The six years he spent in Berlin were not in other respects happy ones. He was on bad terms with all his colleagues, and even in his private life he contrived to bring worry and legal trouble upon himself. In a small entrance hall, common ground to himself and another lodger, he, one day, found three women engaged in conversation. He demanded their withdrawal. Two complied, but one, a sempstress lodging in the same house, refused. Thereupon Schopenhauer, stick in hand, threw her forcibly twice out of the house. She fell, and on the following day brought her case before the court. After six months, the verdict went in Schopenhauer's favour, but an appeal was lodged, and, in his absence, the court inflicted a fine of twenty thalers, { 29} as compensation for injuries inflicted. Some months later the sempstress brought a further action. She claimed that her injuries were more serious than had first appeared, and that she was now permanently incapacitated for work. Schopenhauer was condemned to pay her sixty thalers a year as aliment, and five-sixths of the costs of the case. This sum he paid until the time of her death, twenty years later. On her death certificate he wrote, "obit anus, abit onus." The episode throws light on the character of the philosopher, with its marked strain of coarseness and ill-controlled passion.
Meanwhile, Schopenhauer continued to philosophise, still hoping against hope for the university professorship, which never came, but sustained by immense self-confidence in the importance of his message. He lived at Berlin in absolute seclusion. Social life had no attractions for him. He was a constant visitor to the theatre, the opera-house, and the concert-room, and at home his flute was a constant diversion. These were his chief distractions.
From time to time the thought of marriage had entered into his plans, but his habits of solitude were growing stronger, and his cynical views on women were obtaining an ever firmer hold on his mind. His nature was strongly sensual, and intermittent amorous experience is not the best school in which to foster the growth of fine feeling or noble thoughts on the relations of the sexes. It is not surprising to find, therefore, in his views on women the unmistakable stamp of his personal experience, a fatal blindness to all but the physical side of sex. The subject is not one that he passes over with indifference, for it amounts almost to an obsession with him. He left behind him notes on { 30} love and marriage, which were held by his literary executor to be unfit for publication, and these were burned accordingly.