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Title: Schopenhauer

Author: Margrieta Beer

Release date: October 18, 2014 [eBook #47136]
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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
SCHOPENHAUER ***

Schopenhauer

SCHOPENHAUER

BY MARGRIETA BEER, M.A.

LONDON: T. C. & E. C. JACK
67 LONG ACRE, W.C., AND EDINBURGH
NEW YORK: DODGE PUBLISHING CO.

CONTENTS
CHAP.

INTRODUCTION
I. SCHOPENHAUER'S LIFE
II. PESSIMISM
III. ART
IV. VIRTUE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

INTRODUCTION

Schopenhauer differs from most other philosophers in that he has
influenced not only the development of the history of thought, the course
along which modern philosophy has proceeded, but in that his views have
been welcomed as an inspiration, accepted almost in the spirit of a religious
faith by workers in quite other departments of life.

No philosopher has so directly touched and influenced the great art
movements of modern times. It is now nearly one hundred years since the
publication of his greatest work, and his philosophy is a more potent and
vitalising force to-day than in his own lifetime. It has been a source of
inspiration to artists and has directly stimulated their creative activity,
probably more than any other abstract system has ever done.

Poetry has always been influenced subtly by philosophy. Spenser and
Shelley are imbued through and through with the doctrines of Plato. Goethe
wrote some of his finest work under the spell of Spinoza, and some of
Wordsworth's deepest experiences were interpreted to him through the ideas
of Kant. It is to all artists, but especially to musicians, that Schopenhauer
makes his most intimate appeal. For in his system music plays a strangely
important part, above and apart from all the other arts. In analysing its
spiritual character, he endows it with mystic significance. One famous
instance of this influence is that of Wagner. His acquaintance with
Schopenhauer's philosophy marked a turning-point in his artistic life. It
gave a tremendous stimulus to his musical productivity, and while under its
influence he composed his greatest works.

Schopenhauer's system expresses, according to his own statement, only a
single thought, viewed in different aspects. He considers it from the

metaphysical, æsthetic, and ethical points of view. This fundamental
thought, which lies at the root of his entire philosophy, is concerned with
the significance of the will. The will alone gives the key to the
understanding of man's existence. Every force in nature is to be regarded as
will, and the inner reality of the universe is to be found only in will.

While it is especially to those who are concerned with the problems
arising out of the function and significance of art that Schopenhauer offers
such fruitful and fascinating suggestions, the other aspects of his system
offer solutions in the sphere of ethics and metaphysics of almost equally
vital importance. His insistence on the significance of instinct and intuition
in all the lower and higher forms of life is of great importance in the history
of philosophy. It is an aspect of the subject which until later times had been
strangely neglected. This prominence which is given to instinct and
intuition, is connected directly with his philosophy of the will.

Schopenhauer, unlike most philosophers, has always been read and
appreciated by the general reader and student of life, as distinguished from
the specialised student of philosophy. His fundamental attitude towards
philosophy explains this to a great extent. Notwithstanding his marked
leaning towards mysticism, he brought philosophy down to earth, and into
relation with, the actual facts of life. He exchanged abstractions for
realities. Philosophy had always been far too much concerned, he
maintained, with abstract conceptions, and the philosopher had tended too
exclusively to be a mere man of books and learning. The true philosopher,
on the contrary, should be a guide to fine living as well as to high thinking.

Philosophy should express the real life of things. But the deepest things
in life are not known by way of the intellect, but are lived and felt. The
profoundest truths of life we know intuitively and directly, with a deeper
certainty than the understanding can give.

That Schopenhauer has a wider public than have most philosophers is
due partly to his style. He writes in language so singularly clear and lucid,
that it can be followed easily by the general reader, not specially trained in a
technical philosophical vocabulary. Of all German philosophers he is the
greatest from a literary point of view. "The true philosopher," he writes,
"will always seek after light and clearness, and will endeavour to resemble

a Swiss lake, which through its peacefulness is able to unite great depth
with great clearness, the depth revealing itself precisely by the clearness,
rather than a turbid, impetuous mountain torrent." Philosophers have not
always given much heed to this counsel of perfection. Obscurity of
expression is merely the cloak in which men seek to hide their poverty of
thought and triteness of mind. "Everyone," says Schopenhauer, "who
possesses a beautiful and rich mind will always express himself in the most
natural, direct, and simple way, concerned to communicate his thoughts to
others and thus relieve the loneliness that he must feel in such a world as
this."

Schopenhauer is a temperamental pessimist. In words of glowing and
passionate eloquence he sets out to prove that all life is essentially sorrow.
From his earliest days he had been abnormally sensitive to the misery that
lies beneath the surface of life. Pain is essential to life and cannot be
evaded. If it can find entrance in no other form, then it comes in the sad,
grey garments of tedium and ennui.

The purest joy in life is that which lifts us out of our daily existence, and
transforms us into disinterested spectators of it. This "divine release from
the common ways of men" can only be found through art. But even this
release, which is accessible only to the few, increases the capacity for
suffering.

The final and only permanent solution of life is to be found in the life of
the saint. True morality passes through virtue, which is rooted in sympathy,
into asceticism. Art gives a marvellous consolation in life, but renunciation
and self-surrender offer a complete release from the terrors and evils of
existence. The veil of Mâyâ—the web of illusion—is lifted from man's
eyes. He now shudders at the pleasures which recognise the assertion of
life, and attains to the state of voluntary renunciation, resignation, and true
indifference. Buddhism, Schopenhauer maintained, comes nearest of all
religions to expressing this truth. It is here that he shows how profoundly
Indian philosophy and religion had influenced him.

Throughout his life Schopenhauer was aggressively hostile towards all
contemporary philosophers. To some extent, no doubt, his own failure to
obtain academic recognition embittered him. But partly his attitude may be

explained by the complete difference of method between them.
Schopenhauer cares nothing at all about method. To Hegel and his
contemporaries method was all-important. The historical method was the
pathway which was followed with most enthusiasm at the time. It is
especially for the historical method that Schopenhauer has the frankest
contempt. Hegel and others were attempting to interpret present reality
through history, seeking to show that through the slow process of history,
unfolding itself in time, are revealed the organic principles which underlie
the whole of life. Schopenhauer attaches practically no value to history as a
highroad for philosophical inquiry. This way, he says, lie merely the dry
bones of archæology and antiquarianism. To examine things historically is
to look along a horizontal line. To think philosophically is to look along a
vertical line. The latter is the rational and the more profound point of view.
"What history narrates is in fact only the long, heavy, and confused dream
of humanity." It is our inmost consciousness which is the real concern of the
philosopher. "The true philosophy of history," he says, "consists in the
insight into the causes of all these endless changes and their confusion. We
have always before us the same even, unchanging nature, which to-day acts
in the same way as yesterday. Thus it ought to recognise the identical in all
events, in ancient as in modern times, in the East as in the West, and in spite
of all difference in special circumstances, of costume and of custom, to see
everywhere the same humanity. If one has read Herodotus, then in a
philosophical regard one has read enough history. For everything is already
there that makes up the subsequent history of the world."

That which is significant in itself, not in its relations, is to be found far
more profoundly and distinctly in poetry than in history. There is, therefore,
far more real, inner truth in poetry than in history. Aristotle held the same
view, maintaining that poetry reveals a higher truth than history, for it
strives to express the universal. "Poetry," he says, "is a more philosophical,
and a higher thing than history."

In Schopenhauer's view, the true philosopher is the genius. His
penetrative imagination will see farther and deeper than the learning of the
mere scholar. The genius is a clear mirror of the inner nature of the
universe. To him knowledge is the sun which reveals the world. His work
may be regarded as an inspiration, as an interpretation of the spirit of beauty

in art. He has been endowed by nature with a special faculty of inner vision,
and uses his power to open the eyes of ordinary men. It is the genius who
knows the inner nature of things, just as in Plato true philosophers are
defined as "the lovers of the vision of truth, who are able to distinguish the
idea from the objects which participate in the idea, and whose eyes are ever
directed towards fixed and immutable principles." It is the genius, says
Schopenhauer, who interprets his vision to the rest of mankind. He enables
us to see the world through his eyes.

There was a wide difference, too, between Schopenhauer and other
contemporary philosophers, in their attitude towards religion.
Schopenhauer's freedom from academic fetters enabled him to steer an
independent way. The German university professor was almost always
dominated by the need for reconciling his philosophical theories with a
theological creed. At times to square accounts between the two involved
considerable ingenuity, as in the case of Kant. To Schopenhauer, to whom
orthodox religion had always been a mere form, such attempts savoured of
hypocrisy. Hence he always speaks slightingly of "philosophy-professors,"
and throughout his writings he makes bitter attacks upon them. Hegel's
work is described as three-fourths utter absurdity, and one quarter as
paradox, and he himself alluded to as "that intellectual Caliban." Plato's
contempt for the sophists stands on very much the same plane of thought.

In spite of this attitude there is much in Schopenhauer's system, which is
closely akin to Christianity on its mystical side. In his ethical theory he
shows extraordinary points of agreement with the mediæval mystics.
Materialism was utterly alien to his spirit. Materialists, he said, possess
neither humanities nor culture, and their point of view filled him with the
Olympian laughter of the gods. He always maintained that his theory of
pessimism was more truly Christian, and more closely in accord with the
spirit of primitive Christianity than the shallow optimism which crept into
the later developments of that system. Its ascetic spirit he considered the
kernel of Christianity. Protestantism represented for him a falling away
from the earlier and purer form, and a transition to shallow rationalism.

His thought was much influenced by ancient Indian philosophy, and
especially by Buddhism. The Upanishads had been published in Germany

in 1801 in a Latin translation from a Persian version of the Sanscrit original.
In these treatises are set forth the general system of mystical pantheism,
which grew out of the more theosophic elements of the Vedas. In reading
them Schopenhauer immediately acknowledged a kindred spirit. In
speaking of this work he says, "How does everyone who by diligent reading
has familiarised himself with this incomparable book, feel himself stirred to
the innermost by that spirit. The mind is here washed clean of all its early
ingrafted superstition, and all philosophy servile to that superstition. It is the
most profitable and the most elevating reading which is possible in the
world. It has been the consolation of my life, and will be the consolation of
my death."

CHAPTER I

SCHOPENHAUER'S LIFE

Arthur Schopenhauer led the outwardly uneventful life of a scholar and a
thinker, taking no part in public affairs. The great movements in European
history, through which he lived, left him untroubled and unmoved in his
scholar's seclusion. There is little therefore to chronicle with regard to the
outer history of his life. It is the more easy to escape the criticism of
Schopenhauer himself, who says that "those who, instead of studying the
thoughts of a philosopher, make themselves acquainted with his life and
history, are like people who instead of occupying themselves with a picture,
are rather occupied with its frame, reflecting on the taste of its carving and
the nature of its gilding."

The little that there is to tell is, however, of great significance with
regard to the development of his thought. For of no philosopher can it be
more truly said than of Schopenhauer, that his thought is the expression of
his character.

Schopenhauer was born at Dantzig on February 22, 1788. He traced his
descent through both parents to Dutch ancestors. The family had settled at
Dantzig in the course of commerce. For several generations the head of the
family had combined the career of a merchant with landed pursuits.
Schopenhauer's great-grandfather, Andreas Schopenhauer, leased one of the
large farms belonging to the municipality, while following the business of a
merchant. His son Andreas acquired property near Dantzig, and there the
father of the philosopher, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, was born. Some
mental weakness seems to have been inherited. The eldest son of Andreas
was an imbecile from his youth, and the other children, with the exception
of Schopenhauer's father, all had some curious mental or moral twist.
Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, however, was a man of strong intelligence
and character. He followed a merchant's career with great success, raising
his firm to the first position in the town. He was a disciple of the school of
Voltaire, read French and English literature, and had a keen admiration for
English life and institutions. His wife, Johanna, belonged, too, to one of the
leading families of Dantzig. She had been educated on broader lines than
was usual for girls at the time, and had a love for art and letters which
extended her interests beyond the domestic concerns of her home. Later on,
during her widowhood, these were to find a wider field and opportunity,
and she became a well-known authoress in the Germany of her day. She
married in 1785, at the age of eighteen, being twenty years younger than her
husband. The marriage was an unhappy one, owing to differences of
temperament. There were two children of the marriage. They suffered for
the incompatibilities of their parents. Both were burdened with abnormally
strong desires for the pleasures of life, together with an extraordinary
capacity for suffering.

Arthur, the future philosopher, was the first child of the marriage. He
was given the name of Arthur to satisfy the cosmopolitanism of his father,
the name being spelt alike in several languages. His earliest years were
spent at the country house near Dantzig, or at the farm, between the sea and
the pine-woods, which had been rented many years before by his great-
grandfather.

In 1793, when Schopenhauer was five years old, the family migrated to
Hamburg. The "free city" of Dantzig, which had a constitution of its own,

was annexed by Prussia in 1793, at the second partition of Poland, and
Heinrich Schopenhauer was too stern a republican to adapt himself to the
new rule. He carried on his business in Hamburg for the next twelve years,
but never became a naturalised citizen.

He had resolved that his son should follow the family career of a
merchant, and his education was planned accordingly on those lines. He
was taken to France in 1797, and left at Havre for two years. For the next
three years he attended a private school at Hamburg. During this time,
discontent with his father's plans for his future was gradually ripening
within him. To reconcile him, he was promised a trip to France and
England, on the condition that he promised to give up his own desires and
ambitions, and to be loyal to his father's wishes. The prospect of the journey
was too alluring, and he gave the required promise. After six weeks had
been spent in London, his parents left him at a boarding-school at
Wimbledon. In letters to his mother, he complains of the mechanical
instruction, the dreary Sunday services, and the tedious routine of the
school. She, in reply, warns him not to give way to bombast and empty
pathos.

He became proficient in English, and always held English character and
intelligence in admiration, although he was impressed by the prevalent
hypocrisy and the oppressive pietism of the time. He was busy already
recording his impressions, describing characteristically the feelings and
ideas awakened in him rather than the actual facts and events. The travellers
returned through France, from Geneva to Vienna, and thence to Berlin.

For about four months Schopenhauer now worked in a Dantzig office,
trying to acquire the rudiments of a business training. When almost
seventeen, he entered the employment of a firm in Hamburg. He himself
has recorded that there never was a worse clerk in a merchant's office. In his
leisure, and during office hours whenever possible, he was reading
voraciously.

In 1805 his father died, whether by accident or by his own hand remains
uncertain. For two years longer Schopenhauer stuck to his hated task, out of
loyalty to his father, and the promise made him some years earlier. But at
last he could stifle his ambitions and yearnings towards a purely intellectual

life no longer, and he obtained his mother's consent to leave his office, and
to begin preparation for a learned career.

His mother meanwhile, with her daughter Adèle, had left Hamburg and
settled at Weimar, at that time the intellectual centre of Germany. Goethe
was here the sun round which the lesser lights of the artistic and intellectual
world revolved. At the age of forty, Johanna Schopenhauer had entered on a
new life, and was finding scope and free development for untried
capabilities. She played a prominent part in the social life of the place, and
her receptions were remarkable for the circle she gathered round her.
Goethe himself was a frequent visitor there. She also took part in the
theatrical performances, which were so conspicuous a feature of the life at
Weimar. With help and encouragement from Fernow, a distinguished
scholar and art critic, she began to write, and published with considerable
popular success travel sketches, art biographies, and novels. Her daughter,
in describing their life at Weimar, tells how her mother experienced ever
fresh delight in intercourse with the famous men living there. "She was
liked, her society was agreeable. Her pleasing manners made her house a
centre of intellectual activity, where everyone felt at home, and freely
contributed the best he had to bring." Besides Goethe, Schlegel, Grimm,
Wieland and others were frequent guests under her roof. Freed from his
hated bondage, Schopenhauer now left Hamburg and entered the
gymnasium, or grammar school, at Gotha, but a lampoon on one of the
masters was so resented that he was obliged to leave. He then came to
Weimar, at his mother's suggestion, and worked at classics in the house of a
well-known scholar, who had a real enthusiasm for all things Greek.
Something of his spirit he communicated to his pupil, and the passion for
Greek art and thought grew into a moulding principle in Schopenhauer's
views of life and religion. At the same time that he was entering into the
spirit of classical literature, he was cultivating his musical ability, and thus
feeling his way towards a full and intense understanding of the art, which
entered later with such significance into the development of his philosophy.
He was striving to realise an ideal of the fullest and most complete culture,
in which not only the life of thought, but also the life of art should find
consummate satisfaction.

The estrangement between his mother and himself began to widen now
that they were thrown constantly together. By arrangement, he dined daily
with her, and came to her receptions. But Schopenhauer was too
uncontrolled in his temper, and too uncompromising in his egoism to make
an agreeable companion. His mother, driven to write to him, asserts that his
constant grumbling, gloomy looks, and intolerant dogmatism depress her. It
is necessary to her happiness to know that he is happy, but not necessary
that she should be a witness to it. Therefore, if they are to agree they must
consent to live apart. Both mother and son were bent on self-development,
and in character were too dissimilar to understand each other. Schopenhauer
was jealous, uncontrolled in his moods, and boorish in his manners. That
all-consuming egoism, which all his life spoiled his relations with everyone
with whom he came in contact, made a congenial family life impossible. He
resented his mother's freedom and independence, and insulted her friends.
In a way that is very characteristic of him, he generalises from his own
personal experience, and in his views on women we find reflected all the
bitterness which had grown round the relations between himself and his
mother.

In 1809 he attained his majority, and received his share of his father's
fortune, amounting to about £150 a year. He was now independent, and
could pursue the career he had marked out for himself. He valued all his life
the liberty which this competency secured him. A draft dedication, intended
for the second edition of The World as Will and Idea, was addressed "to the
manes of my father. Noble, beneficent spirit! to whom I owe everything that
I am.... As thou didst bring into the world a son such as I am, thou didst also
make provision that in a world like this, such a son should be able to subsist
and to develop himself.... In my mind the tendency to its only proper
vocation was too decidedly implanted to let me do violence to my nature,
and so to subjugate it that, recking nought of existence in general, and
active only for my personal existence, it should find its sole task in
procuring daily bread.... Thou seemest to have foreseen that thy son, thou
proud republican, could not possess the talent to compete in cringing before
ministers and councillors, Mæcenases, and their advisers, basely to beg for
the hard-earned piece of bread, or to flatter self-conceited
commonplaceness, and humbly join himself to the eulogistic retinue of
bungling charlatans.... That I could expand the forces nature gave me and

apply them to their destined purpose, that I could follow my natural instinct
and think and work for beings without number, while no one does anything
for me, for that I thank thee, my father, thank thy activity, prudence, thrift,
and provision for the future."

In 1809 he entered the University of Göttingen as a student of medicine.
In his second year he changed his course to philosophy. Wieland, the poet,
on the occasion of a visit from Schopenhauer, tried to dissuade him from
philosophy as a career. The reply was, "Life is a ticklish business. I have
decided to spend it in reflecting on it."

In 1811 Schopenhauer left Göttingen, and entered the University of
Berlin. Here, too, he gave special attention to natural science. Throughout
his notebooks are scattered critical remarks on his teachers and their
lectures. Fichte especially was a butt for his sarcasms. Against a statement
of Schleiermacher's, that "No man can be a philosopher without being
religious," he writes, "No man who is religious takes to philosophy: he does
not need it."

The Napoleonic wars were at this time disorganising the whole of
Europe. Berlin was in the hands of a French garrison. But after the
disastrous campaign of Napoleon in Russia, the entire nation rose against
the invader. University classes were broken up. Fichte stayed behind to
nurse the wounded, and died next year at his post. Schopenhauer, a prey to
fears, which tormented him all his life, fled for safety to Dresden. He settled
finally at Rudolstadt, and wrote there an essay, to qualify for the degree of
doctor of philosophy at Jena. This he obtained, and his essay was published
as A Philosophical Treatise on the Four-fold Root of the Principle of
Sufficient Reason. This work he describes in his later books as a preliminary
part of his system, which must be studied if the remainder is to be
understood. It is written entirely under the influence of Kant. The title refers
to the four branches of knowledge: physical science, mathematics, logic,
and ethics.

After the publication of his book, Schopenhauer returned to Weimar, and
stayed for a few months with his mother. The experiment resulted in
complete estrangement. He was overbearing and dogmatic, insulting his
mother's friends, and censorious towards herself. She wrote to him again, to

avoid an unpleasant personal interview, and complained of his
contemptuous bearing and peremptory manner. He left Weimar and never
saw his mother again, although she lived for twenty-four years after their
separation. It is a curious commentary on his relations to his parents, that
his highest praise of his father lay in the fact that he had, by his thrift, left
his son an adequate income; and that his main censure on his mother is that
she spends her money too negligently.

His visits to his mother at Weimar were of considerable importance in
the subsequent development of his thought, for it was there that he made the
acquaintance, not only of Goethe, who influenced him profoundly for a
time, but also of F. Mayer, the orientalist, who directed his attention to the
philosophical literature of ancient India. This literature left a permanent
mark upon his mind.

For the next four years he lived at Dresden. In 1816 he published an
essay On Vision and Colours, which has reference to the controversy which
Goethe was waging on the theory of light. Schopenhauer's theory is
fantastic. It is not submitted to experimental evidence, and rests, as he
admits, on "intuitive" certainty.

This early work is hardly in the direct line of the development of
Schopenhauer's thought. It is really a deviation, for which Goethe's all-
compelling influence is responsible. Goethe was at first inclined to regard
Schopenhauer as an opponent, for the essay is rather a transformation of
Goethe's theory than an expansion of it.

His residence at Dresden was the best he could have chosen from the
point of view of his own system of philosophy. Here he could study better
than in almost any other town of Europe the works of art, in which he was
to see a revelation of the meaning of life. The art collections of the town are
among the most famous in Europe, and the music, both operatic and
orchestral, was then, as now, of the highest quality. In this home of art,
Schopenhauer's great system was now taking shape.

During his daily walks along the banks of the Elbe, he was thinking out
his theories, making notes occasionally in a note-book, and then striding on
again with the rapid pace by which he was recognised even as an old man.

More and more strongly it was borne in upon him that "inward discord is
the very law of human nature." All his life his thoughts had struck the note
of genuine pessimism. He was always in revolt against the pain and misery
that lie hidden beneath the surface of life. That this pessimistic bias was
fundamentally one of temperament, there can be no doubt. In letters to him
from his mother, we find her constantly urging him, even as a child, to look
upon the brighter side of things. In a letter written to him in 1806, she
writes, "I could tell you things that would make your hair stand on end, but
I refrain, for I know how you love to brood over human misery in any
case."

Even in happiness and success he recognised illusion. Everywhere in
nature we see strife and conflict. One species preys upon another. The "will
to live" necessarily expresses itself as a struggle.

Hegel at this time reigned supreme in the kingdom of philosophy. It was
hardly possible to escape his influence. Schopenhauer, in striving to give
expression to a system which would lay bare the real inner nature of our life
and destiny, was at the same time protesting passionately against the
Hegelian view. It was as a protest against the all-powerful idealism of this
philosophy that his system was directed in the first place. He represents a
reaction against the absorption of everything in reason. As opposed to this
view, Schopenhauer urged the priority of the will and the feelings as the
fundamental factors in determining the mental life.

The will is the reality behind all life. The intellect is merely a tool in the
service of the will. It is impossible to find in reason a complete knowledge
of the essence of the world. A merely intellectual philosophy of life is
bound to be thin and hollow, and we should aim rather at a clear and direct
insight into life.

Now the will, into which every form of life can be resolved, is the source
of all human misery and unhappiness. The only way in which men can free
themselves from the bondage of the will, and throw off its yoke, is by
looking upon beauty. It is in art that eternal truth is revealed with a
directness and certainty to which science never attains. This theory is
connected with the Platonic theory of Ideas. The real inner nature of things,
the Ideas in the Platonic sense, are revealed in creative and imaginative art.

The faculty of vision, which enables men to divine this reality behind
appearances, and to interpret it to others, is the gift of the artistic genius. He
"understands the half-uttered speech of nature, and articulates clearly what
she only stammered forth." The man of genius produces works of art by
intuitive insight. He sees through the outer shell to the inner significance
that lies at the heart of things. Genius is the faculty of renouncing entirely
one's own personality for the time being, so as to become clear vision of the
world, free of subjectivity. The genius must have imagination, above all
things, in order to see in things not that which nature has actually made, but
that which she endeavoured to make, but could not.

Art, however, does not deliver us permanently from life, but only for
moments. It is therefore not a path out of life, but only an occasional
consolation in life.

It is the saint, who through the surrender of all willing, through the
intentional mortification of his own desires, attains to true resignation.
Happiness and unhappiness become then a matter of indifference, and the
spell of the illusion, which held us chained in the bonds of this world, is
broken for ever.

These were the views which found expression in Schopenhauer's great
work, The World as Will and Idea, which was finished in 1818. He found a
publisher in Brockhaus of Leipsic. While the work was going through the
press, he attacked his publisher with such violent rudeness, that Brockhaus
wrote declining all further correspondence with one "whose letters in their
supreme coarseness and rusticity savour more of the cabman than of the
philosopher."

The work appeared when Schopenhauer was thirty years of age, an
extraordinarily early date at which to produce so complete and elaborate a
system of philosophy. In this work the outlines of his whole system are
permanently fixed. The whole contains, he says, but a single thought. That
thought exhibits itself as metaphysics, æsthetics, and ethics. He wrote later
many essays and supplements, but these all go towards confirmation and
expansion of his earlier work. For the rest of his life he was repeating his
original theories, with infinite variation in expression. This is entirely in
accord with his own theory of age. At thirty, he maintained, the intellectual

and moral endowment has reached its highest development. All that is done
later is to vary and expand the main principles already laid down.

His book fell still-born from the press. Twenty years later he succeeded
in getting his publishers to undertake a second edition, but this too received
but scant recognition. Schopenhauer had built great hopes on his work, and
his disappointment was bitter when no word of notice greeted its
appearance. "I dread silence about my system, as a burnt child dreads the
fire," he wrote on one occasion. When bringing his manuscript to the notice
of the publisher, he had written that the work "would hereafter be the source
of a hundred other books." He confided to a disciple that upon completing
the work, he had felt so convinced that he had solved the enigma of the
world, that he had thought of having his signet-ring carved with the image
of the sphinx throwing herself down the abyss. "My philosophy," he wrote,
"is the real solution of the enigma of the world. In this sense it may be
called a revelation."

Before the book appeared, Schopenhauer travelled to Italy. He first spent
some weeks in Venice, where Byron was living at the time. The two,
however, did not meet. He then set out for Rome, by way of Bologna and
Florence, and there he spent the winter. His time was spent mostly in the art
collections, and in the study of Italian. He kept, as he always did in
travelling, a diary, recording not so much his observations on things seen, as
his moods and moralisings on them.

In May of the following year, as he was returning home, he received the
news of the bankruptcy of the Dantzig house in which almost the entire
means of his mother and his sister were invested. He himself had a far
smaller amount at stake. The business arrangements connected with the
winding-up of the firm, which his mother accepted, were not to
Schopenhauer's taste, and the estrangement between himself and his
relatives now became permanent. He showed his usual promptness to
suspect evil, and his angry accusations were so bitter, that a silence of
eleven years fell between himself and his mother and sister. His struggle
with the firm in question lasted for two years. Schopenhauer came off
triumphant financially, his capital with interest being paid in full, whereas
the other creditors obtained only thirty per cent.

His great work having now been launched in the philosophical world,
Schopenhauer turned his thoughts to the chances of an academic
appointment. After many inquiries he decided finally on Berlin, and made
an application. Specimen copies of his published works were sent in, and a
private trial lecture delivered. Here in 1820 he began his career as assistant
lecturer, and a course of lectures was announced, of six hours a week, on
philosophy in general. He chose as his lecture hour the very time at which
Hegel delivered his principal course, thinking to enter into direct
competition with him, and carry off his students. His hopes, however,
misled him. The students were not to be beguiled away from the omnipotent
Hegel, and Schopenhauer's course was a complete failure. He was not a
good lecturer, and the course fell through before the end of the term. The
lectures were never again delivered.

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,
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 love and marriage, which were held by his literary
executor to be unfit for publication, and these were burned accordingly.

It was during these years at Berlin, embittered by the lack of recognition
of his philosophical work, and by his failure in the academic world, that his
attacks on university professors grew so virulent. He attributed his failure in
both respects to conspiracy on the part of those in power. His attacks on
Hegel grew ever fiercer.

In 1829 he was anxious to undertake a translation into English of Kant's
chief works. He wrote to the publishers, urging his claims, saying "a
century may pass before there shall again meet in the same head so much
Kantian philosophy with so much English, as happen to dwell together in
mine." The proposal came to nothing, and Kant's Critique had to wait for
nearly ten years longer before it appeared in an English form.

In 1831 the cholera broke out in Berlin, and Schopenhauer immediately
took to flight. Hegel was one of the victims of this outbreak. In one of his
later works, Schopenhauer describes how he had been moved to leave
Berlin, on the entry of the cholera, by means of a dream. He had dreamed of
a little schoolfellow and playmate, who died in childhood, "It may have
been," he says, "of hypothetical truth, a warning in short, that if I had
remained, I should have died of the cholera. Immediately after my arrival in
Frankfurt, I was the subject of a perfectly distinct apparition, as I believe, of
my parents, and signifying that I should survive my mother, who was still
alive; my father, already deceased, carried a light in his hand." This is

significant, as showing Schopenhauer's belief in the supernatural, and in
mystical influences.

After leaving Berlin, Schopenhauer settled at Frankfurt, and with the
exception of one year, which was spent at Mannheim, he lived there until
his death twenty-seven years later. For twenty years after coming to
Frankfurt he lived in entire isolation. Now and again, at rare intervals, an
article from his pen appeared, but this is the only sign of life. We hear
nothing of his personal life during this period. Friends he seems to have had
none, and all personal intercourse with acquaintances invariably came to an
abrupt end, owing to his intolerant attitude towards those who dared to
disagree with any of his views.

Only when he reaches the verge of old age do we once again have some
record of him. This latter part of his life was spent with unvaried regularity.
His chief occupation and solace is philosophy. His daily routine was
mapped out, according to a regular plan, which hardly varied from day to
day. He worked during the forenoon for three or four hours. At noon he
enjoyed half an hour's relaxation on the flute. He dined daily at a hotel.
After an hour's rest, the afternoon was given up to lighter literature. His
favourite authors, among poets, were Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Calderon.
The study of the great classical writers was all his life his greatest delight.
The degradation in style of contemporary literature, which he constantly
bemoaned, he held to be due largely to the neglect of classical literature.
"Without Latin," he wrote, "a man must be content to be counted amongst
the vulgar." He regretted the disuse of the Latin language as a means of
communication between scholars. Apart altogether from the educational
value of the classics, he thought no other literature afforded the same
refreshment and enjoyment for the mind. To take one of the classics in one's
hand, even for half an hour, is to feel refreshed, purified, elevated, and
strengthened, exactly as if one had drunk from a fresh rock spring.

In the afternoon, whatever the weather, Schopenhauer took his daily
walk, together with his dog, his invariable companion. The two were well-
known figures in Frankfurt, as they took their customary exercise together.
Schopenhauer's devotion to his dog was boundless. For the animal world
altogether he had a special tenderness, pitying animals as the tortured souls

of the earth, and holding that in all essentials they are the same as man. He
condemned vivisection, on the ground that animals have rights.

For two hours he took his customary walk, at a rapid pace, in accordance
with his theory that quick movement is essential to health. Then he visited
the reading-room of the town, never omitting to look through the Times.
The evening was spent frequently at the theatre, or in the concert-room. In
his later years, his growing deafness robbed him of much of the pleasure
which he had always won from music. On returning home, he read for an
hour, and then retired to rest. All his life he was afraid of robbers, and took
extraordinary precautions against them. He slept invariably with loaded
weapons by his bedside, and his valuables were hidden away with great
ingenuity in various corners of his rooms. He believed that a thinker needed
more than the ordinary amount of sleep to recuperate after the day's labours.
His rule of life was modelled on that of Kant, but of Kant's early rising he
strongly disapproved, believing it to be a reckless waste of vital energy.

Thus the latter part of his life is occupied with careful rules for the
preservation of his health, which was 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 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.

Meanwhile he was competing for another prize, offered by the Royal
Danish Academy of the Sciences, at Copenhagen, on the subject of the
sources or the basis of morality. He was confident of success, and wrote to
the Academy asking that the award might be speedily made public, as he
proposed to publish his essay along with the one which had been successful
in Norway. His confidence was premature, for when the Danish Academy
made known its decision, it announced that Schopenhauer's essay was the
only one sent in, but that it was unworthy of the prize on several grounds,
one of which was, that several of the chief philosophers had been treated
with contempt.

From this time his rage against the three philosophers, Hegel, Fichte, and
Schelling, knows no bounds. He attributed his failure to win recognition to
a conspiracy among them and their followers. His writings abound in
violent invective against them. In several ways there are points of contact
between the system of Schopenhauer and that of Hegel, but Schopenhauer
refused to admit any kinship between them.

His two treatises were published together, as he had intended. They
appeared in 1841 as The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics. These two

problems are the freedom of the will and the basis of morality. The
treatment is little more than an expansion of the theories set forth in his
chief work. He finds the roots of morality in sympathy. The sense of
brotherhood, which binds together individual and individual, and welds
them into an organic whole, is the foundation on which all the moral
sentiments are built. All goodness, love, virtue, and nobility of character
spring from the same source, from sympathy, which is the same in its nature
as pure love. Beyond the egoism, which is fostered by the world around us,
there exists also the principle of altruism, impelling men to self-sacrifice,
unselfishness, and devotion.

The second edition of The World as Will and Idea, which appeared in
1844, seemed at first as likely to fail of attaining recognition as the earlier
one. But a change was now at hand. The reign of optimistic pantheism was
approaching its end in Germany. The lofty idealism, which was the strength
of the dominant school of thought, and which found political expression in
the revolutionary movements of 1848, was now followed by a wave of
reaction. The democratic movement, after obtaining some temporary
triumphs, was checked completely for the time, and a wave of weariness
and discouragement passed over the country. Schopenhauer looked on,
while Frankfurt was torn violently asunder in the throes of its revolution.
His sentiments were against the democratic party, and he seems to have
feared, above all else, the possibility of losing his private means. In letters
written at this time to his friends, Schopenhauer expresses his dislike and
disapproval of the great national movement of 1848. He was a thorough-
going individualist, and the movement, which stirred to the depths the finest
natures of the time, found no response in Schopenhauer's heart. His room
was used by Austrian soldiers, who shot from the windows upon the
democrats below.

His political views are expressed again in his will, made in 1852, in
which Schopenhauer left the greater part of his estate to be spent for the
benefit of the soldiers who had been wounded at Berlin, in 1818, in defence
of the royal party against the democratic revolutionaries. In his view, the
State exists only to secure safety of persons and property. It is a strange
error, he says, to attribute to the State any moral function. It is to be

regarded merely as the night-watchman, who protects us from thieves and
robbers.

The German Parliament, which sat at Frankfurt, had but a short-lived
existence. In the reaction which followed, Schopenhauer's philosophy found
an open door. Disciples attached themselves gradually to the philosopher,
and by degrees his system gained ground at home and abroad.

The work which won for him more popularity than any other, was
Parerga and Paralipomena (Chips and Scraps), published in 1851. The
work had been declined by three publishers before a Berlin firm agreed to
publish, without any payment to the author. The book consists of essays of a
very heterogeneous kind, and of varying length. Most of the chief problems
discussed in his larger works are treated again in the essays. Religion,
education, archæology, Sanscrit, style, noise, ghosts, and immortality are a
few of the subjects dealt with. Schopenhauer's reading was wide. His
quotations range freely over oriental, classical, and modern literature.

The success which followed the publication of this book was reflected
on the earlier works, and it was now possible to bring out further editions.
Schopenhauer's delight at this tardy recognition was unbounded. Every
scrap of applause was gathered and absorbed with eagerness. In his letters
during this period, everyone who differs from him is denounced as a
charlatan and a windbag. Everyone who says anything at all similar is
attacked as a plagiarist. Every adversary is moved by the meanest motives.
So virulent is his abuse, and so coarse his language, that words in his letters
have sometimes to be changed for an initial. Nothing short of adulation,
could satisfy his hungry vanity. Even when the universities at last
acknowledged him, and offered a prize for the best exposition and criticism
of his system, he was enraged at the award of the prize to a student who
treated him as of more importance in a literary than in a philosophical
capacity. Praise of any other philosophy than his own filled him with
bitterness. His correspondence with Frauenstadt, Lindner, and Asher is full
of such weakness. It may be doubted whether any great man ever left
behind him letters of so trifling a nature, so steeped in vanity and so
resentful of any breath of criticism.

He was active to the end of his life, though the first fine rapture of his
passionate love for all that is best in art was dimmed inevitably with the
passing years. There is a pathetic reference in a letter to this dulling of his
power of vision. "In the time," he writes, "when my spirit was at its zenith,
whatever object my eye rested upon made revelations to me. Now that I am
old, it may happen that I stand in front of Raphael's Madonna, and she says
nothing to me."

He died suddenly, in 1860, at the age of seventy-two. The stone which
marks his grave bears as inscription the sole words "Arthur Schopenhauer."

CHAPTER II

PESSIMISM

Schopenhauer's system is set forth in all its fulness in his great work, The
World as Will and Idea. All that he wrote after the appearance of this book
was confirmation and expansion of the theories already laid down. It differs
from his earlier books in method. He no longer follows academic lines. He
looks upon the work as a revelation of the meaning of life, based on a clear
and direct intuition into life, and the style shapes itself accordingly.
Metaphor frequently takes the place of argument, and his theories are
developed in a flow of passionate eloquence, contrasting remarkably with
the severer methods of the ordinary metaphysician.

Schopenhauer takes as his starting-point certain theories from the
philosophies of Plato and Kant. Things, as we know them in experience,
said Kant, are made up partly of forms or moulds, which are in the mind,
and partly of something outside the mind. That which we know, our actual
experience, is a combination of the two elements, the subjective and the
objective element. That part of experience which lies outside the mind, the
reality, the thing-in-itself or the noumenon in philosophical language, we
can never know. For in order to be known by us, it has to run into the forms

or moulds supplied by the mind, and in this transition its nature has been
changed. To know it as it is, before it enters into contact with our minds, is
impossible. That we appear to have objective knowledge is therefore a
deception and an illusion.

Schopenhauer accepts Kant's analysis of experience, but denies that the
thing-in-itself is unknowable. For that which is real in our experience is not
outside us altogether, as in Kant's theory. It lies within ourselves; it is the
only real and essential part of our nature, and we have a direct knowledge
of it. This reality Schopenhauer finds in the will. Now the will is fully
known to us through internal perception, through intuition. It is the real,
inner nature of everything in the world. It affords the key to the knowledge
of the inmost being of the whole of nature. It is the kernel of every
individual thing, and also of the whole universe.

It is important to note, that Schopenhauer's use of the word "will" is far
wider than that of common usage. It includes not only conscious desire, but
also unconscious instinct, and the forces of inorganic nature. He recognises
will not only in the existences which resemble our own, in men and
animals, but also in the force which germinates and vegetates in the plant,
the force through which the crystal is formed, that by which the magnet
turns to the north pole, the force which appears in the elective affinities of
matter as repulsion and attraction, decomposition and combination, and
lastly even as gravitation, which draws the stone to the earth and the earth
to the sun. All these in their inner nature are identical. It is the same force in
every manifestation of nature, as in each preconsidered action of man. The
difference is merely one of degree.

The body is the most real thing for everyone. If we analyse the reality of
this body, we find nothing but the will. With this its reality is exhausted.
The word will, like a magic spell, he says, reveals the inmost being of all
nature. Spinoza says, that if a stone, which has been projected through the
air, had consciousness, it would believe that it was moving of its own will.
Schopenhauer adds that the stone would be right. The impulse given it, is
for the stone what the motive is for us. All blindly impelling force, all
forces which act in nature in accordance with universal laws, are equally in
their inner nature to be recognised as will. It is everywhere one and the

same, "just as the first dim light of dawn must share the name of sunlight
with the rays of the full midday."

Now the will expresses itself necessarily as a struggle. Everywhere in
nature we see strife, conflict, and alternation of victory. Every grade of will
fights for the matter, the space, and the time of the others. For each desires
to express its own inmost nature. Nature exists only through such struggle.
This universal conflict is most distinctly visible in the animal kingdom. For
animals have the whole of the vegetable kingdom for their food, and even
within the animal kingdom every beast is the prey and the food of another.
Each animal can maintain its existence only by the constant destruction of
some other life.

This is the "will to live" which everywhere preys upon itself, until finally
the human race regards nature as a manufactory for its own use. This strife
manifests itself just as characteristically in the lower grades of will, e.g. the
ivy which encircles the oak until the tree withers as if choked, the parasite
which fastens itself on the animal and kills it. Even crude matter has its
existence only in the strife of conflicting forces.

Man has need of the beasts for his support, the beasts in their turn have
need of each other as well as plants, which in their turn require the ground,
water, and chemical elements and their combinations. Thus in nature
everything preys on some other form of life. For the will must live on itself;
there exists nothing beside it, and it is a hungry will.

This theory of the will is connected by Schopenhauer with pessimism.
Eternal becoming, endless flux characterises the inner nature of the will. In
the human race this character of the will is most clearly marked. All our
endeavours and desires delude us by presenting their satisfaction as the final
end of will. But as soon as we attain our desires, they no longer appear the
same. They soon grow stale and are forgotten, and then are thrown aside as
useless illusions. The enchantment of distance shows us paradises, which
vanish like optical delusions, as soon as we have allowed ourselves to be
mocked by them. We are fortunate if there still remains something to wish
for and to strive after, that the game may be kept up of constant transition
from desire to satisfaction, and from satisfaction to a new desire.

Happiness, therefore, always lies in the future, or else in the past. The
present, Schopenhauer compares to a small dark cloud, which the wind
drives over the sunny plain. Before and behind it all is bright, but the cloud
itself always casts a shadow. The present is always insufficient, the future is
uncertain, and the past irrevocable.

The will strives always, for striving is its real nature. No attainment of
the goal can put an end to this constant striving. It is not susceptible,
therefore, of any final satisfaction, for in itself it goes on for ever. As in the
life of the plant, so in the life of all men. There is the same restless,
unsatisfied striving, a ceaseless movement through ever-ascending forms,
until finally the seed becomes a new starting-point. This is repeated ad
infinitum, nowhere an end, nowhere a final satisfaction, nowhere a resting-
place. No possible satisfaction in the world can suffice to still the cravings
of the will, to set a goal to its infinite aspirations, and to fill the bottomless
abyss of its heart.

The hindrance of this striving, through an obstacle, we call suffering; the
attainment of its temporary end is well-being or happiness. But as there is
no final end of striving, there is no measure and end of suffering. In
proportion as knowledge attains to distinctness, as consciousness ascends in
the scale of organic life, pain increases also. It reaches its highest capacity,
therefore, in man. The more intelligence a man has, the greater his capacity
for suffering; the man who is gifted with genius suffers most of all.
Suffering is in the very nature of all life, and the ceaseless efforts which we
make to banish it succeed only in making it change its form. Yet we pursue
our lives, absorbed in the interests of the moment, just as we blow out a
soap bubble as large as possible, although we know perfectly well that it
will burst. Willing or striving may be compared to an unquenchable thirst.
Every act of willing presupposes a want. The basis of all willing is need or
deficiency. The nature of man, therefore, is subject to pain originally and
through its very nature.

If, on the other hand, man lacks objects of desire, being deprived of them
by too easy satisfaction, then a terrible emptiness and sense of boredom,
comes over him. His very existence becomes an unbearable burden to him.
Thus life swings like a pendulum backwards and forwards between pain

and boredom. Men have expressed this truth oddly, says Schopenhauer, in
transferring all pain and torments to hell, and in leaving what remains, that
is, boredom, for heaven. Man is of all animals the most full of wants and
needs. He is a concretion of a thousand necessities. Driven by these, he
wanders through life, uncertain about everything except his own need and
misery. The care for the maintenance of his existence occupies, as a rule,
the whole of human life. A second claim, that of the reproduction of the
species, is related directly to this. At the same time, he is threatened from all
sides by different kinds of dangers, from which it requires constant
watchfulness to escape. "With cautious steps and casting anxious glances
round him, he pursues his path, for a thousand accidents and a thousand
enemies lie in wait for him. Thus he went while yet a savage, thus he goes
in civilised life. There is no security for him."

The majority of men wage a constant battle for their very existence, with
nothing before them but the certainty of losing it at last. Man's greatest care
in avoiding the rocks and whirlpools of life, only bring him nearer at every
step to the greatest, inevitable, and irremediable shipwreck of death. This is
the final goal of the laborious voyage.

Whatever nature and fortune may have done, whoever a man be, and
whatever he may possess, the pain of life cannot be cast off. Excessive joy
and excessive suffering always occur in the same person, for they condition
each other reciprocally, and are conditioned by great activity of the mind.
Error and delusion lie at the foundation of keen joy or grief. Joy rests on the
delusion that lasting satisfaction has been found for the desires. The
inevitable result is that when the delusion vanishes, we pay for it with pain
as bitter as the joy was keen. The greater the height from which we drop,
the more severe the fall.

For the most part we close our minds to the knowledge that happiness is
a delusion. We strive unweariedly from wish to wish, and from desire to
desire. It is incredible how meaningless when viewed from without, how
dull and unenlightened by intellect when felt from within, is the course of
life of the great mass of men. It is a weary longing and complaining, a
dreamlike staggering through the four ages of life to death, accompanied
only by trivial thoughts. Such men go like clockwork, without knowing the

reason why. The life of every individual, if we survey it as a whole, is
always a tragedy, but looked at in detail, it has all the character of a comedy.
Everyone who has awakened from the first dream of youth, who has
reflected on his own experience and on that of others, must conclude
inevitably that this human world is the kingdom of chance and error, which
rule without mercy in great things and in small. Everything better struggles
through only with difficulty. That which is noble and wise seldom attains to
expression. The absurd and the perverse in the sphere of thought, the dull
and tasteless in the sphere of art, the wicked and deceitful in the sphere of
action, assert a supremacy which is rarely disturbed.

Nothing external has power to deliver man from this dominion of woe.
In vain does he make to himself gods, in order to get from them by prayers
and flattery what can be accomplished only by his own will-power.

The most beautiful part of life, its purest joy, is pure knowledge. It is
removed from all willing, and lifts us out of real existence. This relief,
however, is granted only to a few, because it demands rare talents and rare
opportunities. Even the few, to whom it comes only as a passing dream, are
made susceptible of far greater suffering than duller minds can ever feel.
They are placed in lonely isolation by their nature, which is different from
that of others. To the great mass of men, purely intellectual pleasures are
not accessible. They are almost incapable of the joys which lie in pure
knowledge. Their lives are given up to willing.

If we could bring clearly to a man's sight the terrible sufferings and
miseries to which his life is exposed, he would be seized with horror. The
brevity of life may be the best quality it possesses.

All happiness is negative in character, and never positive. Only pain and
want can be felt positively. Happiness is merely the absence of pain, for it
follows upon the satisfaction of a wish. Some want or need is the condition
which precedes every pleasure. But with the satisfaction, the wish, and
therefore the pleasure, cease. The satisfaction can never be more than
deliverance from a pain or want. We observe that the days of our life were
happy after they have given place to unhappy ones. In proportion as
pleasures increase, the capacity for them decreases. What is customary is no
longer felt as a pleasure. Achievement is difficult, but when attained it is

nothing but deliverance from some sorrow or want. Therefore we value our
blessings and advantages only when we have lost them, for the deprivation,
the need, is the positive factor.

Man's real existence is only in the present, and the present is slipping
ever into the past. There is thus a constant transition into death. The future
is quite uncertain, and always short. Our existence, therefore, is a constant
hurrying of the present, into the dead past, a constant dying. On the physical
side, the life of the body is but an ever-postponed death. In the end death
must conquer, and he only plays for a little with his prey before he
swallows it up.

With such intensity did Schopenhauer feel that pessimism was the only
possible conclusion, that he maintained that optimism was not only absurd,
but really a wicked way of thought. For optimism is a bitter mockery of the
unspeakable suffering of humanity. He revolted against the theory of
Leibnitz, who maintained that this is the best of all possible worlds. It is, on
the contrary, he declared, the worst of all possible worlds. Optimism is at
bottom the unmerited self-praise of the will to live, the real originator of the
world, which views itself complacently in its works. It is not only a false,
but also a pernicious doctrine. For it presents life to us as a desirable
condition, and happiness as its end. Everyone believes that he has a just
claim to happiness and pleasure, and if these do not fall to his lot, he
believes that he is wronged. It is far more correct to regard misery and
suffering, crowned by death, as the end of our life, for it is these which lead
to the denial of the will to live. It is difficult to conceive how men can
deceive themselves and be persuaded that life is there to be thankfully
enjoyed, and that man exists in order to be happy. The constant illusion and
disillusion seem intended to awaken the conviction, that nothing at all is
worth our striving, our efforts, or our struggles, and that all good things are
but empty vanity. The truth is, he says, we ought to be wretched and we are.

The world is a hell, which surpasses that of Dante. One need look only at
man's treatment of his fellow-men.

Schopenhauer points to the children, who are sent into factories to work
there daily for long hours, performing day after day the same mechanical
task. This, he adds, is to purchase dearly the satisfaction of drawing breath.

Everyone would have declined the "gift" of life, if he could have seen it and
tested it beforehand. But life has never been chosen freely. Everyone would
retire from the struggle gladly, but want and boredom are the whips which
keep the top spinning. Every individual bears the stamp of a forced
condition. Inwardly weary, he longs for rest, but yet he must press forward.
All movement is forced, and men are pushed from behind. It is not life that
tempts them on, but necessity that drives them forward.

Suicide is no solution of the problem of life. It is not to be regarded as a
crime, as in the code of modern society. But there is a valid moral reason
against it, in that it substitutes for the real emancipation from the world of
suffering, a merely apparent one. So far from being a denial of the will,
suicide is indeed a strong assertion of the will. The suicide destroys merely
the individual manifestation of life. The wilful destruction of the single
existence is a vain and foolish act. The suicide gives up living, because he
cannot give up willing. He denies the individual only, not the species. There
is a more adequate way of conquering life than by destroying it, which
Schopenhauer expounds when he deals with the ethical aspect of his
philosophy.

His analysis of the worth of human life, as represented in this theory of
pessimism, is the most passionate and terrible indictment of existence
which has ever found expression. His sense of disenchantment is felt with
such intensity, that it colours and distorts the whole fabric of his vision of
life.

There is much affinity between the character and work of Schopenhauer
and that of Leopardi. In both are displayed penetrating profundity of
thought, extraordinary beauty of expression, and deep insight into the
workings of the human mind, while the same passionate revolt against the
misery of life colours the outlook and achievement of philosopher and poet
alike. Schopenhauer was acquainted with the writings of Leopardi, and had
great admiration for his work. His subject, he says, is always the mockery
and wretchedness of existence, and he presents it with such wealth of
imagery, such multiplicity of forms and applications, that he never wearies
us, but is always entertaining and exciting. This estimate of the work of
Leopardi might with equal justice be applied to Schopenhauer himself.

As his philosophy gained ground gradually, and became known, he won
many disciples and enthusiastic followers, and for a time his theories of
pessimism became fashionable. Certain literary groups adopted them with
enthusiasm, but in that direction his influence was not permanent. It is not
in Schopenhauer's theory of pessimism that his true importance and real
significance lie. In philosophy this influence has but faintly shown itself.
Schopenhauer's direct successor on these lines of thought is Eduard von
Hartmann. He rejects Schopenhauer's doctrine that all pleasure is merely
relief from pain, but admits that the greater number of pleasures are of this
kind. Satisfaction, he asserts, is always brief, while dissatisfaction is
enduring as life itself. The pain in the universe greatly preponderates over
the pleasure, even for those who are regarded as the fortunate ones in the
eyes of the world. The future, moreover, seems likely to bring us only
increased misery. Hartmann's practical conclusion is that we should aim at
the negation of the will to live, not each for himself, as Schopenhauer
taught, but universally, by working towards the annihilation of all existence.
Schopenhauer's influence is here, obviously, very strongly marked.

Another disciple, and a far more famous one, is Nietzsche. He came
under Schopenhauer's influence while a student at the university, and threw
himself with passionate enthusiasm under the spell of his philosophy.
Although in his later development he reacted strongly in an opposite
direction, yet all his work bears the mark of the deep impress which
Schopenhauer had made upon his mind. His outlook on life had been
changed profoundly by "that wonderful heart-stirring philosophy," as he
calls it. One of his earliest works was an essay on Schopenhauer as
Educator, in which he bases the greatness of Schopenhauer on his power to
see the picture of life as a unity, and to express it as such. He is held up as
the ideal philosopher, and as one of three models for future man, the other
two being Goethe and Rousseau. Schopenhauer's insistence on action as the
proper sphere of man, as contrasted with the mere life of thought, made a
strong appeal to Nietzsche. A philosopher, says Nietzsche, must be not only
a great thinker, but a living man. Schopenhauer had not been spoilt, as was
Kant, by his education. He had seen life as well as studied books, and so
was able to see how the free, strong man could be evolved. Many of
Nietzsche's most characteristic doctrines are suggested in this early essay,
and are read partially into Schopenhauer's philosophy.

It is more especially Schopenhauer's theories of art which influenced
Nietzsche's thought, and left the deepest and most permanent mark on his
work. He adopted in his early days the pessimism along with the rest of
Schopenhauer's system. But this conception of life was not really native to
his mind, and it was against this aspect of Schopenhauer's philosophy that
he reacted most violently in later life. Nietzsche stands, above all else, for
the affirmation of life, Schopenhauer for the negation of life. In his protest
against pessimism, Nietzsche reaffirms with passionate intensity the worth
of life and the splendour of human destiny. He told men to believe in the
glory of things, and bade them shout for the joy of living. "All that's joyful
shall be true," he says in one of his poems. In another passage he insists that
"it is necessary to remain bravely at the surface, to worship appearance, to
believe in forms, in tones, in words, in the whole Olympus of appearance."
It is clear that by this time nothing of the pessimistic outlook on life had
been left in Nietzsche's philosophy.

Pessimism will always find an echo in the minds of those who by
temperament tend to see only the darker colours of the picture of life. Too
much questioning and too little responsibility lead down to the abyss, as
William James points out. Pessimism, he says, is essentially a religious
disease. It consists in nothing but a religious demand, to which there comes
no normal religious reply.

To the great mass of mankind there is something alien and repellent in
this grim and bitter outlook of hopelessness. It finds little or no response in
the heart of the normal human being, even though at times the nightmare
view may force itself upon him. "Deliverance," says the Indian poet Tagore,
"is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand
bonds of delight. All my illusions will burn into illumination of joy and all
my desires ripen into fruits of love."

For Schopenhauer the way of escape lay in two directions. In
considering his æsthetic theories, we shall see how he found in art a
temporary release from the bondage of life, and in his ethical system he
points the way to a permanent deliverance.

It is in these statements, the æsthetic and the ethical aspects of his
system, that we find the most significant part of Schopenhauer's philosophy.

His pessimism left little permanent mark on the course of philosophic
thought. It is to the other side of his work that we must look for a fruitful
issue, to his statement of the function of art and its meaning for life; his
insistence on the will, the active element, as that which has most reality and
significance in life; to the part which the feelings, instinct, and impulse play
in his system. In all these directions, Schopenhauer's influence has been
powerful and far-reaching. To-day he is a stronger force than any other of
the great thinkers of his time, overshadowed though he was by them during
his lifetime. In Germany especially, his influence is felt as a powerful factor
in the thought of the present day.

CHAPTER III

ART

Schopenhauer's theory of the beautiful is the side of his philosophy
which has always made so potent an appeal to artists, and to all those lovers
of the beautiful, for whom art represents the supreme significance of life.

The present for Schopenhauer is only an infinitesimal moment between
two eternities, the past and the future. It is "a flash of light between two
darknesses." Now how is man to make the best of this brief moment, under
the hard conditions of his destiny? The answer to this question
Schopenhauer finds in his theory of the function of art. He links up into
intimate relation his theory of æsthetic with his philosophical pessimism,
but his pessimism is modified considerably in the process.

There are certain men, he maintains, who can free themselves from the
bondage of the will. They can throw off its yoke, and, released from all the
aims of desire, they can become disinterested spectators of the real,
essential nature of the world. The inner meaning of their clear, deep vision
they can interpret to others. Such men are artists, and the interpretation of
their vision is the work of art. In art are revealed the eternal truths of the

nature of man and the universe, revealed with a power and directness to
which science can never attain. Artists, then, are the seers, the visionaries,
who penetrate into the hidden, vital principles of things. They alone have
power to interpret the half-uttered speech of nature, and disentangle that
which is real and essential, the inner truth, from that which is accidental and
transitory. The road to philosophy, then, leads through the gateway of art.

In this theory Schopenhauer starts from Plato's doctrine of the Ideas. The
particular objects of sense, which we know, are mere appearances. They
have no reality in themselves. They arise and pass away, they always
become and never are. But there exist also the types and eternal forms of
things, which do not enter into time and space, and which remain fixed,
subject to no change. These constitute the sole reality. Plato called them the
Ideas, and Schopenhauer adopts this term from the Platonic philosophy. The
Ideas for Schopenhauer represent the different grades of the objectification
of the will, which are manifested in the individuals. These are the eternal
forms or prototypes of individual things.

Our knowledge of the ordinary things of sense-experience is indirect, it
is gained by way of the intellect. Our knowledge of the Ideas, on the other
hand, is direct and immediate, it is gained through intuition. In his account
of the Ideas, or the real, essential nature of things, Schopenhauer is treading
already the path of mysticism, along which he works out his theories of
ethics.

Now the whole function of art is to reproduce the eternal ideas, to seize
on that which is essential and abiding in all the phenomena of the world.
The one and only source of art is the knowledge of true reality, of the Ideas.
The one aim of art is the communication of this knowledge. According to
the material in which this vision of true reality is reproduced, it is
architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry, or music.

Science can only follow the unresting and inconstant stream of
appearances. It can never reach a final goal nor attain complete satisfaction,
any more than by running we can reach the place where the clouds touch
the horizon. But art, on the other hand, is everywhere at its goal. It plucks
the object of its contemplation out of the stream of things as they seem, and
holds it isolated before its vision. And this particular thing, which in the

stream of the world's course was a small perishing part, becomes to art the
representative of the whole, the type of the endless multitude in space and
time. Art, therefore, pauses before this reality, which it perceives in the
particular thing. The course of time stands still; relations vanish before it;
only the essential, the Idea, remains as the object of the artist's vision. In the
multitudinous and manifold forms of human life, and in the unceasing
change of events, the artist looks only on the Idea, knowing it as the abiding
and the essential, as that which is known with equal truth for all time. Art,
therefore, is the bridge between two worlds. It leads us from things as they
seem to things as they really are.

It is the genius who possesses this power of vision, and whose magic
works can unfold before the eyes of ordinary mortals the spirit of beauty as
she has revealed herself to him. Entirely in this spirit does Blake express his
sense of the poet's mission:

"I rest not from my great task
To open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes
Of man inwards; into the worlds of thought; into Eternity
Ever expanding in the bosom of God, the human Imagination.

The method of genius is always artistic, as opposed to scientific. The
nature of genius consists in a surpassing capacity for the pure contemplation
of Ideas. It is the faculty of continuing in the state of pure perception, of
losing the personality in perception, and of enlisting in this service the
knowledge which existed originally only for the service of the will. Genius,
then, is the power of leaving one's own interests, wishes, and aims entirely
out of sight, of renouncing entirely one's own personality for a time, so as to
remain pure knowing subject, clear vision of the world. This state must be
achieved, not merely at moments, but for a sufficient length of time, and
with sufficient consciousness, to enable the artist to reproduce by deliberate
art what has thus been seized by his inner vision. He must fix in lasting
thoughts the wavering images that float before the mind:

"But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,

Nurslings of immortality."

It is as if, says Schopenhauer, when genius appears in an individual, a far
greater measure of the power of knowledge falls to his lot than is necessary
for ordinary men. This excess of knowledge, being free, now becomes
subject purified from will, a clear mirror of the inner nature of the world.

Imagination is an essential element in genius, and it is a necessary
condition that it should be possessed in an extraordinary degree.
Imagination extends the horizon far beyond the limits of actual personal
experience, and so enables the artist to construct the whole dream, the
complete vision, out of the little that comes into his own actual
apperception.

The actual objects are almost always but imperfect copies of the ideas
expressed in them. Therefore the artist requires imagination in order to see
in things, not that which nature has actually made, but that which she
endeavoured to make, but could not, because of the never-ceasing conflict
between the various forms of will. Through the penetrating vision of this
imagination, the artist recognises the Idea. He understands the half-uttered
speech of nature, and is able to articulate clearly what she only stammered
forth.

The common mortal, he says, that manufacture of nature, which she
produces by the thousand every day, is not capable of observation that is
wholly disinterested in every sense. He can turn his attention to things only
so far as they have some relation to his will, however indirect it may be.
This is why he is so soon done with everything, with works of art, objects
of natural beauty, and everywhere with all that is truly significant in the
various scenes of life. He does not linger in the pursuit of beauty, but seeks
only to gain his own way in life. On the consideration of the significance of
life as a whole, he wastes no time. The artist, on the other hand, strives to
understand the inner nature of everything. His faculty of vision is to him the
sum which reveals the world.

In spite of his contempt for the majority of men, Schopenhauer has to
admit that the faculty of perceiving the Idea, the inner reality, must exist in
nearly all men, in a smaller and different degree, otherwise they would be
just as incapable of enjoying works of art as of producing them. They would
have no susceptibility to beauty, nor to sublimity. All men, therefore, who
are capable of æsthetic pleasure at all, must be capable to some extent of
knowing the Idea in things, and in responding to the call of beauty, of
transcending their personality for the moment.

Æsthetic pleasure is the same whether it is evoked by a work of art or by
the contemplation of nature, for the Idea remains unchanged and the same.
The work of art is only a means of making permanent the vision in which
this pleasure consists. The artist does not add "the gleam, the light that
never was on sea or land," but his vision is more finely attuned to the reality
than that of ordinary men. He makes permanent in the various media of art
"the consecration and the poet's dream." His work acts as a communicating
spark from mind to mind.

In one of Carlyle's most suggestive passages, he insists on the spiritual
and symbolic nature of the work of art, in words that echo curiously the
thought of Schopenhauer. "In all true works of art," he says, "thou wilt
discern eternity looking through time, the godlike rendered visible ... a
hierarch therefore, and pontiff of the world will we call him, the poet and
inspired maker, who Prometheus-like can shape new symbols, and bring
new fire from heaven to fix it there."

That the Idea, the true reality behind appearance, is revealed with so
much more force and clearness in the productions of art than directly in
nature is due to the power of the artist to abstract the pure Idea, the reality,
from the actual and the accidental, omitting all disturbing, non-essential
qualities. He disentangles that which is real and essential from the confused
mass presented in experience. The artist lets us see the real world through
his eyes. That he has these eyes, that he knows the inner nature of things,
apart from all their relations, is the gift of genius. This gift is inborn, and
cannot be acquired. But that the artist is able to lend us this gift, and let us
see through his eyes, is acquired. This is the technical side of his art.

Primarily, then, the genius is the artist. Scientific genius finds no place in
Schopenhauer's scheme. Statesmen are of very different fibre. Their
intellect retains a practical tendency, and is concerned with the choice of the
best means to practical ends, remaining therefore in the service of the will.
The eminent man, who is fitted for great achievement in the practical sphere
of life, is so because objects rouse his will in a strong degree, and spur him
on to the investigation of their relations. His intellect, therefore, has grown
up in close connection with his will.

Talent is limited to detecting the relations which exist between individual
phenomena, whereas genius rises to a vision of the universal in the
individual. The genius has a vision of another and a deeper world, because
he sees more profoundly into the world which lies before him. "To compare
useful people with men of genius is like comparing building stone with
diamonds." Mere men of talent come always at the right time, for they are
called forth by the needs of their own age. The genius, on the other hand,
comes into his age like a comet, whose eccentric course is foreign to its
well-regulated order. Genius appears only as a perfectly isolated exception.

Schopenhauer never states definitely that a philosopher may be a genius,
but he always seems to assume that he himself belongs to the heavenly
company. He gives a detailed description of the genius, even to his physical
appearance. With his usual habit of generalising from his own particular
case, he endows the genius with many of his own personal characteristics,
even to his dislike of mathematics.

The Platonic theory of Ideas was the basis on which Schopenhauer built
his philosophy of art. But Plato's own theory of the function of art differed
fundamentally from that of Schopenhauer, and it is interesting to compare
the two views. To Plato it seemed that art was concerned with the imitation
of things as they seem, not as they really are; with the objects of sense
perception and not with the Ideas. The artist mutates the illusory
appearances of concrete things. Consequently the work of art is still further
removed from true reality, from the Idea, than is the thing of experience. It
is a copy of a copy. This led him to the statement that works of art are thrice
removed from the truth. They can be produced easily without any
knowledge of the truth, for they are concerned only with appearances, and

not with the reality that lies behind appearances. Hence Plato's rejection of
art. In his system it is not art, but philosophy that gives a direct revelation of
truth. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, maintains that it is not the concrete
object of experience, but the reality itself which lies behind that object, with
which the artist is supremely concerned. The artist alone among men has
the capacity of vision to see and grasp the truth of this reality. Such capacity
of vision is reserved by Plato for philosophers, those whom he calls "lovers
of the vision of truth."

In his earlier works, Plato approximates far more closely to
Schopenhauer's theory. He speaks there of the poet as "a light and winged
and holy thing. There is no invention in him until he has been inspired....
Beautiful poems are not human or the work of man, but divine and the work
of God. The poets are only the interpreters of the gods, by whom they are
severally possessed."

The value of art for Schopenhauer lies mainly in its power to deliver us
from the slavery of the will. In the quiet contemplation of beauty revealed
in art, we are delivered from the misery of life. Willing, he maintains, arises
from want, and therefore from suffering. The satisfaction of a wish ends it,
but every satisfied wish at once makes room for a new one, and both are
illusions. No attained object of desire can give lasting satisfaction, but
merely a fleeting gratification. It is like the alms thrown to the beggar, that
keeps him alive today, that his misery may be prolonged till the morrow.

Without peace no true well-being is possible. But when some external
cause or inward disposition lifts us suddenly out of the endless stream of
willing, and knowledge is delivered from the slavery of the will, we have a
vision of things free from this relation of the will. We can observe them
without personal interest, without subjectivity. Then, all at once, the peace
which we are always seeking, but which always fled from us on the path of
the desires, comes to us of its own accord, and it is well with us. This is the
painless state, which Epicurus prized as the highest good, and as the state of
the gods. We are then set free from the miserable striving of the will. It is
this deliverance that art effects for us, and which is accomplished only by
the inner power of the artistic nature. Art frees us from all subjectivity, from
the bondage of the will. This freeing of knowledge lifts us out of all the

misery of endless desire, as wholly and entirely as do sleep and dreams.
Happiness and unhappiness have disappeared. We are no longer individuals.
We are only that one eye of the world, which looks out from all knowing
creatures, but which can become perfectly free from the service of the will
in man alone. Art provides us with a sphere, in which we can escape from
all our misery, and can attain to a state of temporary peace and painlessness.

There is a curious affinity between the æsthetic theories of one of the
mediæval mystics and those of Schopenhauer. St. Thomas Aquinas, the
greatest of the schoolmen, expounded views in the thirteenth century akin
in many respects to those set forth by Schopenhauer at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. Beauty, he held, is the revelation of reason in sensuous
shape, and he proceeds further to say that in the realisation of beauty desire
is quieted.

Art is the most joy-giving and the only innocent side of life. It is, says
Schopenhauer, in the full significance of the word, the flower of life. The
pleasure which we receive from all beauty, the consolation which art
affords, enables us to forget the cares of life. This pleasure consists in the
contemplation of the Ideas, in the contemplation of the inner truth of life,
which reveals to us a drama full of significance. In entering into the state of
pure contemplation, our happiness lies in the sense of being lifted, for the
time being, above all willing, beyond all wishes and desires. We become
freed from ourselves. These moments when, sunk in contemplation and
enjoyment of the work of art, we are delivered from the ardent striving of
the will, when we seem to rise out of the heavy atmosphere of earth, these
moments are the happiest which we ever know.

The arts themselves Schopenhauer arranges according to their subject-
matter rather than according to their medium. He places them in very much
the same order as that in which Hegel puts them. Architecture, painting and
sculpture, poetry and music are each discussed in turn.

Music.—Music is the apex of his whole system of æsthetics. It is placed
by itself, outside and above all the other arts. For it is not, like the other
arts, a copy of the Ideas, but it is the copy of the will itself. In the main
Schopenhauer's treatment of music is mystical. Hegel too gave to music the
supreme position among the arts. It was the central romantic art in his

system, and the mysterious magical enchantment of music is painted by him
with glowing eloquence.

The effect of music, says Schopenhauer, on the inmost nature of man, is
powerful beyond that of any of the other arts. For that great and
exceedingly noble art stands alone, quite apart from the other arts. In it
there is no copy or repetition of any Idea of existence in the world. It is
understood by man in his inmost consciousness as a universal language, the
distinctness of which surpasses that of the visible world itself. The basis of
modern music lies in the numerical relations which underlie sounds.
Arithmetical proportions enter into and have some part in the pleasure
which we derive from music, as Leibnitz points out, but this does not
account for that passionate delight with which we hear the deepest recesses
of our nature find expression in sound. If we take the æsthetic effect as a
criterion, we must attribute to music a far deeper and more vital
significance than that which lies at the basis of the other arts. This is
connected with the inmost nature of man and the world. Its representative
relation to the world must be very deep, absolutely true, and extraordinarily
accurate, because it is understood immediately by everyone. It has the
appearance of a certain infallibility, because its form may be reduced to
quite definite rules, expressed in numbers, from which it cannot free itself
without ceasing to be music. The obscure relation of music to the world has
never been made clear.

In order to explain this relation, Schopenhauer says he gave his mind
entirely to the impression of music in all its aspects, and then returned to
apply his reflections to his system of thought. We know that he had
invaluable opportunities of studying music, in its various forms, during the
time that he was working out his system at Dresden. He himself practised
daily the use of a musical instrument. The result of his investigation is an
explanation, which he admits is impossible of proof, because it regards
music as the copy of an original, which can never itself be presented
directly as idea. But he maintains that in order to assent with full conviction
to his theory of the significance of this art, it is only necessary to listen
frequently to music, testing the theory at the time, and reflecting constantly
upon it.

The other arts represent the Ideas in the particular things, the realities
that lie behind the visible world, but music is independent altogether of the
world of concrete things. It ignores completely this aspect of life. It could to
a certain extent exist even if there was no world at all. Music, then, is not
the copy of the Ideas, but the copy of the Will itself. That is why the effect
of music is so much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other
arts, for they speak only of shadows, but it speaks of the thing itself.

Browning relates music to the will in one of his best-known poems,
when he makes Abt Vogler say:

"But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can,
Existent behind all laws, that made them, and lo, they are!
And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star."

Schopenhauer, in working out the details of his theory, tries to establish
an analogy between music and the Ideas of the visible world, connecting the
lower tones with the lowest grades of the objectification of the will, those of
inorganic nature, and leading up gradually through the intermediate grades
until the higher tones are reached, representing the other end of the scale,
the highest organic forms of life. The melody, the high singing part,
represents the intelligent life and effort of man, and progresses with
unrestrained freedom, while it dominates the whole. This represents the
unbroken, significant connection of one continuous thought. The melody,
therefore, has significant intentional connection from beginning to end. It
records the history of the will enlightened by intellect. In the world of
experience the will expresses itself in action. But melody does more, it
expresses the inner side of the action, drawing out from the deeps its secret
history, its motives and efforts, its passionate yearning and inner
excitements, all that which the reason includes in the concept of feeling. For
this reason music has been called the language of feeling and passion, as
words are the language of the reason. In melody there is a constant
deviation from the keynote in a thousand ways, yet there always follows a
constant return to the keynote. In all these digressions and deviations
melody expresses the manifold efforts of the will. Its satisfaction is also

expressed by the final return to a harmonious interval, and to the keynote.
In melody, therefore, the composer reveals all the deepest secrets of human
willing and feeling.

His work lies far from all reflection and conscious intention, and flows
directly from inspiration. The abstract conception is here, as everywhere in
art, unfruitful. The composer reveals the inner nature of the world, and
expresses the deepest wisdom in a language which his reason does not
understand. In the same way, a person under the influence of mesmerism
tells things of which he has no conception when he wakes. In the composer,
more than in any other artist, the man is entirely separate and distinct from
the artist.

As quick transition from wish to satisfaction is well-being, so quick
melodies are cheerful. Slow melodies are analogous to the delayed and
hardly-won satisfaction, and are sad. Quick dance music seems to speak
only of easily attained and common pleasure. Adagio movements speak of
the pain of a great and noble striving, which despises all trivial happiness.

The effect of the major and the minor key is equally marked. In general,
music consists of a constant succession of more or less disquieting chords,
chords which excite "immortal longings," and also of more or less quieting
and satisfying chords, just as the life of the heart is a constant succession of
feelings of disquietude and of peace, following desire and satisfaction. Just
as there are two general fundamental moods of the feelings, serenity and
sadness, so music has two keys, which correspond to these, the major and
the minor. Since music is founded deeply in the nature of man, the
dominant national mood is reproduced invariably in a country's music. We
find accordingly that the minor key prevails in Russian music, while allegro
in the minor is characteristic of French music, "as if one danced while one's
shoe pinched."

But in all these analogies music has no direct, but only an indirect
relation to them. It does not express particular and definite joys, sorrows,
pains, or horrors, but joy, sorrow, pain, or horror itself, the real, inner nature
of each emotion. It is the essential character of these emotions that is
represented, without disturbing accessories. Music expresses only the
quintessence of life and its events, never the events themselves. This inner

meaning of life, the eternal truth of things, is felt and understood
immediately when we listen to great music. "All things eternal," wrote
Wagner, "can be expressed with unmistakable certainty in music." And in
another passage, he says, "Music can never and in no possible alliance
cease to be the highest, the redeeming art. It is of her nature, that what all
the other arts but hint at, through her and in her becomes the most
indubitable of certainties, the most direct and definite of truths."

It is for this reason that our imagination is excited so easily by music,
and that we seek to give it form by clothing it with words. This is the origin
of opera and songs.

Wagner built up a whole theory of music, based on the philosophy of
Schopenhauer. But in their views on opera they differed fundamentally. The
text of opera, says Schopenhauer, should never forsake a subordinate
position. The music should never become a mere means of expressing the
words. That is a great misconception of the function of music, for music
should always be universal. It is just its universality, which belongs
exclusively to it, that gives music its high worth as "the panacea for all our
woes." If music is too closely united to the words, and tries to express itself
according to outward events, it is striving to speak a language which is not
its own. Schopenhauer mentions Rossini as the composer who is most free
from this mistake. His music speaks so clearly that it requires no words to
explain it.

Nature and music, then, are merely two different expressions of the same
thing. Music is a universal language, expressing the inner nature of the
world. It resembles geometrical figures and numbers. They are the universal
forms of all possible objects of experience, and yet are not abstract, but
concrete and determined. All that goes on in the heart of man, and that is
included in the concept of feeling, may be expressed by an infinite number
of possible melodies, but always universally. Music represents the inmost
soul of the event, without the body. We might therefore just as well call the
world embodied music as embodied will. For this reason music makes
every scene of real life, and of the world, more profoundly significant. It
lays bare the inmost kernel which lies hidden in the heart of all things. It
penetrates to the very heart of nature. The ineffable joy which we derive

from music, which haunts our consciousness as the vision of a distant
paradise, restores to us all the emotions of our inmost nature, but divested
entirely of the sting of actuality, and far removed from its pain.

It is interesting to compare the view of Schopenhauer, that music is a
copy of the will itself, with the theory of Plato and Aristotle, which
maintained that music is a direct reflection of character. The modern art of
music was not developed in their day, and yet both these philosophers seem
to have had prophetic insight in understanding the nature of the marvellous
spell and power of sound. Music to them was an imitation, a copy of
character, and as such of profound importance in education. Music reflects
character, and therefore moulds and influences it. The foundations of
character, says Plato, are laid in music, which charms the souls of the young
into the path of virtue. Rhythm and harmony find their way into the secret
places of the soul, making the soul harmonious and graceful. "If our youth
are to do their work in life, they must make harmony their perpetual aim,"
and the soul can only be reached and educated in this way through music.

It is Schopenhauer's theory of music which has influenced most directly
the world of art. It was hailed by Wagner as a revelation, and it determined
his musical development and all his æsthetic theories. Through Wagner it
may be said to have revolutionised much of modern music. After reading
The World as Will and Idea, Wagner wrote, "I must confess to having
arrived at a clear understanding of my own works of art through the help of
another, who has provided me with the reasoned conceptions corresponding
to my intuitive principles." This philosophy contained, he said, the
intellectual demonstration of the conflict of human forces, which he himself
had demonstrated artistically.

Architecture.—In Schopenhauer's arrangement of the arts, music, as we
have seen, occupies the supreme place, being the highest expression in art
which man can achieve. At the other end of the scale stands architecture. Its
aim is to bring to greater distinctness some of the ideas which represent the
lowest grades of the will, such as gravity, cohesion, rigidity, and hardness.
These are the universal qualities of stone, and the simplest, most inarticulate
manifestations of will. They may be called the bass notes of nature. The
conflict between gravity and rigidity is the sole æsthetic material of

architecture. Its problem is to make this conflict appear distinctly in a
multitude of different ways. The beauty of a building lies in the obvious
adaptation of every part to the stability of the whole. The position, size, and
form of every part must be so related to the whole, that it forms a necessary
and inevitable part of an organic unity. Each arch, column, and capital must
be determined by its relation to the whole building.

It is the function of architecture to reveal also the nature of light. For the
light is intercepted, confined, and reflected by the mass of the building. It is
thrown into high relief by the receding forms, which supply the contrasting
depths of shade. It thus unfolds its nature and qualities in the clearest and
most definite way. It is not merely form and symmetry which appeal to us
in architecture, but primarily the fundamental forces of nature, the simplest
qualities of matter. The quality of the material, therefore, is of great
importance. The fundamental law of architecture is that no burden shall be
without sufficient support, and no support without a suitable burden. The
purest example of this principle is the column and entablature. In separating
completely the support and burden in the column and entablature, the
reciprocal action of the two and their relation to each other become
perfectly clear. For this reason the simplest building in Italy gives æsthetic
pleasure, due to the flatness of the roof. A high roof is neither support nor
burden, for its two halves support each other. It serves merely a useful end,
presenting to the eye an extended mass, which is wholly alien to the
æsthetic sense. Architecture requires large masses, in order to be felt
adequately, and it must work out its own character under the law of the
most perfect clearness to the eye. It exists in space-perception, and must
make a direct and inevitable appeal to the æsthetic sense. This demands
symmetry, which is necessary to mark out the work as a whole. It is only
through symmetry that a work of architecture reveals itself as an organic
unity and as the development of a central thought. Architecture ought not to
imitate the forms of nature, and yet it should work in the spirit of nature. It
should reveal the end in view quite openly, and should avoid everything
which is merely aimless. Thus it achieves the grace which is the result of
ease, and the subordination of every detail to its purpose.

It follows from Schopenhauer's treatment of architecture that he held
Greek work of the best period to be the highest type of building which it is

possible to attain. In its best examples that style is perfect and complete,
and is not susceptible of any important improvement. The modern architect,
he held, cannot depart, to any great extent, from the rules and models of the
Greeks, without descending the path of deterioration. There remains
nothing for him to do but to apply the art transmitted to him, and to carry
out the rules laid down, so far as he is able under the limitations of climate,
age, and country.

Schopenhauer, therefore, had no appreciation of Gothic architecture. The
simple rationality of the Greek temple delights him, but the Gothic
cathedral leaves him cold and unmoved. He makes the naïve admission, that
approval of Gothic architecture would upset all his theories of the æsthetic
significance of architecture. To compare the two is, he says, a barbarous
presumption, although he allows, somewhat grudgingly, that a certain
beauty of its own cannot be denied to the Gothic style. Our pleasure in it,
however, is to be traced mainly to the association of ideas, and to historical
memories. That pure rationality by which every part admits instantly of
strict account in its subordination to the plan as a whole, is not to be found
in Gothic work. Greek architecture is conceived in a purely objective spirit,
whereas Gothic is rather subjective in spirit. But Schopenhauer cannot
reason away entirely the impression created by the Gothic interior. That, he
admits, is the finest part of the whole, and it is here that the mind is
impressed by the effect of the groined vaulting, borne by slender, aspiring
pillars, soaring upwards. All burden seems to have disappeared, promising
eternal security. Most of the faults, however, appear upon the exterior,
whereas in Greek buildings the exterior is the finer; in the interior the flat
roof retains something depressing and prosaic.

Of the ideals and aspirations which the great builders of the Middle Ages
so wonderfully transmuted into stone, Schopenhauer has nothing to tell us.
The men "who sang their souls in stone" were for him pre-eminently the
builders of Greek temples.

In his insistence on the open display of the relation between burden and
support, and also on the importance of bringing out the qualities of the
material, Schopenhauer's treatment of architecture recalls many passages in
Ruskin, in which he insists repeatedly, that both truth and feeling require

that the conditions of support should be clearly understood, and that the
quality of the material must find expression.

The analogy of architecture to music is one of the most characteristic
and suggestive portions of Schopenhauer's æsthetic. He emphasises the
great difference between the two arts, pointing out that according to their
inner nature, in their potency, extent, and significance they are indeed true
antipodes. Architecture exists in space, unrelated to time, whereas music is
in time alone, having no relation to space. But the principle which gives
coherency to architecture is symmetry, that which gives coherency to music
is rhythm. The close relationship between these two principles is obvious. It
is this resemblance which has led to the saying that architecture is "frozen
music," which Schopenhauer quotes from Goethe.

This relation between the two arts, however, extends only to the outward
form. In their inner nature they are entirely different. In essential qualities,
Schopenhauer maintains, architecture is the most limited and the weakest of
all the arts, whereas music is the most far-reaching, and possesses the
deepest significance.

Painting and Sculpture.—Filling an intermediate position between
architecture and music come painting and sculpture. These arts represent
more complex grades of the will than architecture, and therefore convey the
truth of life with deeper insight. They too are concerned with the Ideas, and
symbolise the inner reality of outward things and events. Lowest in the
scale of the various kinds of painting come the painting of landscape and of
still life, in which the subjective side of æsthetic pleasure is predominant.
Our satisfaction consists less in the vision and comprehension of the Ideas
than in the state of mind aroused. We receive a reflected sense of the deep
spiritual peace and absolute silence of the will, which are necessary in order
to enter so completely into the character of these lifeless objects. It would
be impossible to bring the modern art of landscape painting, with its revolt
against a purely objective representation of nature, into line with this
analysis of Schopenhauer's.

Next in the scale comes the painting and sculpture of animals, and then
follows the plastic representation of the human form. The artist expresses in
marble or paint that beauty of form which nature has failed to complete, and

which has to be disentangled from the obscuring cloud of trivial and
accidental details. In virtue of this anticipation through art, it is possible for
us to recognise beauty when nature by a rare chance does achieve a
masterpiece. Human beauty is the fullest objectification of the will at the
highest grade which is known. It is expressed through form. In sculpture,
beauty and grace are the principal qualities. The special character of the
mind, represented by expression, is the peculiar sphere of painting.
Historical painting aims at beauty, grace, and character. The inward
significance of an action, which is the depth of insight into the Idea which it
reveals, must be brought to light. Only the inward significance concerns art,
the outward belongs to history. The countless scenes and events which
make up the life of men are important enough to be the object of art, for by
their rich variety they unfold the many-sided Idea of humanity.

No event of human life is excluded from painting. The painters of the
Dutch school, for example, are great artists, not only in virtue of their
technical skill, but because they have seized the inner significance of the
things and actions they have depicted. They have real depth of insight into
reality. What is peculiarly significant is not the individual, nor the particular
event, but that which is universal in the individual.

Schopenhauer held that the highest achievements of the art of painting
were reached by the Italian painters of the early Renaissance, especially by
Raphael and Correggio. We see in them, says Schopenhauer, a complete
grasp of the Ideas, and thus the whole nature of life and the world. In them
we find the spirit of complete resignation, which is the inmost spirit of early
Christianity, as well as of Indian philosophy. There are portrayed the
surrender of all volition, the suppression of the will. In this way these great
artists expressed the highest wisdom, which is the summit of all art.

Poetry.—Poetry too represents the ideal in individual creations. Its aim,
like the other arts, is the revelation of the Ideas. The poet must understand
how to draw the abstract and universal out of the concrete and individual,
by the manner in which he combines them. The universality of every
concept must be narrowed more and more, until we reach the concrete
image, for the poet must express the universal in concrete form. The whole
of nature can be represented in the medium of poetry. The extent of its

province is boundless. Thoughts and emotions, however, are its peculiar
province, and here no other art can compete with it. That which has
significance in itself, and not in its relations, the real unfolding of the Idea,
is found definitely and distinctly in poetry. More genuine inner truth is to be
found in poetry than in history. The poet's knowledge is intuitive, and by its
means he shows us in the mirror of his mind the Idea, pure and distinct,
bringing to the consciousness of others that which they feel and do. In the
epic, the poem of romance, and the tragedy, selected characters are placed
in those circumstances in which all their special qualities unfold
themselves, and the depths of the human heart are revealed, and become
visible in significant actions.

Tragedy is the summit of poetic art. Here the unspeakable pain, the wail
of humanity, the triumph of evil, the mastery of chance is unfolded before
us. It is one and the same will that appears throughout. Knowledge reaches
the point at which it is no longer deceived by the veil of Mâyâ, the web of
illusion. Thus the noblest men, after long conflict and suffering, at last
renounce for ever the ends they have so eagerly pursued. The heroes and
heroines of tragedy die, purified by suffering, after the will to live is dead.
The true import of tragedy is that the hero expiates, not his own individual
sins, but the crime of existence itself. Tragedy, then, presents the highest
grade of the objectification of the will, in conflict with itself, on a scale of
grandeur and awful impressiveness. The greatest poetry is symbolic in this
deepest sense.

Goethe may be considered one of the greatest symbolists among poets.
Every event in life was symbolic for him. It expressed something more
universal, more extensive, more profound. The concrete image, the whole
full-blooded individual was always clearly before his mind, but beyond that
he saw and realised something more universal, from which it necessarily
and inevitably springs. He saw that the truth of nature does not lie on the
surface, but in a deeper unity, which the penetrative insight of the artist
alone can grasp.

In the system of Schopenhauer, then, art acquires almost the character of
a religion. It becomes the means by which the ultimate essence, the soul of
whatever exists, is disengaged from the world of matter. And "in this dutiful

waiting upon every symbol, by which the soul of things can be made
visible, art at last attains liberty. In speaking to us so intimately, so
solemnly, as only religion had hitherto spoken to us, it becomes itself a kind
of religion, with all the duties and responsibilities of the sacred ritual."

There is a deep significance in the historical fact, that the birth of
religion is interwoven invariably with that of the origin of art. Aristotle
connects closely the rise of various forms of poetry with religious
celebrations. Art and religion were born simultaneously, and have always
been closely related in the history of mankind.

CHAPTER IV

VIRTUE

Art, which Schopenhauer calls "the flower of life," enables us to forget
the cares and sufferings of life. The consolation which we derive from
beauty repays us for the miseries and terrors of existence. The
contemplation of beauty brings us deliverance from the deceptions and
illusions of life, and gives us a pure, true, and deep knowledge of the inner
nature of the world. It acts as a quieter of the will, and such quiet
contemplation of beauty is the nearest approach to pure satisfaction that we
can achieve. This deliverance, however, is not a path out of life, but only a
consolation in life. We must seek the highest solution in proceeding farther
in the same direction. In his theories on ethics and religion, Schopenhauer
points the way to a permanent escape from life.

True morality is summed up in self-surrender, in the denial of the will to
live. There are two stages in this progress of morality. The first and lower is
that attained in the perfecting of the good disposition. This is ordinary
virtue, which is rooted in love and sympathy, and which rests on the
recognition of the real identity of any one individual with all other
individuals. The second and higher stage is that of holiness, and is attained

only through asceticism, through the complete self-surrender which turns
away from all the pleasures of life, and represses even the natural instincts.
Man lays hold on that which is real through complete resignation and
surrender of the will. Only then is the veil of Mâyâ, the illusion of life, torn
asunder, and is it possible for man to be told the vision of truth. This is the
way of virtue. It cannot be taught any more than genius can be taught.
Systems of ethics can produce virtuous and holy men no more than
æsthetics can produce great poets or musicians.

In working out his ethical system, Schopenhauer was deeply influenced
by ancient Indian philosophy. The complete release from the slavery of the
will is only to be found, in his view, in the asceticism which is the
fundamental principle of Buddhism and of early Christianity. The
disposition of mind, which alone leads to true holiness and to deliverance
from the world of desire, finds expression in renunciation.

Schopenhauer expands his philosophy of art at far greater length than he
does his ethical system, and seems at times to attach more significance to it.
But in his final view it is only through virtue and holiness that man attains
to the gate of heaven.

It follows from his philosophy of the will that human action has a
significance far transcending all the possibilities of experience. Human
action exceeds in importance all other things in the world. The sanest
philosophers, he held, have been those who have played an active part in
life, and who have not devoted themselves merely to abstract thought. It is
not the highest function of man to think and to understand, but to feel and to
live. In short, understanding itself is attained only through life. For reality is
greater than our knowledge of it. Knowledge itself is a poor thing at best, an
indirect way of seizing hold of reality. We must understand things by a
deeper knowledge than that of the intellect. We must exchange head
knowledge for heart knowledge. For head knowledge is concerned only
with that part of reality which rises above the threshold of consciousness.
Our total sense of reality is broader and deeper than a merely intellectual
knowledge. It includes the subconscious depths of our personality, making
up a whole which is far richer in content than that mere surface life which
we know in consciousness.

This insistence on the importance of intuitive knowledge is closely
connected with Schopenhauer's treatment of instinct. He is supremely
interested in instinct, finding in it a positive quality, which plays frequently
a more important part than the knowledge of the understanding or the
reason. The one kind of knowledge is set constantly against the other in his
system. His treatment of the whole subject is of deep significance in his
philosophy.

The typical case in which instinct is most highly developed is that of
animals. They strive definitely towards an end, though this end is unknown
to them. In all the instinctive actions of animals, the will is clearly as
operative as in their other actions, but it is in blind activity. In inorganic and
vegetable nature the will acts as blind impulse, and so with infallible
certainty. Animals are exposed already to illusion and deception, but in their
case instinct comes to their assistance. Though guided by no motive or
knowledge, they yet have the appearance of performing their work from
rational motives. They work with the greatest precision and definiteness
towards an end which they do not know. In man also the will is in many
ways only blindly active. Though a tendency of the will, instinct does not
act entirely from within. It waits for some external circumstance for its
action. Instinct gives the universal, the rule; intellect gives the particular,
the application. Instinct seems always to be in accordance with the
conception of an end, and yet is entirely without such an end. Schopenhauer
also connects instinct with clairvoyance and dreams. In his own life he
attached especial importance to dreams, and on several critical occasions
regulated his actions in accordance with them. With his treatment of instinct
is bound up also his theory of sexual love. The lover is deluded in thinking
that he aims at his own happiness. The will to live is forcing him, for
nature's own purposes, to aim at a certain typical beauty, which has its end
in the perfection of the offspring. The more perfectly two individuals are
adapted to each other, the stronger will be their mutual passion. Nature is
striving for a better realisation of the type, and to attain its ends must
implant a certain illusion in the individual. That which is good only for the
species appears to him as good for himself. He serves the species in
imagining that he is serving himself. This illusion is instinct. The individual
is but a helpless tool carrying out blindly the designs of nature.

An instinctive character belongs also to the highest functions of human
life, as in art and virtue. Wisdom proper, says Schopenhauer, is something
intuitive, and not something pertaining to the intellect. It does not consist in
principles and thoughts, which are carried about ready in the mind, as the
result of research, but it is the whole manner in which the world presents
itself intuitively to the mind. In real life the scholar is far surpassed by the
man of the world, for the strength of the latter consists in perfect intuitive
knowledge. The true view of life proceeds from the way in which the world
is known and understood, not from abstract knowledge. The heart of all
knowledge is intuition. Upon this depends the infinite superiority of genius
to learning and scholarship. They stand to each other as the text of a classic
to its commentary. It was this emphasis, which Schopenhauer laid on the
instinctive and impulsive side in man, rather than on the conscious and
deliberate, which led him to the view that man is a creature controlled and
dominated by his instincts, and therefore a mere puppet in the hands of
nature.

This aspect of Schopenhauer's system acquires a special importance,
when compared with much of the most modern philosophy. There are
interesting points of contact with the views of M. Bergson, who maintains
that in the intuition of life we see reality as it is.

The intellect is merely a tool in the service of the will. Since philosophy
must express the real nature of life, we are driven to seek reality through
that which is felt. Since the time of Socrates, Schopenhauer maintained,
philosophy has made a systematic misuse of general conceptions. We have
an immediate experience of the will, and therefore we may be said to have
an immediate knowledge of the nature of reality. One of the most valuable
contributions which Schopenhauer made to the history of thought, was his
insistence on the view that philosophy must be brought back to the
recognition of the richness of an immediate and direct knowledge of reality.
It must learn that the meaning of things is to be realised more by living than
by thinking. The philosopher, therefore, must be before all things "a real
man," a guide to fine living. Schopenhauer brought philosophy into relation
with life, he drew it down from the icy heights, where abstract conceptions
alone can flourish, to the sunny plains below, where art, with "a spark of the
divine fire," warms and lightens the ways of man. The intuitive insight of

the genius, which divines the truth through art, is a far higher form of
knowledge than that of the abstract thinker.

It is suggestive to compare with this the view of Pater, that "philosophy
serves culture, not by the fancied gift of absolute or transcendental
knowledge, but by suggesting questions which help one to detect the
passion, and strangeness, and dramatic contrasts of life."

There is much significance in Schopenhauer's exaltation of intuition over
reason. Philosophy has always tended to make too much of reason. And in
spite of many crudities in his psychology, Schopenhauer's treatment of the
subject contains much of the greatest value. In emphasising the part played
in the mental life by instinct, habit, and impulse, he anticipated much that
has since been confirmed in the modern science of psychology.

Kant maintained that the only absolutely good thing in the world is the
good will, and Schopenhauer practically accepts this dictum. Right action
springs from the will, and not from the intellect, for the true nature of man
lies in his will. The problem of ethics for Schopenhauer is how the will is to
be made good. His treatment of the problem leads him beyond a system of
ethics to a philosophy of religion.

Virtue to Socrates was a knowledge of the good; but no amount of mere
knowledge of the good can make the will good, and therefore Schopenhauer
maintained that Socrates had done next to nothing in ethics. The real
solution of the problem of moral obligation lies in sympathy. It is through
sympathy that man is able to attain virtue. Goodness of disposition shows
itself as pure disinterested love towards others. And when such love
becomes perfect it places the fate of other individuals on a level with itself
and its own fate. The character which has thus attained the highest goodness
and nobility will sacrifice its own interests, and even its life, for the well-
being of others. Great heroes in all ages have laid down their lives for their
country or their friends. Others have submitted voluntarily to death or
torture for the sake of truths or principles which they held dear. Socrates
and Giordano Bruno, and many another hero, have suffered death rather
than deny what they held to be true. Such heights are reached only by rare
natures among men. But all the intermediate stages of goodness spring from
the same root of sympathy. Pure love is in its nature sympathy.

Schopenhauer is here in direct contradiction to Kant, who recognised
goodness and virtue only when they spring from abstract reflection, from
the conception of duty, and who explained sympathy as weakness. On the
contrary, says Schopenhauer, the mere concept is as unfruitful for virtue as
it is for art. All true and pure love is sympathy, and all love which is not
sympathy is selfishness. Many of our sentiments are a combination of the
two. Friendship is always, he says, a mixture of selfishness and sympathy.
The selfishness lies in the pleasure which we experience in the presence of
a friend, the sympathy in the participation in his joy or grief, and the
sacrifices we make for his sake.

Genuine virtue springs from the knowledge, which we have through
intuition, that other individuals are of the same nature as ourselves. The
source of morality is this inward principle of solidarity between individual
and individual. This sense of brotherhood, which pervades the whole of
humanity, is the real and vital fact which makes the whole world kin.
Transcending the spirit of egoism, which is fostered by the actual conditions
of life, there springs the spirit of altruism, which strives to subordinate the
good of the individual to the good of the whole community, and prompts
the individual to self-denial and unselfishness.

In dealing with men, we should never, he says, take into consideration
their interested motives, their limited intellectual capacity, nor their wrong-
headedness, but we should think only of their sufferings, their needs, their
anxieties and their misery. Only in this way can we feel ourselves akin, and
so enter into sympathy with others, that we experience a fellow-feeling and
a desire to help them in their need. The two fundamental attitudes of mind,
in which the virtues and vices of men are rooted, are envy and sympathy.
Each man bears within himself these two diametrically opposite
characteristics. One or the other quality becomes the fundamental attitude
of mind and the basis of action according to the character of the individual.
Envy builds up a strong, impregnable wall between each man and his
neighbour, isolating the individual in his crust of misanthropy, which grows
daily harder and denser. Sympathy, on the other hand, breaks down the
barriers between man and man. The sense of division grows thin and
transparent, until the individual feels himself a part of an organic whole,

deriving his sole usefulness and justification only in so far as he
subordinates his own personal ends to the common good.

Schopenhauer's use of the factor of sympathy in explaining morality,
differs considerably from that of the English philosophers of the eighteenth
century, in whose systems of ethics sympathy played a large part. The
sympathy, which Hume presupposes as "a principle in human nature,
beyond which we cannot hope to find any principle more general," is
sympathy with the pleasure resulting from the effects of virtuous action.

Adam Smith, who also regarded sympathy as the ultimate element into
which moral sentiments may be analysed, approached more nearly to the
position of Schopenhauer. Morality arises in its simplest form from direct
sympathy or "fellow-feeling" with the passions of others, which a spectator
feels from imagining himself in their situation. It is of two kinds, and moves
the spectator to enter into the sentiments of the person concerned, and also
moves the person concerned "to bring down his emotions to what the
spectator can go along with." It is a power which enables us to take a
disinterested view of our own conduct by putting ourselves in another's
position.

In Schopenhauer's view sympathy is a positive principle of conduct. It is
based upon the recognition of the identity of all living beings. It alone
makes moral conduct possible, and moves us to feel and act towards others
as to ourselves.

So far Schopenhauer has described the first stage in the progress of
morality, that which is attained in ordinary virtue. The higher stage, that
which he calls holiness, is attained through asceticism, the denial of the will
to live. On the path of virtue man has learned to make no distinction
between his own person and that of others, to take as much interest in the
sufferings of others as in his own. He is even ready to sacrifice his own
individuality, whenever such sacrifice will benefit humanity. It is no longer
the changing joy and sorrow of his own personality which concerns him,
but the joy and sorrow of all. He attains to a vision of the real nature of life,
and realises the vain striving, the inward conflict, and incessant suffering in
which it consists. And with this knowledge he finds it impossible to assert
the egoistic desires of his own nature. His will turns away from life. He

shudders at the pleasures which recognise the assertion of life. He attains to
the state of voluntary renunciation, resignation, and indifference.

The attainment of this goal is the hardest end of all to achieve. Only the
saint, the perfect man, ever attains it completely and finally. Weaker and
less perfect natures are ever drawn back to life by the sting of the desires,
for the veil of Mâyâ, the mist of illusion, still clings about their feet. The
vanity and bitterness of life still holds them, although the entrance to all
suffering stands open while they are not yet purified by complete and final
renunciation. They cannot tear themselves free from the illusions of life,
from the allurements of hope, and the sweetness of pleasure. Those who see
through the deceptions of life, and recognise the real nature of the world,
are already on the way to consolation. They withdraw from the struggle of
life, and no longer wish to assert their own individuality. The loftiest
goodness means refraining from all willing.

This is the transition from virtue to asceticism. A man who has reached
so far ceases to will anything, he guards himself against desire, and strives
to attain complete indifference to everything. He gives the lie to his own
body, and no longer desires any gratification. Voluntary and complete
chastity and poverty are necessary steps in this asceticism. Man is at once
the priest and the sacrifice. Every kind of volition is suppressed
intentionally. The body is nourished sparingly, lest its vigour and well-being
should arouse the will. Every step is taken to break and destroy the will,
which is recognised as the source of all suffering. Death when it comes at
last is welcomed as a longed-for deliverance, and hailed with gladness.

In this picture of the life of holiness and asceticism Schopenhauer shows
the strong influence which Indian philosophy had exercised upon his
thought. This is the ideal life, the life of the saint, as portrayed by the early
Christian mystics, and in the Indian religious books.

Virtue and holiness proceed from inward, direct and intuitive knowledge,
and not from abstract knowledge, as so many earlier philosophers asserted.
The chasm between the two kinds of knowledge can be bridged only by
philosophy. Everyone is conscious intuitively of philosophical truths, but
philosophy is necessary to bring them to abstract knowledge and reflection.
Hence Schopenhauer is at enmity with all rational religion. For religion has

to do primarily not with the intellect, but with the will and the feelings. He
felt this so deeply that he left the rational element almost entirely out of his
definition of virtue. We learn the meaning of virtue, in his view, through the
sympathy, which makes us feel intuitively the underlying identity in the
lives of other beings with our own life. It is possible to express abstractly
the inner nature of holiness and asceticism as the denial of the will to live,
but this abstract theory has been known directly, and carried into practice by
countless saints and ascetics, who all possessed the same inward
knowledge, though they used very different language with regard to it,
according to their dogmas. Whether a saint is moved by the grossest
superstition, or whether he be a philosopher, makes no difference. His
conduct testifies to his saintliness, and this proceeds from an intuitive and
direct realisation of the nature of the world. The dogmas he holds are
merely for the satisfaction of his intellect. It is therefore not necessary that a
saint should be a philosopher, just as it is not necessary that a great sculptor
should be himself a beautiful man.

The use of philosophy is to gather up the whole nature of the world in
concepts, abstractly and universally, and thus to store up "a reflected image
of it in permanent concepts always at the command of reason." Intuitive
knowledge, on the other hand, is expressed most perfectly in deeds and
conduct, not in abstract conceptions. To understand it fully, therefore, we
must know examples in experience and actual life. A mere description of a
beautiful soul is cold and abstract. Schopenhauer refers as models to the
biographies of the early Christian and of the Buddhist saints, and in later
times to the biography of Spinoza. He holds up with especial admiration the
life of St. Francis of Assisi. These records of the lives of simple, self-
denying men, mixed as they are with superstition, are for the philosopher
far more significant and important than the lives of the great fighters and
conquerors of the world. The life of St. Francis is of greater import than that
of Alexander the Great. It is the ethical aspect of action which is important,
and therefore the most significant life which the world can show is not the
conqueror of the world, but he who has in himself subdued the world. It is
the quiet, unobserved life of the man who has learned to deny the will to
live that is most profoundly instructive.

This ethical teaching is no new thing. It is only the philosophical
expression of it which is new. As Christianity developed, the seed of
asceticism unfolded into full flower in the writings of the saints and
mystics. Even more fully developed and more vividly expressed is this
teaching in the ancient Indian writings. In the Indian sacred books, in their
poems, myths, and legends, and in the lives of their saints, the love of one's
neighbour is taught, and the complete surrender of self enjoined. Such love
is not confined to humanity, but includes all living creatures. The path of
asceticism is marked as the ideal way for all who strive after true holiness.
There is wonderful harmony between the life of a Christian mystic and that
of a Hindu saint. In each case the inward life and effort is the same. The
rule of life enjoined on both shows striking resemblances. The renunciation
of all possessions, the choice of deep, unbroken solitude, which is spent in
silent contemplation, perfect chastity, and voluntary penance, is the
teaching of Christian and Hindu alike. In such rare similarity of teaching,
followed by races differing so radically in outward circumstances,
Schopenhauer finds proof that this manifestation has its root in the nature of
man, and appeals to an essential side of human, nature.

In his treatment of art, Schopenhauer points out how happiness is
achieved in the contemplation of beauty. In his treatment of ethics he shows
how permanent happiness may be attained. It is the man alone who follows
the path of renunciation, and who succeeds in denying the will to live, who
attains perfect happiness. He is filled with inward joy and peace. This joy is
in no way akin to the passionate delight experienced by those who love life.
That is a fleeting emotion, which has keen suffering as its correlative. But
"it is a peace that cannot be shaken, a deep rest and inward serenity, a state
which we cannot contemplate without the greatest longing, when it is
brought before our imagination, because we at once recognise it as that
which infinitely surpasses anything else. Then we feel that every
gratification won from the world is merely like the alms which the beggar
receives from life to-day, that he may hunger again on the morrow.
Resignation, on the other hand, is like an inherited estate, it frees the owner
for ever from all care." He who can enter into the spirit of the beautiful, as
revealed in art, silences his will for the moment, but the saint who attains
holiness is altogether blessed, for he silences his will, not only for the
moment, but for ever. His will is wholly extinguished, save for the last

glimmering spark, which retains his body in life, and which will be
extinguished only with his death. Such a man has endured bitter struggles
with his own nature, but has emerged triumphant. "Nothing can trouble him
more, nothing can move him, for he has cut all the thousand cords of will
which hold us bound to the world, and as desire, fear, envy, and anger drag
us hither and thither in constant pain. He now looks back smiling and at rest
on the delusions of the world, which once were able to agonise his spirit,
but which now are as indifferent to him as the chessmen when the game is
ended. Life passes before him as a fleeting illusion, as a light morning
dream before half-waking eyes, the real world already shining through it."

It is interesting to compare Schopenhauer's ideal of the highest form of
human life with that of Aristotle. For Aristotle too the highest end of man
was the life of pure contemplation. This, however, was a more purely
intellectual state than Schopenhauer had in mind, but still an existence
withdrawn from the cares and struggles of life, wrapped securely in quiet
contemplation.

It must not be supposed that when this self-surrender has been won, that
it never wavers or hesitates. We can never rest upon it as an assured
possession. It must ever be attained anew by a constant battle. For so long
as the body lives, the whole will to live exists potentially, striving to realise
itself and to burn again with its old intensity. The peace and blessedness
which is attained in the lives of holy men is found only as the flower which
blossoms after victory in the constant battle with the will to live. In the
histories of the saints we find their inner lives full of conflicts and
temptations, the end which gives the deepest peace and opens the door of
freedom constantly eluding them.

The suffering which is experienced personally is that which most
frequently produces the fullest resignation. The illusions of life are a
constant hindrance to the fullest self-surrender. The will must first be
broken by great personal suffering before complete self-conquest is
reached. Then, having passed through increasing stages of affliction, and
being brought finally to the verge of despair, a man knows himself and the
world, and rises above himself and all suffering. He renounces willingly
everything he desired formerly, and faces death joyfully. This is the refined

gold, which is drawn out of the purifying flame of suffering. Goethe has
given an incomparable picture of an unfolding of character to such ends, in
his drawing of Gretchen in Faust.

The extent to which man is free to make himself good raises the
perennial question of the freedom of the will. Schopenhauer held that the
answer depends entirely on the statement of the problem. In so far as the
real nature of man is will, and man himself is only a phenomenon of this
will, a particular action follows inevitably on a given motive in a given
character. It is just as absurd, he says, to doubt such inevitableness as to
doubt that the three angles of any triangle are together equal to two right
angles. If the character and the motives were given completely, it would be
possible to calculate the future conduct of a man as exactly as we can
calculate an eclipse of the sun or moon. Character is as consistent as nature.
There is no independence of the law of causality, the necessity of which
extends to man as to all else in nature. But in the metaphysical world,
Schopenhauer, following Kant, maintains that the will is free. In so far as
the will represents the only reality, it transcends experience. It is outside
time, outside every form of the mind which limits or moulds our
experience. It is above and beyond the forms of causality, and therefore free
transcendentally. In that dim region where character is formed we are our
own creators. Action which is seen empirically to follow inevitably from a
character already formed is seen from another point of view to be but a
form of self-realisation, of self-expression.

Mysticism is strong in Schopenhauer. Now and again it breaks through
the even flow of European thought, usually, as with Schopenhauer, drawing
its main inspiration from the East. There is a recurring period in the history
of thought, when the scientific point of view does not make its accustomed
appeal, when it is felt intensely that science can give but a partial and
limited view. Academic culture and science are felt to be inadequate, are felt
even to be leading away from the real heart of the matter, and putting us
outside the deepest current of existence. Intuitive and direct knowledge is
given then an importance denied to the knowledge of the reason. Man
retires into himself, instead of searching outside himself for objective
knowledge. He seeks the secret of the universe in the depths of his own
heart and will, and strives to pluck out the heart of life's mystery in waiting

on the silent twilight of inner feeling. The eyes are shut on the outer world,
in order that one may see the more inwardly. Then only does man
experience the sense of solidarity and kinship which runs through all things,
and feel himself one with the universe.

These recurring waves of mysticism seem always to appear in the history
of thought at the end of a specially brilliant intellectual period. It is as
though the human mind, having striven to the top of its capacity on the lines
of the intellect and the reason, impatient at its own limitations, and
wearying of the discrepancy between its endeavours and its achievements,
turns eagerly in the opposite direction, and directs its gaze inward. The
great school of Neo-Platonists, for example, followed immediately the most
brilliant age of Greek thought. And the same is true of the strong trend in
the direction of mysticism, which is so marked towards the close of the
eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries in Germany, a
tendency which shows itself in Schopenhauer more strongly than in any
other philosopher.

There is a strong appeal in this ideal of human life, which Schopenhauer
depicts in words of glowing eloquence. Based on the pessimism which
claims that all life is worthless, it aims at conquering life by withdrawing
altogether from it. This is a negative solution of the problem of life. It is
possible to oppose to this philosophy a robuster view, which would come to
grips with the misery and evil of existence on another plane. William James
points to the spiritual gain that comes of fighting ills. To wage war
obstinately against the odds of life fills us with courage and resolution, and
there is possibly a deeper satisfaction to be won from the determined facing
of the battle of life than in the attitude of pessimism, which bids us draw
back and take no part in the fray. There is a fine courage in the attitude of
mind, which admits "the deliciousness of insanities and realities, strivings
and deadnesses, hopes and fears, agonies and exultations," but which claims
that we who are born for the conflict, the shifting struggle of the sunbeam in
the gloom, must accept it all as a vital part of the whole. "When the healthy
love of life is on one, and all its forms and its appetites seem so unutterably
real; when the most brutal and the most spiritual things are lit by the same
sun, and each is an integral part of the total richness, it seems a grudging
and sickly way of meeting so robust a universe to shrink away from any of

its facts and wish them not to be. Rather take the strictly dramatic point of
view, and treat the whole thing as a great unending romance which the spirit
of the universe, striving to realise its own content, is eternally thinking out
and representing to itself."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. ENGLISH

The World as Will and Idea. Translated by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp. 3
vols. 1883-6. London: The English and Foreign Philosophical Library.

Two Essays. I. On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.
II. On the Will in Nature. Bonn's Philosophical Library. 1889.

Selected Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer. Translated by E. Belfort Bax.
London: Bohn.

Religion: A Dialogue; and other Essays. Translated by T. Bailey Saunders.
1891. London: Swan Sonnenschein. Pp. 140.

The Wisdom of Life. Essays translated by T. B. Saunders. 1890. London:
Swan Sonnenschein. and Co. Pp. xxvi, 135.

Counsels and Maxims. Translated by T. B. Saunders. 1895. London: Swan
Sonnenschein. Pp. 162.

The Art of Literature. Essays translated by T. B. Saunders. 1891. London:
Swan Sonnenschein Pp. xiv, 149.

Studies in Pessimism. Essays translated by T. B. Saunders. 1891. London:
Swan Sonnenschein. Pp. 142.

On Human Nature. Essays translated by T. B. Saunders. 1902. London:
Swan Sonnenschein and Co. Pp. 132.

Life of Arthur Schopenhauer. W. Wallace. 1890. London: Scott. Pp. 217.

Arthur Schopenhauer, His Life and His Philosophy. Helen Zimmern. 1876.
London: Longmans. Pp. 249.

Schopenhauer's System in its Philosophical Significance. Caldwell. 1896.
Edinburgh: Blackwood. Pp. xviii, 538.

B. FOREIGN

Schopenhauer's Sämmtliche Werke. Herausgegeben von J. Frauenstädt. 6
Bde. Leipzig. 1873-4.

Schopenhauer Lexikon. Bearbeitet von J. Frauenstädt. 2 Bde. Leipzig.
1871.

La Philosophie de Schopenhauer. T. Bibot. 2nd edit. 1885.

Schopenhauer's Leben. W. von Gwinner. 1910. Leipzig. Pp. xv, 439.

Arthur Schopenhauer. J. Volkelt. 1907. Stuttgart, Pp. xvi, 459.

Schopenhauer und Nietzsche. G. Simmel. 1907. Leipzig. Pp. 263.

INDEX

Architecture, 68

Aristotle, 12, 67, 89
Art, 10, 23, 25, 52
Asceticism, 25, 76, 77, 84, 88

Bergson, 80
Blake, 54
Browning, 63
Buddhism, 10, 13, 77, 86, 87, 88

Dreams, 30, 79

Epicurus, 60

St. Francis, 87

Genius, 12, 25, 54
Goethe, 7, 19, 23, 75, 90

Hartmann, E. von, 48
Hegel, 11, 13, 24, 28, 30, 61, 62
History, 11
Hume, 84

Instinct, 8, 39, 78, 79, 80

James, William, 50, 93

Kant, 7, 13, 22, 30, 32, 38, 81, 82, 91

Leopardi, 48

Music, 7, 19, 61
Mysticism, 13, 53, 91

Nietzsche, 49

Opera, 66

Painting, 72
Parerga und Paralipomena, 36
Pater, 81
Pessimism, 10, 13, 24, 38
Plato, 7, 12, 13, 25, 38, 53, 58, 67
Poetry, 74

Religion, 12, 75
Ruskin, 71

Schopenhauer, Heinrich F., 16
Schopenhauer, Johanna, 16, 18, 19, 22
Sculpture, 72
Shelley, 7
Smith, Adam, 84
Socrates, 81
Spenser, 7
Spinoza, 7, 40, 87
Style, 9
Suicide, 47
Symbolism, 75
Sympathy, 10, 76, 82, 84

St. Thomas Aquinas, 61
Tragedy, 74

Virtue, 70

Wagner, 8, 66, 68
Will, 8, 24, 80, 90
Women, views on, 20, 29
Wordsworth, 7
World as Will and Idea, 20, 26, 33, 35, 38, 68

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