Arthur spent two years as a merchant in honor of his dead father, and because of his own doubts about being too old to start a life of a scholar. Most of his prior education was practical merchant training and he had some trouble with learning Latin, which was a prerequisite for any academic career. His mother moved, with her daughter Adele, to Weimarthen the centre of German literatureto enjoy social life among writers and artists. Arthur and his mother were not on good terms. In one letter to him she wrote: "You are unbearable and burdensome, and very hard to live with; all your good qualities are overshadowed by your conceit, and made useless to the world simply because you cannot restrain your propensity to pick holes in other people." Arthur left his mother, and they never met again before she died 24 years later. Some negative opinions of the later philosopher about women may be rooted in his troubled relationship with his mother.