Life of Arthur Schopenhauer Author:William Wallace Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE epoch at which Schopenhauer began to seek an entrance through scholarship into the close demesnes of the higher education was a turning-point... more » in philological progress. The old Latin training of the seventeenth century, which set forth as its chief aim the capacity of writing an elegant Latinity, had been considerably discredited by the utilitarian and practical tendencies of the eighteenth. A movement had been vigorously started, under the name of Philanthropinism, to make the methods of teaching more easy and natural, and to give more weight to the bearing of school-lessons on the pursuits of adult life. In extreme forms Philan- thropinism probably sank into a vulgar devotion to palpable results, and an undue scorn of more ideal study; but in many ways it was a reasonable protest against a barren service to niceties of grammar, and against a course of classes fitted only to produce schoolmasters. But this divergence from the traditions of a liberal and scholarly instruction led to a corresponding reaction. Classical studies began a new and freer flight. Their champions took the ground that the direct insight into the ideas of the Grfeco-Roman world, which couldonly be fully enjoyed by those who were fully masters of the original tongues, was an inestimable instrument in working out that " education into humanity " which was the great desideratum for the higher life in the world of to-day. A great wave of Greek enthusiasm set in : almost it seemed intoxication. The modern world had disappointed even the most hopeful. Few of those who had, in 1789, greeted the revolt of France against her old monarchy, as if the sun of liberty had at length arisen, still retained, under Napoleon, their generous faith in the Revolution. And the collapse of the old kingdom of F...« less