Arthur Schopenhauer was a prominent German irrationalist philosopher. He earned the nickname 'the pessimistic philosopher' because he called the existing world 'the worst of all possible worlds.' For his time, he possessed a large library, containing 1,375 books, but he also argued that excessive reading was not beneficial but, on the contrary, weakened the mind, accustoming it to absorbing foreign ideas. He was fascinated by mysticism, highly valued the works of Immanuel Kant, and criticized Hegel, his contemporary. In 1819, Schopenhauer published his major work, The World as Will and Representation, in which he sought to establish a new and comprehensive doctrine opposed to the rationalism of the modern era. Although recognition came to Schopenhauer rather late, only in the 1850s, his works had a great influence on the development of philosophy, in particular on such thinkers as F. Nietzsche, L. Wittgenstein, Z. Freud, K. Jung, A. Einstein, and L. Tolstoy.