Schopenhauer, the last German who is to be reckoned with who is a European event like Goethe, Hegel, or Heinrich Heine, and who is not merely local, national), is for a psychologist a case of the first rank: I mean as a malicious though masterly attempt to enlist on the side of a general nihilistic depreciation of life, the very forces which are opposed to such a movement, that is to say, the great self affirming powers of the will to live, the exuberant forms of life itself.