Thus the latter part of his life is occupied with careful rules for the preservation of his health, which was { 33} naturally robust. The contradiction is at once obvious between his actual mode of life and his own moral ideal, as set forth in his works. Some of his most eloquent writing is on the subject of holiness, attained through renunciation and self-denial. Poverty, chastity, and constant mortification of the will are the ways along which man must travel to gain the highest moral solution of life. Schopenhauer was perfectly conscious of this contradiction between his ideals and his own way of life. But, he says, it is just as little needful that a saint should be a philosopher, as that a philosopher should be a saint. In the same way, it is not necessary that a perfectly beautiful man should be a great sculptor, or that a great sculptor should himself be a beautiful man. It is a strange demand, that a moralist should teach no other virtue than that which he himself possesses.
After 1818, when _The World as Will and Idea_ appeared, he published nothing further until 1836. In that year, a small book called _On the Will in Nature_ appeared. It was described on the title-page as "a discussion of the corroborations which the philosophy of the author has, since its first appearance, received at the hands of empirical science." During these eighteen years, in which no new work of his was published, he had been collecting from all that he read, or saw, or heard, everything that could in any way be brought to bear as evidence towards the proof of his main theories and principles. Especially had he been on the alert with regard to scientific investigation, believing that his own sceptical generation would be most strongly influenced by anything that science could bring forward as confirmation of his metaphysical principles. Physics, he thought, had arrived at the point where it touches { 34} metaphysics. He was now confident that the time for his philosophy was ripening. But in spite of this confidence, the book met with no more recognition than had his previous works.
In 1838 he competed successfully for a prize offered by the Scientific Society of Drontheim, in Norway, for the best essay on the question "whether free-will could be proved from the evidence of consciousness." The subject could not have been more happily chosen to suit him. His essay won the prize, and he was elected a member of the Society. He obtained permission from the Society to publish his essay in Germany.