“The character or will,” says Schopenhauer, “is inherited from the father; the intellect from the mother.”2 The mother had intellect—she became one of the most popular novelists of her day—but she had temperament and temper too. She had been unhappy with her prosaic husband; and when he died she took to free love, and moved to Weimar as the fittest climate for that sort of life. Arthur Schopenhauer reacted to this as Hamlet to his mother’s re-marriage; and his quarrels with his mother taught him a large part of those half-truths about women with which he was to reason his philosophy.
