Page:Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field.djvu/85

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.

the philosopher, particularly his "Fragments of Philosophy" and his "Pandectes et Spicilegia"; the latter are still in manuscript or, at least, were in manuscript in the early nineties.

If Mark were alive to-day, how happy he would be at the discovery I made quite recently in an old chest of drawers. I had seen a movie play, showing the extravagant amounts of money one can earn by selling old manuscripts—including the rejection slips—and I started cleaning up an old piece of furniture wanted for less ideal purposes. And there I found the long lost Schopenhauer MS. According to the notes, this manuscript belonged to a parcel of handwritten essays willed by the philosopher to the Royal Library at Berlin and dealing with themes and matters that Schopenhauer hoped to work out and improve upon by and by. But death overtook him before he could exploit the problem in hand. Here follows the MS. Mark was not allowed to see:

Schopenhauer's Tetragamy.
The Philosopher s Attempt to reform social
conditions due to Monogamy.

Neither woman's frailty nor man's egoism should be held responsible for those frequent miscarriages of domestic happiness encountered in married life. Nature itself is to blame. If the state of monogamy, as some of the philosophers will have it, is the

81