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Having read Weininger and other philosophers, I was convinced that woman was the lowest and most unworthy thing in the scale of created things, a thing quite beneath the attention of a thinking man. I have said that I was scarce beyond thirty years of age. Even so, I found myself already old; and like any true philosopher, I resolved to make myself young.
The existence of anything is sufficient vindication of its fitness to exist to exist, mark you, as the average person unconsciously believes, not merely in present conditions, but in all conditions. It is their ignorance, of course, that makes them believe such rot their ignorance, which is nothing more nor less than the henidical mental process described by Weininger.
There were complete sets of Tolstoy, Turgenieff, and Gorky; of Cooper and Mark Twain; of Hugo, and Zola, and Sue; and of Flaubert, De Maupassant, and Paul de Koch. He glanced curiously at the pages of Metchnikoff, Weininger, and Schopenhauer, and wonderingly at those of Ellis, Lydston, Krafft-Ebbing, and Forel.
By far the most exhaustive analysis of Peer Gynt which has hitherto been given to the world is that published, as I send these pages to the press, by the executors of Otto Weininger, in his posthumous Ueber die letzte Dinge . This extraordinary young man, who shot himself on October 4, 1903, in the house at Vienna where Beethoven died, was only twenty-three years of age when he violently deprived philosophical literature in Europe of by far its most promising and remarkable recruit.
They think they think, and such thinkless creatures are the arbiters of the lives of the few who really think." He paused, overcome by the consciousness that he had been talking over Ruth's head. "I'm sure I don't know who this Weininger is," she retorted. "And you are so dreadfully general that I fail to follow you. What I was speaking of was the qualification of editors "
His extreme interest in the observation of ethical problems is not identified with any curiosity about what philosophical writers have said on similar subjects. Weininger has pointed out that Ibsen's philosophy is radically the same as that of Kant, yet there is no evidence that Ibsen had ever studied or had even turned over the pages of the Criticism of Pure Reason.
Yet assuredly the main thesis of the volume stands, and profoundly concerns every student of womanhood in any of its aspects. It will continue to stand when the brilliant foolishness of such writers as poor Weininger, the author of that evidently insane product "Sex and Character," is rightly estimated as interesting to the student of mental pathology alone.
If I confess myself unable to see in Peer Gynt all that Weininger saw in it, the fault is doubtless mine. But in Ibsen, unquestionably, time will create profundities, as it has in Shakespeare. Ibsen's four years in Italy were years of rest, of solitude, of calm. The attitude of Ibsen to Italy was totally distinct from that of other illustrious exiles of his day and generation.
And interwoven with the story, like an eerie breathing from the dark of woods at dusk and dawn, is the haunting presence of Iselin, la belle dame sans merci. Otto Weininger, the author of Sex and Character, said of Pan that it was "perhaps the most beautiful novel ever written." Weininger, of course, was an extremist, and few would accept his judgment without reserve.
"Human creatures," says George, borrowing from Weininger, "are never entirely male or entirely female; there are no men, there are no women, but only sexual majorities." Find me an obviously intelligent man, a man free from sentimentality and illusion, a man hard to deceive, a man of the first class, and I'll show you aman with a wide streak of woman in him.
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