer and the three Germans and others of the hour as part of our necessary stock-in-trade for culture and for conversa tion. A few years ago one chatted over a cup of tea about William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, and Will to Believe with the same people with whom one had e'xchanged pleasantries about Hugh Wynne, or Mrs. Humphry Ward's latest intricate piece of womankind. Now we give one breath to The Stooping Lady, another to wireless telegraphy, and turn to meet Pragmatism at the corner; yes, even in popular University Extension lectures. Macaulay's history lay on my fine lady's dressing-table, Pope's Essay on Man was the talk of the fashionable world, William James is charged with writing novels and dubbing them Philosophies. When philos ophy grows as interesting as a novel, how can the novel, which is true to life, help reflecting philosophy? An utterly un philosophical literature to-day would be as much of an anomaly as an untheological Milton.

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