0 \ #■ 15 ■. SHAIV FELLOWSHIP LECTURES, 1893 SCHOPENHAUER’S IN ITS SYSTEM PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE “Vitam impendere vero.” — Juvenal, iv. 91. I SCHOPENHAUER’S SYSTEM IN ITS PHILOSOPHICAL 8IONIFICAAOE BY WILLIAM CALDWELL. M.A.. D.Sc. NW. PROFESSOR OF MORAL AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, U.S.A.; FORMERLY ASSISTANT TO THE PROFESSOR OF LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS, EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY ; AND EXAMINER IN PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MDCCCXCVI DOLTON COLLEGE LIBHMKT CHESTKUT HILU All Rights reserved 33 /4-g c/4 1 .H B 4 9 3 TO EMEEITUS PEOFESSOE A. CAMPBELL EEASEE, D.C.L., LL.D., AND TO HIS SUCCESSOR IN THE CHAIR OF HAMILTON, PEOFESSOE ANDEEW SETH, LL.D., dEfjts Fclume is QetiicatEti WITH THE ESTEEM AND GRATITUDE OF AN OLD PUPIL AND FRIEND. PREFACE. This book is substantially the outcome of the public lectures delivered by me in the Logic class-room of the University of Edinburgh, in the months of October and November, 1893, at the close of my tenure of the Shaw Fellowship. Following the precedent of previous holders of the Shaw Fellowship, Professor Sorley of Aberdeen and Professor Mac- kenzie of Cardiff, and also in accordance with the natural necessities of the evolution of the work in my own mind, I have departed altogether from the lecture form, and have pre- sented my matter in the shape of several continuous philo- sophical essays. Some of these chapters may appear to be of undue length. As each, however, was intended to reflect to some extent the system of Schopenhauer as a whole, as well as to indicate his views upon the particular topic in question, it seemed undesirable to curtail too much. Taken together, they represent a series of attempts to suggest the significance of Schopenhauer’s thought as an organic whole. The order of the series is partly natural and partly logical. As to the justification for the volume, I desire the title to be partly explanatory. I have not directly attempted to give an exposition, or even an exposition and criticism, of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. This has been done sufficiently well in many different ways by many English and foreign Vlll PREFACE. writers. I have rather tried to connect Schopenhauer with some few broad lines of philosophical and general thought and — so far as I could — with some few broad principles of human nature. It seems to me that the time has come for this. My best hope for the book is that it may afford reflec- tive matter to those who have, for any reason whatsoever, an interest in Schopenhauer. Nowadays it is almost impossible to escape being brought more or less under his influence. He has even got into the comic papers of most countries. 'Wliile to a certain extent presupposing some elementary knowledge of Schopenhauer/ I have tried to give enough positive state- ment from and about him to render what I write intelligible to the ordinary reader. I have tried to strike a mean in the matter of the con- nection of Schopenhauer’s philosophy with his personality. I am inclined to resent the practice of attributing the exaggera- tions of his philosophy to his personality, when such attribu- tion does not rest upon a broad perception of the philosophy of such a personality as Schopenhauer’s. It is time the public should be prevented from being misled by much extravagant statement in this connection.^ The first chapter is general in its character, and suggests only the scope of Schopenhauer’s significance and the spirit in which we ought to study his system. The next two chapters, ^ Such knowledge, for example, as may be had from a recent article in the ‘Westminster Review’ (April 1895) by Mr E. Todhunter, or from Mr Bailey Saunders’s excellent translations (published in very convenient form by Sonnen- schein), or from such an essay as that by Professor E. Rod in ‘ Les Iddes Morales du Temps Present,’ or from the “Britannica” article of Professor W. Wallace (or from my own in the ninth edition of ‘ Chambers’s Encyclopaedia ’), or from Pro- fessor W. Wallace’s book in the “ Great Writers ” Series, or from the instructive article of the late Mr E. Wallace in the ‘Westminster Review’ (No. 59, p. 388). E.g., “No philosopher so readily explains himself as Schopenhauer. His philosophy was simply the formulation of his own special disease, the expression of his own ineffably petty and uncomfortable disposition. He was a small philosopher with a great literary gift.” — ‘The Religion of a Literary Man,’ by Richard le Gallienne. I select this quotation only on account of its recent character. Many others might be given. PREFACE. IX I imagine, will demand a somewhat closer attention on the part of the reader than the first. They constitute an attempt to trace out the theoretical roots of Schopenhauer’s philosophy.^ The fourth chapter occupies itself with the practical bondage of life, from which art and ethics and religion are supposed by many people (and by Schopenhauer himself) to set us free. The following four chapters present the Schopenhauer that is known to the thought of the nineteenth century. Chapter ix. tries to show the fundamental philosophical char- acter of Schopenhauer’s thought. It takes up, incidentally, the threads of chapters ii. and iii., and interweaves them with the other chapters of the book and with the system as a whole. Chapter x. attempts some general positive statement about Schopenhauer. In it and in the Epilogue points are suggested which might form the material for further study and exposition. Before this, however, one would have to devote some attention to von Hartmann. It was originally part of my intention to consider the gen- eral subject of pessimism as treated by both von Hartmann and Schopenhauer. In view of this I read to a fair extent into von Hartmann,^ but soon concluded that Schopenhauer, in virtue of his greater originality and attractiveness, would alone afford enough scope for my first investigation. There are two things that are more satisfactory in von Hartmann than in Schopenhauer : first, his scholarship, and then the historical basis on which he tries to found pessimism. I am quite convinced that Schopenhauer and von Hartmann to- gether represent one-half of modern philosophy. I say of modern 'philosophy, because for the purposes of general philo- sophy we still sit, and ought to continue to sit, at the feet of ^ These chapters represent matter which I presented partly in two papers in ‘ Mind ’ (O.S., vol. xvi. p. 355 ; N.S., vol. ii. p. 188), and partly in class-room lectures in Cornell University, N.Y. 2 See ‘Mind’ (N.S., vol. ii. p. 188) for a preliminary study of von Hartmann’s theory of knowledge. X PREFACE. the Greeks. It is greatly to be regretted that Schopenhauer did not give more attention to Aristotle than he did. I hope at another time to be able to do greater justice to von Hart- mann than I have been able to do in this volume. I crave indulgence for the supreme liberty I have taken in often speaking for my author and in often perhaps identifying my exposition or criticism or philosophy with his name or his principles. If I have made him speak and appear to be significant, that is all I care about. I have not always fully worked out what I have suggested, but in this I feel justified by the nature of the task. There are, of course, many things ^ in Schopenhauer to which little reference has been made here, and some to which no reference at all has been made. Xor have I tried to free Schopenhauer from the many charges of inconsistency which may be brought against him. Frauenstadt’s infinite care in this direction, although of great service, seems to me to be often carried too far. The manuscript and the proof-sheets of this work have been read by Professor James Seth, of the Chair of Moral Philosophy, Cornell University; all the proof-sheets by Mr Henry Barker, of Trinity College, Cambridge ; a part of the manuscript and a part of the proof by Mr Eobert P. Hardie, Lecturer on Ancient Philosophy, University of Edinburgh ; a part of the proof by Mr Horman McLean, Fellow and Lecturer of Christ’s College, Cambridge; and the revised parts of the proof, along with some whole chapters, by my colleague at Northwestern, Professor J. Scott Clark, of the Chair of English Language. All these gentlemen have rendered me important service by their suggestions. To other friends, also. ^ Such are, for example, his views upon the psychology of pain, his views upon mathematics, his theory of colours and his optical researches, his opinions upon literature proper, the extent of his knowledge of Eastern religions, or his opinions upon Kant and Kant’s works. PEEFACE. XI I feel indebted at this time : to some for an active interest in the book or in parts of it ; and to some whose friendship has enabled me to understand much of what I have learned about both philosophy and life. In the latter regard I owe much to nearly ten years of intercourse with Professor Laurie of Edinburgh University, some of whose books (the ‘ Metaphysica ’ and the ‘ Ethica ’) long ago revealed to me something of the reality and the possibilities of a philosophy of the will. I have endeavoured, by the use of the capital and in other ways, to call the attention of the reader to the difference between the term Ideas ” (the “ Platonic Ideas ”) and the term “ ideas ” (sense-phenomena, objects). The abbreviation “ H. and K.,” in the footnotes, refers to the English translation of Schopenhauer’s ' World as Will and Idea,’ by E. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (Triibner, 1888. 3 vols.) The edition of Schopenhauer I have used is the sdmmtlicTie Werke. Ziveite Auflage. Keue Ausgabe. Leipzig. Brockhaus. 1888. XOETHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, Evanston, III., U.S.A., March 1896. CONTENTS CHAPTER I. GENERAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUER’S SIGNIFICANCE. Scope of the present Inquiry — Objective and Subjective Elements in a philosophi- cal System— The Reason and the Emotions — Insight and Genius and Reason — That which Schopenhauer compels Philosophy to notice : Schopenhauer and the Zeit-Geist at the beginning of the Century — Naturalism and Idealism — Evolution and Hegel and Schopenhauer : The attitude of mind incident to the study of Schopenhauer : The relation of Mind and Body — Transcen- dentalism and Positive Psychology : Schopenhauer and the Scientific Spirit — The Restrictive and Negative Aspects of Schopenhauer’s teaching : Whether Schopenhauer’s Philosophy is Materialistic : Whether Schopen- hauer knew Science — The Philosophy of Genius : Schopenhauer’s Platonism — The Reasons for his antipathy to the “ Hegelians ” — His attitude to History — His Significance : Kant’s infiuence over Schopenhauer — Speculative Dog- matism — Man the Key to the World : The Philosophy of Religion Pp. 1-59 CHAPTER II. SCHOPENHAUER AND IDEALISM. S ome different aspects of Schopenhauer’s attempt to reduce the world to unity — His Starting-point in Philosophy — Idealism and the different forms of the same : I. Subjective or Naif Idealism — The Reference of all things to the Knowledge or to the Activity of the Self — The Reason of Schopenhauer’s being so much under the Influence of the Presuppositions of Idealism — The Notion of a Bridge between the Subjective and the Objective ; H. Ordinary or Dogmatic or Phenomenological Idealism — That, whether True or False, Idealism tends to become Illusionism — Illusionism in Schopenhauer — That, despite Illusionism, Schopenhauer thinks Idealism to have been proved true — That his own Positive Philosophy is more Real than Idealism ; III. Transcendental Idealism — All Things Related to Each Other — And to Will — Or to Purpose — Results ..... 60-111 XIV CONTENTS. CHAPTER HI. SCHOPENHAUER’S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE. The Relation sustained by the System of Schopenhauer to the Theory of Know- ledge — W]ia.f .-Sp.bnpp.nhauer l earned from Plato and Kant — His Charge against Kant : I. The Element of Kn 6 \Hedge to which Schopenhauer attaches Im^rtance : Perceptions, both lower and higher — (Schopenhauer on the Mutual Relations of his three Elements of Knowledge) ; Conceptions, their Nature and Utility — (Schopenhauer ever eager to insist on the Dangers of Conceptual Knowledge) ; The Ideas, the higher perceptions of the mind ; Criticism of Schopenhauer’s treatment of these three Mental Elements — That they ought not to be so sharply marked off from each other — Nor from our Total Experience of Reality — A Theoretical Reason for Schopenhauer’s Illusionism. — II. That Reason to Schopenhauer represents an Indirect Way of reaching Reality — The Principle that Everything that is in Reason comes from Perception — That Schopenhauer is apt to recur to his idea that Know- ledge is a poor way of reaching Reality. — III. The idea that there are Different Ways of Knowing Different Sides of Reality — Schopenhauer’s Dialectic Difficulty and the Different Forms that it Takes : (a) The alleged Opposition between Formal and Real Knowledge — The Ideas and the Things of Sense — Schopenhauer’s Attitude to the Alleged Reliability of the Knowledge of the Self ; (i 8 ) That Nature becomes more and more difficult to Comprehend as we Ascend in the Scale of Being — The Philosophy of Causation — That Causation in the last resort means Volition — That Volition, however, is Difficult of Comprehension ; ( 7 ) The Apparent Difference between Fact and Necessity — That Real Knowledge has Little Form and Formal Knowledge Little Reality ; (5) That Knowledge becomes Purer and more Objective with the Growth of the Brain — The Difficulty of this Position. — IV. Criticism of Schopenhauer’s Confusion between Consciousness and Self- Consciousness — That we cannot say that Knowledge Falsifies or Phenomen- alises things. Renders them Unknowable, — V. Some Theoretical Advantages of regarding the World as Will — (Characteristic Defect of Schopenhauer’s in regard to the Judgment) — Resume of some Important Features of Schopen- hauer’s Theory of Knowledge ..... 112-170 CHAPTER IV. THE BONDAGE OF MAN. Schopenhauer’s quasi Positivism and Determinism — The Limitations of Know- ledge and the Primary Fact of Volition — I. The Complex Character of Will — Conscious Actions and Reflex Actions — That Conduct is an Organic Whole — The Biological Idea and the Deterministic View of Conduct — That in Will as Rational Conduct two prominent Psycho-physical Tendencies must be dis- tinguished — How Conduct may be systematised — The notion that the Sole CONTENTS. XV Function of Conceptions is to Furnish us with Motives to Action — Whether this notion can be applied to the Fact (Idea?) of Self-Consciousness — That Determinism is not necessarily a Wholly Unsatisfactory Philosophy — What the Science of Human Nature seems to teach on the point — What a Liber- tarian may legitimately contend for in regard to Conduct — That the Intel- lect needs to be schooled into true Service of the Will — What Self-Knowledge or Objectivity of Intellect can mean — II. The Explanation of Human Life in terms of Necessity — The Conscious and the Unconscious in Man — Have the Ideas a Relation to the Will ? — That the Ultimate Explanation of Life is a Practical Explanation — Whether Spontaneity resides in the Intellect or the Will — That Schopenhauer insists more strongly on the Feebleness than on the Utility of Thought — What his Philosophy represents in this regard — Another Reason for the Sense of Illusion that it seems to awaken — III. The Philosphy of Pain — The Idea that Pain exceeds Pleasure — The Real Cause of the Pessimistic Mood — That Men seemed Fated to Form Erroneous Esti- mates about Life — What to Schopenhauer is the Deepest Pain in Life — IV. What this Chapter has Suggested — That there is much that is Illusory in Life — History reveals a series of Illusions — MTiat is most Depressing in Schopenhauer — Another Word on Freedom — Conclusion . 171-227 CHAPTER V. SCHOPENHAUER’S PHILOSOPHY OF ART. Schopenhauer’s Treatment of Art — As compared with that of other Philosophers — Genius and Common-sense — The Emancipating Intellect in Schopenhauer — Whether Schopenhauer can allow for Spiritual or Ideal Volition — Religion as “ Art and Science ” — That Art is an Affair of Perception rather than of the Understanding — I. Knowledge of the Ideas as Different from Scientific Knowledge — Illustration from Schopenhauer — Art and Insight into Human Life — That Matter cannot Express the Ideas — “ Pure Cloudless Knowledge ” — That the Different Arts Express the Different Grades or Ideas of the Will — The Uniqueness of Artistic Perception — That Everything is in a sense Beautiful — II. The Philosophy of Art and the Philosophy of Genius — That Schopenhauer writes more upon the Insight afforded by Art, than upon the Artistic Sense for Life and Reality — The Meaning of This — That Beauty should be Closely Connected with Life — Art and the Restless Will — III. The Nature of the Reality with which Art deals — Schopenhauer’s treatment of Art too Negative — Schopenhauer and Plato and others upon the Nature of Artistic Reality ....... 228-260 CHAPTER VI. SCHOPENHAUER’S PHILOSOPHY OF ART — continued. (a) Limits of Schopenhauer’s treatment of Fine Art — The Personal Equation therein — That his Treatment is Metaphysical — Transcendentalism in Art — XVI CONTENTS. Kant’s ^Esthetic 'Philosophy — Its Merits, according to Schopenhauer — That Art completes Intellectual and Critical Philosophy — That Schopenhauer’s Treatment is too Abstract, too Unhistorical, too Impassive — That it Over- looks the Facts of Artistic Production — And does not Connect Itself with the Will — Classical and Gothic Architecture, and the Modern Feeling for Beauty — (/ 8 ) Other Omissions in Schopenhauer’s Treatment — Art and Illu- sionism and Realism — (The Conflict between the Will and the Idea again) — ( 7 ) Schopenhauer’s Esthetic and the Philosophy of the Universal — Artistic Creation and Function and Development — That Art completes the Teleo- logical view of the World and of Human Life — Art and Ordinary Reality — Formal Conditions of the Beautiful — Beauty and Adaptation — That the World is what we make it to be — (5) Beauty and Pleasure — (Genius and Life) — The Height of Hlsthetic Feeling — Beauty and Life and the Expres- sion of Life — Closing Reflections .... 261-305 CHAPTER VII. SCHOPENHAUER’S MORAL PHILOSOPHY. That to Schopenhauer the Last Meaning of the World is Ethical — I. The Fact of Moral Conduct the Key to the Transcendental Meaning of Things — The Sense in which it is this — II. How Schopenhauer approaches the Problem of Ethics — What he thought of the Ethic of Socrates — That True Nobility of Soul is an Affair not of the Intellect but of the Will — Schopenhajj^rl^ujQpiii- ion s^on th e Ethic of Kant — That Moral it ^annot be ex^ Hined in an “ Exte r^ nal ^Manner— IS cliop^hauer’s own Statement of the Facts of Mo^ity — His Black Picture ofVKe~Facts of* Human Nature — SympatEy~and the Denial of all Selfish Volition — That in these two things a Metaphysical Perception is involved — The “ Affirmation of the Ideas ” — III. Criticism of Schopenhauer’s Views upon Ethics — Whether he overlooks Duty — Whether his Facts are Typical — Whether he is fair to Socrates and Kant — His Attitude to Life that of an Extremist — That the Spirit of the Eighteenth Century is Re- flected in his Difficulties — That he overlooks the Complexity of the Facts of Conduct — Evolution and Sovereignty and Naturalism — The Fundamental Fact of Morality to Schopenhauer — The Will in a State of Natural Conflict with Itself — The Facts of Feeling and Volition more important to Ethics than Abstract or A Priori Knowledge — That the Knowledge implied in Goodness is Intuitive and Mystical, not Rational — IV. The Facts of Conduct and Illusionism — The Difficulty of Pronouncing Correct Moral Judgments — What alone we Know about Ourselves — Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Con- science — Erroneous Assumptions upon which Ordinary Discussions of Free- dom proceed — Whether Men Know what they Mean by Freedom — V. The Difficulty of a Beginning in Ethical Philosophy — The Difficulty of Knowing the Moral Self — The Natural Element of Illusion and Contradiction in the Moral Life — Whether this is surmounted by the Philosophy of Spirit — VI. Significance of the Opposition between Egoism and Altruism — The Possible Irrelevancy and Superficiality of a One-sided Altruism — Some Practical Re- flections — That Ethics leaves us with a Dualism or Hlusionism 306-366 CONTENTS. XVll CHAPTER VIII. SCHOPENHAUER’S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Religion and the Rest of his Thought — I. The Uniqueness of his Treatment of Religion — His Objections to Ordinary Dog- matic Religion — To Rationalism — The Kinds of Religious Phenomena that he Studies — The Religious Literature he cares for — Formal Defects of the Various Philosophies of Religion — How Schopenhauer Classifies Religions — His Opinions on the Leading Philosophical and Historical Religious Systems — II. What his own Philosophy of Religion is — The Eternal Necessity of all Things — The Evil Inherent in the Will — The Negation of the Merely Natural in our Lives, and the Consequences of this Negation — The Philosophy of the Fact of Death — That in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy the Strongest Possible Theoretical Support for Altruism may be found — How Schopenhauer Thinks of the World and of Ordinary Reality — Why we Cannot literally Deny the World — Schopenhauer’s Attitude to the “Two Cardinal Points” in Religion — A Reflection upon the Philosophy of the Idea — The Necessity of taking firm hold of the Positive Element in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy — The Supreme Difficulty in the Study of Schopenhauer — The Crux of the Religious Problem — III. That Religion Presupposes Pessimism — That it Presupposes Idealism — That its Origins must be studied in Connection with the Will— The Inadequacy of Rationalism in Religion — Limitations of Schopenhauer’s Treatment of Religion — What Objective Reality in Religion means — The Philosophy of the Notion of the Objective — The “ Argument from Design ” — The Vitality and the History of Religious — IV. Theoretical Defects in Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Religion — His Attitude to Apologetic — The Nemesis that Overtakes his Hostility to Rationalism and “ Externalism ” — Illusionism again — How to take hold of the Positive Elements in his Teach- ing — The Value of Eastern Religions — The World Illusory to the Egoist — That Philosophy Should Not Doubt the Reality of its Conclusions — That Schopenhauer is a true Kantian — How he Looks at the History of the World — Perfection and Reality an Affair of the Will . . 367-431 CHAPTER IX. THE METAPHYSIC OF SCHOPENHAUER. The Spirit of Schopenhauer’s Metaphysic — I. Illusionism — That each Phase of the System seems to find Illusion in our Experience — The Apparent Op- position between the Will and the Idea — II. The Main Facts of the System — Its Fundamental Idea — The Relative Truth of the Same — That the World is Best Understood When Understood Practically —That in both Philosophy and Science Ontology becomes Teleology — The “ Personal Equation ” in Il- lusionism — That we Must Not be Misled by the Fact that Reality Presents Itself to us in Different Phases — A certain Amount of Illusionism Incident XVlll CONTENTS. to the Philosophy of Will — III. That Schopenhauer Causes us to Alter our Ideas about the Problem of Philosophy — And to Look at the Self in a Dif- ferent Way — That Many Facts seem to Justify the Expediency of this — lY. Criticism of Schopenhauer’s Inability to Correlate Different Ways of Look- ing at Reality, and of his Idea that the World is Necessarily Unintelligible— The Illusionism Incident to the Philosophy of Purpose or Volition — That Individual Effort is not Necessarily Meaningless — Schopenhauer’s Reflections on the Point — Positive Element in Illusionism — What a Teleological View of the World means — How Philosophy might Systematise Knowledge and Reality — The Extreme Danger of Belie^ing that Things are not what they Appear to be — Philosophy A Rehours — V. The Foundations of the System, again — The Broad View of Will — That we Know the World through Action — The Intellect only a Partial Sense for Reality — Not that the World is Ir- rational — Our Knowledge as Real as the Continuity of our Experience — That Nature has Intended that we should Think our Lives — Schopenhauer on the Intellect and the Will — His Neglect of Feeling — And of History 432-48.5 CHAPTER X. THE POSITIVE ASPECTS OF THE SYSTEM. Schopenhauer’s Suggestiveness — Philosophical Affinities of the Different Parts of the System — Some of the Main Lessons it teaches — To whom these are of Value — The Necessity of Pain and Difficulty — That Schopenhauer Himself Knows that Most Estimates of Life are Subjective — That Philosophy itself Must be Viewed as an Effort — What Reality is, on Schopenhauer’s Principles — Illus- tration of this from Physics and Psychology — The “ Relativity ” of Definitions of Reality — That Schopenhauer’s Philosophy seems to take the World as it is — That Man’s Life is an Effort to Idealise the Real — How Experience Ought to be Interpreted — The Economy of Pain and Disappointment — Schopen- hauer and Naturalism and Evolution — Some Metaphysical Advantages of Regarding the World as Will — Logical Dangers of Idealism — That Idealism has a Tendency to Pessimism — The Element of Contradiction and Illusion in Experience — What to do in View of the Existence of this Element — Criti- cism and Optimism and Pessimism — Concluding Reflections . 486-521 EPILOGUE ........ 522-527 INDEX 529-5.38 SCHOPENHAUEE’S SYSTEM. CHAPTER 1. GENERAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUER’S SIGNIFICANCE. “ Die Zeit wird kommen, wo, wer nicht weiss, was ich iiber einen Gegen- stand gesagt habe, sich als Ignoranten blossstellt.” ^ “ 'Whoever, I say, has with me gained this conviction . . . will recognise this will of which we are speaking not only in those phenomenal existences which exactly resemble his own, in men and animals as their inmost nature, but the course of reflection wiH lead him to recognise the force which ger- minates and vegetates in the plant, and indeed the force through which the crystal is formed, that by which the magnet turns to the north pole, the force whose shock he experiences from the contact of two different kinds of metal, the force which appears in the elective affinities of matter as repul- sion and attraction, decomposition and combination, and, lastly, even gravi- tation, which acts so powerfully throughout matter, draws the stone to the earth and the earth to the sun, — all these, I say, he will recognise as differ- ent only in their phenomenal existence, but in their inner nature as iden- tical, as that which is directly known to him so intimately and so much better than anything else, and which in its most distinct manifestation is called wiliy ^ The philosophy of Schopenhauer has been for some years and is now in most civilised countries matter of public and private interest and surmise, ridicule, inquiry, and study. While this may not recommend the system to the pure ^ Schopenhauer an Frauenstadt, 10th Feb. 1856. - Schopenhauer’s Welt als Wille, &c., i. 131. Eng. transl. by Haldane and Kemp, i. 142. A 9 Schopenhauer’s system. philosopher, who is aware that for the last three-quarters of this century speculative philosophy may be said to have been in a period of decadence, the fact of widespread interest be- speaks for it a presumption that in it surely are to be found many elements appealing to many minds. In the following pages an attempt will be made to exhibit the extent of its breadth and its depth. Different lines of interpretation and criticism have been followed by different writers in explaining Schopenhauer, such as the study of the system through the personality of its author, or through his philosophical and political environment, or from the side of some of the great ultimate ideas of philosophy; and all of these haVe their justification. We shall he concerned with the general sig- nificance of the system, and hope to bring many of these lines incidentally to a focus. But if Schopenhauer is really a great philosopher, he will have something to say that ap- plies to all time ; and it is the possibility of this which determines our inquiry. We shall seek also to discover where we stand in philosophy after Schopenhauer. Schopen- hauer prophesied his own immortality as a thinker, and said that his works would be read when those of Hegel and Bichte and other clii major es of philosophy would lie on the shelves of the scholar or of the seller of old books, and his words have come true. Why is he read ? Fichte said, as we know, that the kind of philosophy a man chooses depends on the kind of a man he is. This is true, but the significance of the assertion is not at first sight apparent. Granting that a man’s philosophy — idealism or materialism, pessimism or optimism — depends on the kind of man he is, what does this prove about philosophy ? Does philosophy simply follow temperament, and is it wholly a matter of temperament ? Again, does a man’s choice in gen- eral depend on the kind of man he is, and if so, is there any freedom of choice ? Both these questions raise them- GENERAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUER's SIGNIFICANCE. 3 selves naturally in the case of Schopenhauer’s personality, and what is more vital (for a philosophy includes not only man but the world), in the case of his philosophy.^ It will become evident from our author that it is not really a reproach to philosophy to say that it in a sense expresses temperament or character. Philosophy indeed cannot neglect the temperament of man, for the temperament of man is a reflex or a differen- tiation of his sense for reality, and may therefore actually give to philosophy some of its facts. Character, too, as an estab- lished disposition or state of the whole man, must reveal the various tendencies of man’s psychical and organic life in a state either of harmony or of discord ; and consequently the study of character will help us to know whether a given state- ment about the nature of the world is, or is not, such as to appeal and commend itself to human nature. It is perhaps possible, for example, through the study of temperament and character, to strike a balance between what Hume called the “ easy and obvious ” ^ way of philosophising and the “ abstract and profound,” and this too without degrading philosophy. Of course we might simply state it to be a fact that, from the standpoint of comparative psychology or anthropology, various systems of thought and belief have been expressive only of differences in the character and temperament of men, and might allow the logic of system-building to square itself with this fact. Any sense of humiliation which we experience from the reflection that it is unphilosophical for philosophy to follow temperament, arises out of the fact of our minds being still ruled by the old philosophical fallacy that reason is superior to emotion, or the form of thought to the matter of thought. One of the most instructive lessons we shall have to learn from Schopenhauer will have a bearing on this very question of the relation of reason to emotion, and of the formal or rational ^ Cf. infra, chap. iv. p. 177 et jpassim. 2 Inquiry concerning Human Understanding, section i. 4 Schopenhauer’s system. aspects of things to their material or empirical aspects ; for his entire system lives and moves on the strength of such opposi- tions and on the controversies arising out of them. Indeed, the whole secret of the study of Schopenhauer lies in the effort that it compels us to make to study the value of the inferential conclusions of our intellectual faculties in face of the natural conclusions to which we are impelled by our natural instincts. The refrain of his philosophy throughout is that man is at bottom nothing but a horrible wild animal, and yet he recog- nises perfectly well at the same time that man will insist upon applying his intellect in a free speculative manner to the problem of the nature of reality. Like many other philosophers, Schopenhauer is perfectly explicit on the point that the only thing that can properly be called knowledge is abstract conceptual knowledge. In this sense, he says, “the proper antithesis to knowing is feel- ing.’’ He is so convinced that abstract conceptual knowledge is the only knowledge, that he is not inclined to attach any cognitive significance to any kind of feeling. “ The word feeling has throughout a negative connotation — namely this, that something which is actually present to our consciousness is not a concept, not abstract knowledge of the reason.” This is of course utterly false in point of fact, and we soon see that Schopenhauer’s statement of fact is here largely coloured by his preconceived theory. AVhat is really interesting and significant, however, in Schopenhauer is not what he says — his psychology has too many crudities to admit of being scien- tifically expounded — but what he does with what he says. The one kind of feeling in which we find Schopenhauer to be supremely interested is instinct, and all the difi&culties of his philosophy arise from the fact that, in spite of his prejudice against feeling as irrational, he does find in instinct a kind of positive knowledge, which he through all his writing and thinking hurls up against the abstract or inferential know- GENERAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUER’s SIGNIFICANCE. 5 ledge of the understanding or the reason. The duty that falls to the interpreter of Schopenhauer’s system is to extract the positive knowledge or consciousness that is contained in feel- ing, and to connect it with the positive knowledge or con- sciousness that is contained in the concept, or in reason. By so doing he will not only make a synthesis of the different elements in Schopenhauer’s own system, but relate much of Schopenhauer’s apparently negative work to the positive work of his predecessors and contemporaries in philosophy. Schopen- hauer was himself unable to connect the philosophy of cog- nition with the philosophy of instinct or impulse, and this is one of the reasons why his system presents the appearance of being throughout a sort of illusionism in which the higher and lower phases of man’s activity seem alternately to contend with and to cancel each other. Of course if a philosophy includes not only man but the world, there ought to be some impersonal as well as personal elements in a philosophical system. That part of philosophy which is called metaphysic is, in idea at least, simply the most scientific statement possible of the nature of the world, what in German would be called Der Inhegriff der Gesammt- Wissenschaft, a methodised statement of the laws and prin- ciples of all knowledge and all science. We have to say “ in idea ” because, however earnest our purpose may be to study the world in an objective and impersonal way, experi- ence seems to show that the slightest science and the “ slight- est philosophy ” bring us back to man as at least the most characteristic object in the w^orld. Plato and Aristotle and Kant all complete their enumeration of the points of view from which the world can be regarded, by an insistance on the idea of the good or the good for man ; and this is in a sense a subjective or personal conception. It is because the philosophy of Hegel does not do this, but ends in the “ Idea ” in and for itself rather than in the idea of a good for man as 6 Schopenhauer’s system. man, that the mind which has been imbued with the spirit of the Hegelian dialectic has to seek over again for some point of rapport with the real world, with ostensible terra firma. Schopenhauer passes quite naturally from a merely critical study of the world of experience to a teleological study of the end of action, and the general outcome of his system is to substitute teleology for ontology, or to resolve ontology — the study of entities — into teleology — the study of purposes. To him, as one knows, the will is everything. It is in fact hard to find what might be called a purely objective study of the world. The nearest substitute for it must be sought among the Greeks ; for with them it is not in such an anti- thesis as that of subject and object, the result of much head- sore travelling on the via longa of modern philosophy, that we find the highest categories of thought, and therefore the last fulcra of metaphysical thinking, but in the “ one ” and the “ many ” of Plato and the dvvafUQ and IvEpyeia of Aristotle. But even the Greeks never completely eliminated the subjec- tive aspects of philosophy from their systems. Aristotle, for example, in giving an analysis of moral freedom, found that, although human action seemed to a certain extent only a par- ticular kind of phenomenal causation, man had yet to be re- garded as more than a merely natural object, since he has a principle of causation in himself.^ It is, after all, too, only because the Greeks had to envisage all the categories and distinctions of their thought in an objective way so as to suit the genius of their thought, that their writings seem to be less rent by the difficulties of dualism than those of most modern philosophers. But if metaphysic be to a certain extent the systematisation of science, there ought to be somehow by this time a body of doctrine common to all philosophers about the ways in which ^ Cf. Eth. Nic., iii. B. ... rj apxh auTif eiSoTt ra /co0’ cKacrra eV oTs 7} irpa^is. GENERAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUER’s SIGNIFICANCE. 7 man should regard the world, a recognition of the possible ways in which he does, and must, regard the universe in which he finds himself. Such a schematic construction of the world, or of the knowable world, would seem to represent the only possible philosophy. If it is objected that this is only the critical idea of philosophy, it must be confessed that it is. Another main lesson we shall have to learn from Schopenhauer is, that although Kant virtually exploded and exposed ontological dogmatism, dogmatism about the essence of the universe, for ever in philosophy, we have been very slow in learning his lesson ; and that, in general, wher- ever philosophy has become dogmatic, it has ventured beyond the merely critical or reflective plane of thought on to the scientific or observational plane, and by so doing has virtually submitted itself to all the tests of inductive philosophy and historically recorded fact. Schopenhauer’s philosophy is a protest written “ in large letters ” against the idea that a complete knowledge of the essence of the world and the purpose of the world is to be found in reason alone. This negative aspect of his teaching is really the continuation or the drawing to a conclusion of the criticism of all speculative dogmatism instituted by Kant in the ‘ Criticism of Pure Eeason.’ Eeason to Schopenhauer is passive in its nature and not active, and can only system- atise the material brought to it by experience, so that the full meaning of reality can be known only in direct experience and not in the abstractions of mere thought. Doubtless he himself falls into a new dogmatism about the nature of the world, a dogmatism of the will instead of a dogmatism of the reason {panthelism instead of panlogism), and so lays himself open to the strictures of scientific observation, which has no difficulty in showing that there are other things in the world besides “willing” and “rushing” and “striving.” Schopenhauer is, in fact, in some respects less successful in his positive than 8 Schopenhauer’s system. in his negative philosophy, and we shall be throughout this volume less occupied with the attempt to treat the world as a phenomenon of the will, than with the attempt to show the significance of the line of thought which led to the sub- stitution of will as a world-principle instead of reason. It may be justifiable to condemn a mere philosophy of the reason without doing violence to the fact that reason is of distinct service to us in the interpretation of experience, and our author will teach us this in spite of his own great incon- sistency in the matter. And so far as the connection with Kant goes, we may learn from Schopenhauer that the dog- matism of criticism, the dogmatism about what we can with our unassisted faculties know about the nature of the world, is perhaps the only dogmatism that will stand the test of time. Philosophy begins in wonder, and philosophical criticism is simply wonder made conscious of itself, of its proper scope and its proper limitations. But there is more in philosophy than pure metaphysic, or, at any rate, there have been included under metaphysic ques- tions where temperament has more to show for itself than in the treatment of the world merely from the standpoint of the categories or the principles of the understanding. Kant, for example, included in philosophy the question, “ What can I hope ? ” and the question, “ What ought I to do ? ” as well as the question, “ What can I know ? ” Kow it would seem im- possible to give an answer to the question, “ What can I hope ? ” and still more to the question, “ What ought I to do ? ” without considering the question, “What would I ? ” or “What do I wish ? ” In short, any supposed “ end ” that the system of things may have — for it is about the end of things that man emphatically asks, when he asks, “ What can I hope ? ” — must be an end that embraces man and the feelings and nature which he finds himself to possess, must be an end for man as Aris- totle said. Of course from a certain point of \dew it seems a GENERAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUER’s SIGNIFICANCE. 9 piece of assumption on the part of man to think that he has a right to hope for anything, as many men partly outside phil- osophy, like Carlyle, are never tired of reminding us. We must waive, however, just now, this contention, and think of the extent to which the feelings of man may conceivably enter into the computation of the philosopher in pronouncing his judgment upon the tendency or the end of things. It is immaterial for our purpose whether the doctrine of teleology (the name that philosophers give to this whole line of con- sideration) be regarded as falling inside or outside that strict body of doctrine which might be called metaphysic proper. There is at least a distinction between that part of philosophy which sets forth merely the reason or order that is in things, and that other part which attempts somehow to give man what has been aptly called a “ synthesis of the world in terms of his emotions ” and of his practical nature : “ attempts to givp,” be- cause a negative philosophy like pessimism or scepticism may teach that the world is essentially unsatisfactory to man, and thus end not by answering our question but by explaining it away, leaving us with scientific metaphysic, the metaphysic of the reason, as the only solid part of philosophy at all. We may at least say that a philosophical teleology or meta- physic of ethics, in its answer to the question of the end of things and the real warrant of our hopes, must give us a kind of philosophy that is suited to all kinds of men, to the man of feeling and the ordinary man as well as to the man of reason and genius. As Schopenhauer somewhere says, it is a much more vital criticism of a man to say that he has a feeble heart although he has great mental powers, than to say his heart is good but his intellect is weak. Now it is a matter of literary history that German philosophy, from Leibnitz and Wolff to Kant and Hegel, gave to the ethical problem answers that were prevailingly, or almost exclusively, intellectual. The philosophy of that period, as a rule, made so little of the natural or direct 10 schopenhauee’s system. feelings of man that it almost seemed, like Spinoza, to throw ethics out of ethics.” It is an old error, indeed, of philosophy to make more of philosophic virtue than of civic virtue, to convert virtually the Stoic maxim “ Follow Nature ” into the maxim “ Study Nature,” and there have never been wanting those who have tried by all means in their power to convert into a positive cult the old error of seeking above all things wisdom. It is enough for man to know, to understand, — him- self or anything else, — we are told ; happiness somehow will follow that. The philosophy which Fichte sought to found on the main critical ideas of Kant is primarily a philosophy of action ; but even he can hardly be said to have freed himself from a belief in the spontaneity and the all-sufficingness of reason, an idea which the Critical Philosophy used as an in- strument or weapon, and did not test while yet seeking to test all other things with it. It is true that in reading Fichte one gets the impression that feeling is in a sense an embodi- ment of reason, as it is to Aristotle (ra iraQr] Xoyot ivvXoC ) ; but precisely because it is too much this, and because the man of genius or reason is regarded as superior after all to the man of action, we feel Fichte’s analysis of action to be inadequate to the facts of life. His optimism, too, is not like that of the Christian religion, which first goes down into the “ mire ” of human nature before seeking to put it on the rock ” of strength and aspiration ; it moves on such a high plane that it only appeals to the man “ who is in a sense good already.” It is one of the main merits of Schopenhauer to have chal- lenged, and on the whole successfully challenged, this vaunted spontaneity of reason which was of course an integral part of Kant’s philosophy, and a root-assumption of Hegel’s from first to last. One is always reading in Hegel of “just letting pure reason go,” float as it were into its own ether. As if “ pure reason ” carried everything with it ! In the ' Phaenomenology ’ we read that the “conception of philosophy is the idea that thinks GENERAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUER’s SIGNIFICANCE. 11 itself/’ and that the “ object of philosophy is the notion in all the movements of its development/’ “ that truth is the move- ment of truth in and for itself,” and that “ reason is to become all reality ” ; and all these phrases indicate what is perfectly well recognised to he the spirit of Hegel’s whole philosophy. ‘‘ The Idea freely lets itself go out of itself, while yet resting in itself, and remaining absolutely secure of itself.” ^ As “ pure reason ” means in general to Schopenhauer pure nonsense, we may well pause at the outset over the conception of philo- sophy as to some extent necessarily an expression of tempera- ment, or of natural feeling, or of character. In this conception there may be an element of truth. The feelings play a tremendous part in Schopenhauer’s system, and this certainly explains the human interest that attaches itself to his writings. People are in general far more ready to listen to a terrible lie or a great half-truth about their passions, than to careful reasoning about the nature of the intellect. To take an extreme instance, the case of the greatest feeling which man is supposed to have (an “ affect ” or feeling which is also an impulse or passion in the strictest sense), the feeling of love, Schopenhauer more than once expresses, as do M. Eenan and others, the greatest surprise that philosophy has almost entirely neglected the study of the attraction of the sexes, which “ shows itself,” in his eyes, “ next to the will to live ” (which in fact it is according to him) “ as the strongest and most active of all impulses. It claims continually quite half of the energies and thoughts of the younger half of mankind, and it is the ultimate aim of all human effort. It has an injurious influence on the most important affairs, and breaks up at any hour the most serious pursuits, setting occasionally the greatest heads into temporary confusion. It breaks up important relations, tears asunder the strongest bonds, takes sometimes life itself or health, ^ Hegel. By Edward Caird, LL.D. (Blackwoods’ Philosophical Classics), p. 197. 12 Schopenhauer’s system. sometimes riches, rank, and happiness, as its offering, and makes even the honest unscrupulous, the faithful unfaithful, and in fact is on the whole a malevolent demon.” It is not only, however, on the influence of sexual love that Schopen- hauer writes at length in his system. All the feelings and impulses are made the subject-matter of his thought ; so much so, indeed, that his system seems as much a pathology as a philosophy of human nature. He enlarges on the effect of fright, anger, emulation, joy, fear upon the intellect, maintain- ing that in general the intellect cannot work freely while these feelings are present to influence and to warp its deci- sions, and that a calm quiet judgment upon life, suclT'as phil- osophy should aim at, is a matter of the very greatest difficulty. Such a judgment is difficult because it involves a solution of the question about the relation of the automatic and spon- taneous and instinctive tendencies in man to his reflective and deliberative and rational tendencies. And the whole philosophy of this question lies open in Schopenhauer, partly solved and partly unsolved. We may say, of course, with the evolutionists, that the difficulty is largely one of our own making, because as a matter of fact reason itself is only an instinct, more complex perhaps than other instincts, but still an instinct whose workings we may scientifically describe and determine. This idea is expressed in Schopenhauer, and it involves the question of a purely naturalistic treatment of man being taken to be the final philosophy of human action. If, however, we regard reason as somehow superior to instinct and passion, as partly directive of them, we raise the question how that which is seemingly inevitable and automatic in its workings (passion and impulse) can be thought of as capable of being controlled from without. Ought man indeed to con- trol passion and instinct, if these be the legacy which nature has left to him ? Is not instinct after all more powerful than reason, and does it not cover a far larger area of life ? Is not . GENERAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUER’s SIGNIFICANCE. 13 instinct, according to Evolution, the organised experience of the past ? Schopenhauer in short illustrates and expresses all the difficulties incident to the effort which the nineteenth century has had to make to correlate what was previously regarded to be characteristic of the animals with what was thought to be peculiar to man. It is the service of Schopenhauer to have reversed the whole process of German philosophy, and to have looked at man from the side of irrational action and passion, things to which Kant’s ethics and Hegel’s system had done scant justice. Ko man ever felt more deeply or more consist- ently than Schopenhauer how thin and hollow and super- ficial any merely intellectual philosophy of life was. He saw what Vauvenargues meant when he said, “ Toutes les grandes pens4es viennent du cc&urJ' The idea that an organ, the brain,^ which can “ only work for a few hours at a stretch,” and is dependent upon the “ humours and tension of the nerves which constantly change with the hours, days, and years,” should be regarded as equal to solving the riddle of the world, appeared to him ridiculous. He always insisted that the quality of knowledge was more important than its quantity, and that we should strive rather to ‘‘ gain insight ” than to add to our knowledge. If we were dependent on the amount of our knowledge, no man, he suggests, could judge of life until he had reached the end of it, and at that time the intellect or the brain could not be relied upon to interpret what had been experienced. A clear and pure and direct intuition into life, a whole sense for reality, always weighed with Schopenhauer far more than the greatest power of abstract thought. He admired, for example, Kant’s power of abstract thought, but, like Heine, he could never think of Kant as a genius comparable to Plato or Buddha. Scholars ^ It is essential in studying Schopenhauer to remember tliat “mind” and “ brain ” are convertible terms. 14 Schopenhauer’s system. in like manner, lie always maintained, learned from books, while the real genius read in the book of the world. Again, “ God save us,” he said once, in writing of his mother, “ from women whose soul has shot up into mere intellect ! ” While Schopenhauer had the fullest sympathy with the attitude of the wise man toward the ills and accidents of life as something merely inevitable — to be borne quietly, in fact — and for the mental rest which the insight of genius brings with it, he had a profound disbelief in and antipathy to the philosophy of the reason as being a cold and external way of looking at life. He is, strange to say, at^once an iconoclast of speculative systems as such and a believer in genius- worship, tending, like his talented disciple Hietsche,^ to judge of a state or a people or an epoch by its capacity to be or not to be a foster-mother of great minds. Many men like Herder and Jacobi and Schiller and Goethe had felt the intensely formal and abstract character of the philosophy of Kant, but it was left to Schopenhauer to point out to philosophy the direction in which a theory of the emotions and activities of man could be sought. One of our hardest problems, however, will be just to reconcile Schopenhauer’s teaching on instinct and passion, with his notorious belief in what he called genius and the pure insight of genius. To take another example, all students of philosophy have in reading Kant found it very difficult to decide whether or not man is free when he does wrong. Wrong or passionate action is something that has really no place in Kant; it is action which is inexplicable just as it is in Plato, where man is “ mastered by passion ” when he does wrong, and where Socrates cannot see how one “ can be knowingly bad.” ^ Cf. Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen : Schopenhauer als Erzieher, s. 21 et 'passim. Schopenhauer often talks of the “secret awe” with which we ought to regard the work of genius. The contemplation of such work is to him (see chaps. V. and vi.) a step towards the emancipation of the mind. GENERAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUEr’s SIGNIFICANCE. 15 It would certainly be a fine thing for the human race did evil and the bad play no part in a man’s mental system, but the fact remains that society through the state punishes the evil-doer. Hegel, as we know, makes out the culprit to be free when he repents and accepts his punishment, but evades for the student the question about the freedom or necessity of the man’s power of action before he is convicted. Hegel, that is, tends to a large extent to face questions of psycho- logy and ethics from 'the standpoint of other sciences, such as jurisprudence and theology. In general Hegel works syn- thetically through man and the sciences, from the individual consciousness to the cosmic consciousness, from the merely natural to the spiritual, from the mere idea of a thing to the thing itself, from possibility to actuality, from the higher sciences to the lower, or from the lower sciences {e.g., an- thropology) to the higher {e.g., psychology) ; and it is just because he seems to do this on the strength of the mere assumption, that of course philosophy must be different from science and must set forth only the universal element in things, without apparently having first done full justice to Kant’s criticism of all the highest ideas of the reason, that one feels Hegel’s general procedure to be pretty well “ in the air.” It was just this question why we should seek to pass so easily from one plane of thought to another, from matter say to spirit, that the human mind was beginning to ask at the commencement of this century — and Hegel seemed to be in the aether without ever having been seen to leave the earth, or to construct his balloon. A balloon too, as some one has said, is a “ very fine thing, if one does not wish to go any- where in particular.” And we are never sure of our direction in Hegel; whether, indeed, he is working downwards from theology to metaphysics, or upwards from nature to spirit, or in a circle, whether analytically or synthetically. It is no doubt intellectually satisfactory to think the world 16 Schopenhauer’s system. downwards, or from the point of view of “ the whole ” ; man had done so for two thousand years before Schopenhauer, he had had gods and heroes for his ancestors, and “ trailed clouds of glory ” after him, and the like. The nineteenth century began to look at the world from below upwards, and Schopen- hauer was its philosophical mouthpiece. And Schopenhauer could never have done the work he did had he not been a man of titanic feeling as well as of titanic intellect. The irrational or daemonic element in Schopenhauer was as strong as the rational or regulative ; and his experience of life was such as to bring the non-rational side of things prominently before his mind, and to make him seek an explanation of it. In the Kanto-Hegelian philosophy, as indeed in philosophy generally before Schopenhauer, evil and passion and the irrational had simply been ‘marked with a minus quantity before it ; and if Schopenhauer had not been a man who had more interest in the failures in life and nature than in the successes, in the bondage and necessity of man than in his liberty and freedom, he could not have done the work he did in philosophy. What we want to learn from Schopenhauer is not that it is as easy to read the world from below upwards as from above downwards, so that we may put Schopenhauer and Hegel together and state the world as “ a sum that comes out in two ways ” ; but that both these ways of regarding the world are to a great extent partial, and that most philosophies indeed have been partial ways of viewing the world. The personal element that one usually studies in the case of a philosopher is the extent to which he is influenced by the ideas of his time about man and the world. It is well known that nearly all the great philosophers have been men who were well acquainted with all the knowledge of their time, and that most great systems can be regarded as the highest theoretical expression of the ideas of an age on what GENERAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUER’s SIGNIFICANCE. 17 is knowable. Schopenhauer’s system, like the rest, is cer- tainly all this, and has its place in the history of human thought as the more or less unified or systematic expression of some of the leading tendencies of nineteenth - century thinking. Schopenhauer is the last of the great original speculative philosophers after Kant ; and in studying his system, we study in a sense the attitude of speculative phil- osophy to the march of the critical and historical and scien- tific thought of our century. He is the natural man facing the idealism of art and philosophy — the natural man of whom Darwin and Haeckel and Spencer have written in the natural sciences, and Eousseau and the anarchists and socialists in the political sciences, and M. Zola and the realists in literature proper. The Idealism of art and philosophy and religion ! That to Schopenhauer is a fact of the world just as much as the things about which physiology and zoology speak. It is in fact infinitely more, he thinks ; and if philosophy cannot retain its hold on idealism while doing full justice to natural- ism, then in his eyes it fails in its mission. Schopenhauer’s published works supply an extensive reper- toire of art - criticism and of the philosophy of art and of the philosophy of religion and mysticism. He classifies the arts, and holds music to be the chief of all the arts, and to be in fact the best key to reality ; and he finds in art and in religious quietism and mysticism the means of “ overcoming the world.” The natural man, as Schopenhauer sees him, is really antagonistic to all these things. He needs to be “ born again ” before he can appreciate them, and when he is “ born again ” he seeks, according to Schopenhauer, to escape as much as possible from the natural life which he feels to be in direct contradiction to the real life of the restored mind. The parallelism to Christianity is obviously very close, and it has to be confessed that however much Schopenhauer deprecates the idea of the mind that is truly B 18 Schopenhauer's system. philosophical seeking for religious consolation, the metaphysi- cal scheme which he gives to the world is in its final out- come a scheme of salvation. He believes that annihilation and not immortality is the only guerdon for man, and in this we certainly reach the limits of naturalism. Schopen- hauer is a pessimist to the last, because the “ light from Heaven ” in the “ pure intuitions ” of art and of “ perfect goodness ” and of “ perfect insight ” is a light that “ leads astray ” ; it is only a lurid flicker of light, a will-o’-the-wisp after all. He makes us think that art and religion take us out of life, and away from it, rather than more deeply and truly into it. How is it that these things fail Schopenhauer at the very point where they should help him ? Before Schopenhauer the current idea on the matter practi- cally was, that the natural man or human beast had as little place in philosophy, had as little to do with it, as he had with the “ kingdom of grace ” of the theologians. The baptism of pure reason was virtually thought necessary to make man a fit student of philosophy, and Schelling indeed said so, advocating the need of a special faculty for philosophy. German philosophy had certainly forgotten that it was the reputed glory of Socrates to have brought philosophy down from heaven to earth and made her dwell in cities and market-places, and it was only through the appearance of a great original untamed force like Schopenhauer in the arena of philosoplry that philosophy was called back from spinning metaphysical subtleties to an honest, positive, and laborious attempt to understand the actual world of natural birth and maturity and decay. Hot that Schopenhauer himself was uninfluenced by the idea of the “ flights of genius ” {G-enie- schwilnge) of the Eomanticists and of Fichte and Schelling, but only that he insisted that philosophy should walk along the earth with the bete humaine before thinking of Pegasus-like flights in the air. GENEEAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUER’s SIGNIFICANCE. 19 Xo doubt in saying this, one does in a sense suggest the reflection that, if Schopenhauer in the nineteenth century proposed a return to naturalism, or even placed philosophy at the point of view of naturalism, he was taking a backward instead of a forward step, since even Kant, not to mention his successors in German philosophy, may be said to have freed philosophy and man from the chains of the naturalism and superficial empiricism that almost conquered the world in the eighteenth century. Two or three things may be said in answer to this reflection. In the first place, the naturalism with which philosophy is confronted in Schopenhauer is the naturalism not of the eighteenth but of the nineteenth century, a naturalism whose real drift Schopenhauer divined before Comte and Darwin and Spencer had written. “ Each indi- vidual effort of the will may be seen in the difference of organic form it brings about. The nature of the place, for example, in which its prey dwells determines the shape of an animal.” He early accepted the idea of the descent of man’s body from a lower organism, and seems to have specu- lated on the consequences of that theory, before others had faced the theory itself. “ If ISTature had only taken its last step to man from an elephant instead of from an ape, how different would man then have been ! He would have been an intelligent elephant, or an intelligent dog, instead of an intelligent monkey.” ^ Schopenhauer, in point of fact, thrust upon philosophy the duty of squaring itself not with the atomistic, mechanical, physical naturalism of the eighteenth century, but with the organic, evolutionary, biological, and psychical naturalism of the nineteenth. It may be recognised at the end of this century that the whole genesis-philosophy of Evolution is a piece of unproved and improvable dog- matism. Evolution refers to process, and not to origin. But whatever truth or untruth there lay in Evolution, Schopen- ^ Aus Schopenhauer’s haudschrift. Nachlass, s. 348. 20 Schopenhauer’s system. hauer was one of the first to be willing to go jiisqyCau lout in the matter. We must remember that owing to the interest of the English mind in German idealism, after idealism had ceased to have an influence in Germany, — an interest fostered by Coleridge and Carlyle, and then by the Scottish and English Hegelian teachers of philosophy, — we have become blinded to the fact that Schopenhauer was a true successor of Kant, living and writing in the very years when Hegel was ascending and filling the philosophical horizon. It is moreover largely owing to the fact that Hegel was the triumphant philosopher at once of the political restoration period and of the literary renaissance period in Germany, that the work of Schopenhauer on the more purely iinimrsal and personal (as opposed to the historical and impersonal aspects of the philosophical problem was so completely neglected by a patriotic and aspiring public. Say what one will about Hegel, he is pre-eminently the philosopher of the early restoration years of the nineteenth century ; he gave thinking Germans what they seemed for a fatal moment to have lost in the revolution period. Professor A. Seth^ says that it is the growing feeling of many students that Hegel’s real Antaeus- like strength lies in the ground of history. While one may not be altogether inclined to acquiesce in the feeling of those who entertain this opinion, in so far as they fail to take account of Hegel’s unparalleled dialectic ability, the outcome of the opinion may be taken to mean that it is impossible to understand Hegel apart from history. Schopenhauer on the contrary faces the philosophical problem as having an interest ^ By this it is meant that Schopenhauer’s philosophy is occupied with the eternal question of how far the individual man can know the ultimate meaning of the world, and of how much meaning the world may have for him as an individual. Hegel’s philosophy, on the contrary (fortunately for Hegel him- self), gave men a complete justification of the history and policy of the German nation. - From Kant to Hegel, p. 169. GENERAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUER’s SIGNIFICANCE. 21 for the individual independently of his place in history. Time, to Schopenhauer, was merely a form of our thinking; and to him the individual really confronted the world now with as pronounced a sense of wonder and mystery as he had on the morning of creation. The species “ man ” was to him an eternally new and an eternally old phenomenon, a timeless assertion of the will to live. The philosophy of history con- sequently had no meaning for him ; he only cared, like John the Baptist, about the timeless nature of the world and of the individual. In nations as nations he had little interest, and even less in the Germany 'which after 1815 was only becoming something more than a mere aggregate of individual territories. Prussia he hated, and in his private life he lived aloof from all the struggles of the century, from all the efforts and aspirations of la souveraine canaille. Patriotism he held to be a spurious virtue resting on ignorance and prejudice ; ^ and he had too little faith in average human nature to believe at all in democracy. And so, in his thought, it is only the destiny of the individual and of his knowledge, and the seem- ingly nugatory character of all that the mere individual can do, that give him food for reflection. ''Eaclem seel aliter ” is all 'that he said about history. To have read Herodotus was quite enough in that regard. The confusions then in Schopenhauer’s philosophy (and his whole philosophy is a philosophy of confusionism or illusion- ism “) are the outcome of the attempt of the “ ape and tiger ” philosophy to break in upon the glorious inheritance of the idealised human person. He was once plunged for days into reflection over an interesting ape that had been brought to ^ “ Der Patriotismus, wenn er im Reiche der Wissensebaften sich geltend machen will, ein schmutziger Geselle ist, den man hinauswerfen soil. Denn was kann impertinenter sein, als da, wo das rein und allgemein Menschliche betrieben wird . . . seine Yorliebe fiir die Nation, welcher . . . u.s.w.” — ‘Parerga,’ Werke, vi. 523. - Cf. supra, p. 5. 22 Schopenhauer’s system. Frankfort : its eyes seemed to him like those of “ the prophet ” gazing over the “ wilderness ” into the “ promised land ” (man’s mind). His system represents the birth-throes of the idea of evolution, at first stupidly thought to suggest a process that had happened in time (instead of a timeless process as in Aristotle and Heraclitus). A student needs to feel at once the awe of Kant for the “ starry heaven above and the moral law’ w’ithin,” and the surprise engendered by a lamp-light inspec- tion of the similarity in structure between the brain of a man and that of an ape, to be in a sympathetic attitude for the study of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. “ Kothing is better calculated to lead us to a knowdedge of the identit}'" of what is essential in the characteristics of brutes and men than having to do somewhat with zoology and anatomy.” So far indeed is Schopenhauer from being a retrograde philosopher that he is a direct successor of Kant, — perhaps on an opposite line to that of Hegel, — continuing to study the real as a philosopher, not the real, it is true, of mere naturalism, but the real of nascent and all- conquering evo- lutionism. Hegel’s philosophy is also a study in evolution ; in fact it is an evolution, a metaphysical evolution. But it is one of the most serious problems in the history of philo- sophy to study Hegel’s dialectic evolution in relation to what is ordinarily meant and scientifically meant by evolution. Yon Hartmann rightly insists that much seeming evolution in Hegel is only an evolution of ideas in Hegel’s brain.^ All students of Hegel have felt this, and felt it most acutely at the moment when a proper understanding of science and nature seems obtainable, only if we have the courage to throw the lumber of his whole method off our shoulders. It would certainly be rash to hint that Schopenhauer clearly recognises the difference between metaphysical and ^ Cf. von Hartmann, Das philosophische Dreigestirn des neun. Jalirh. (s. 609, Studien u. Aufsatze). GENERAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUER's SIGNIFICANCE. 23 scientific or historical evolution. We have little interest in making out either philosopher to be less culpable than he seems to be, but we must try to see how, on a rough pro- visional acceptance of the evolutionary hypothesis, Schopen- hauer’s philosophy stands nearer both to science and to life than Hegel’s absolute idealism. Any one who is acquainted with the history of nineteen th- century thinking would say that one of its great characteristic achievements is to have shown nature to include both what was known previously as the natural and what was known previously as the supernatural. John Stuart Mill, standing at its centre and being for Englishmen one of the most typical minds of the century, thought of nature as including both phenomena and causes, both the world and God, as it were, nature and grace, phenomena and noumena. We all know how the noumenal or supra-sensuous world even in Kant seems to fioat in sether, just as it does in Plato, and never to be com- pletely brought into real relation with the actual world with all its fulness of life and colour. Hegel, on the contrary, thought of himself as the modern Aristotle, giving us the concrete uni- versal for the abstract universal, a new God of spirit for the dead mover of matter of eighteenth- century theism and ma- teriahsm ; but it is pretty generally agreed that his natural philosophy is one of forms and words rather than of real things and real forces. Schopenhauer simply thrust himself into the philosophical world; and by his unsparing iconoclasm, if by nothing else, drew attention to the possible reasons for his hostility to the philosophy of the mere idea and the merely supernatural. This fact suggests the nature of the interest the mind natu- rally takes in Schopenhauer. We are first alarmed by his utterances about his predecessors and the bold realistic char- acter of his own first principle ; then we are charmed by the 24 Schopenhauer’s system. extraordinary brilliance and richness of his utterances, and strangely interested in the study of his marvellous personality, combining as it does to a more wonderful extent than that of any other man who ever lived ^ the power for abstract speculation with an enormous vitality of force and feeling ; and then finally we come to an objective study of the man and his philosophy as a great natural phenomenon in the his- tory of modern culture. Schopenhauer’s own personality is one of the best examples that could be given of the fact that the primary thing about man is not his intellect but his personality — his endeavour, Goethe-like, to “ experience ” all things and to obtain tire fullest life and the best kind of happiness. “ Ce n'est pas un philosoplie comme les autres’’ said some one of him ; '‘cest iin philosoplie qui a mi le moncle’’ Schopenhauer knew his character perfectly well, and described it carefully and accurately ; it was in the language of psychology about one-half choleric and one-half melancholic. As he put it, he belonged to the ^vctkoXoi and not to the evKoXoi, to those who had the severe or difficult mood of life and not to those who had the easy or light mood. The reading he gave of life was therefore a stern and severe one. The characterisation, however, of Schopenhauer’s perception of the miseries of life, as a direct consequence of the sensi- bility or the temperament he knew himself to be possessed of, is apt to become superficial. It rests upon mere truism. We shall be occupied throughout not with the man and the element of personal equation in his philosophy, but with the question of the grounds upon which an ultimate judgment about life may be conceived to rest. There are scores of sentences throughout Schopenhauer which show that he rose altogether beyond any personal estimate of life, whether his ^ Gwinner makes out Schopenhauer’s to be the strongest head of all the philosophers. GENERAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUER’s SIGNIFICANCE. 25 own or another’s, even although he persisted in regarding life in terms of feeling and action rather than in terms of know- ledge. A healthy beggar is happier than a sick king,” he insists. “ The man of elevated character will regard men in a purely objective way, and not according to the relations they sustain to his own personal activity : he will for example take cognisance of their faults, of their hate even and injustice to himself, but without being on his side excited to hate them ; he will be able to look on their good fortunes without envying them ; he will recognise their good qualities without wishing for any closer relations with them ; he will perceive the beauty of women without being drawn to them. His own personal happiness or unhappiness will not strongly affect him. . . . For he will see in his own course of life and its misfortunes, not so much his own personal lot as the lot of humanity, and so adopt the attitude more of a spectator than a suffer er^ ^ More of a spectator than of a sufferer 1 These words are char- acteristic of the being we have yet to study with Schopenhauer, the man who is emancipated from wrong views and feelings about life. But what is the meaning of Schopenhauer’s per- sistently pessimistic estimate of life, in view of the fact that from a higher standpoint he is enabled to say, “ The greatest thing in life is not he who conquers the world {Welteroherer) but he who overcomes it ( Weltuberwinder) ” ? ^ Are we to choose the standpoint of the natural man or the emancipated man in drawing up our estimate of life ? If of neither but of both, then what are we to say the world is as a matter of fact ? What is to be our dogmatic position about the world as a whole ? All that we can now realise is that perhaps both the dogmatism of pure reason and the dogmatism of pure passion (naturalism) are apt to turn out to be one-sided estimates of life. Schopenhauer was always enough of a student to inquire, ^ Die Welt, &c., Werke, ii. 244. ^ Cf. pp. 49 and 516. 26 Schopenhauer’s system. in the order of ideas, first for a metaphysic of man and then for an ethic, making the latter to depend on the former, although strangely enough his personality and his system teach with perfect plainness that for man as man know- ledge does not precede conduct, but conduct knowledge. The whole enigma of his philosophy, and the whole contradic- tion that his life was, depend on his mental effort to reconcile these two positions, — that of philosophy which says, first a metaphysic or theory and then action, and that of nature which says, first action and then theory. “ It is with perfect right that the heart, this primum mobile of animal life, has been chosen and designated the symbol and the synonym of the will, which is the core of our phenomenal being, and this in distinction to the intellect, which is exactly just the same as the brain. . . . Heart and head describe the whole man. But the head is always the secondary and the derivative ; for it is not the centre of the body but only its highest efflorescence. When a hero dies it is his heart that is embalmed and not his brain ; but on the other hand people are willing enough to pre- serve the skull of poets and artists and philosophers.”^ Else- where he says that in life the brain and the heart get “ move and more detached from each other ” as life goes on. This, as it stands, is an exaggerated assertion ; the opposite in fact is nearer the truth, because as people grow older a harmony generally seems to establish itself between their conscious desires and their unconscious actions, between what they know and what they feel. It is chiefly only in the young, and in people of unstable character, that reason and instinct do not seem to be in perfect accord. Schopenhauer of course be- lieved that we could attain to full salvation from human misery only by giving up willing and acting altogether, and by taking refuge in the higher kind of knowledge (artistic and religious contemplation), which is as far removed from ^ Die Welt, &c., ii. 267, 268, passim. GENERAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUER’s SIGNIFICANCE. 27 willing and acting (from the heart therefore) as possible. To correlate, however, in our thought the workings of the head and the heart is the great problem in Schopenhauer. The diffi- culty really is : if philosophy has systematically put knowledge before conduct, while nature has done the reverse, what is to become of philosophy ? If nature is really our teacher, what about reason, and rational thinking concerning the end of life ? Schopenhauer in early life insisted (he was set a-thinking by Gall and the philosophical physiology of the day) on a belief in two things : heredity and the practical identity of mind and body. He can hardly be made out to have fully understood the physiology and the psychology of heredity. Hor did he work out to any degree of completeness the relation of the fact of heredity to the question of moral freedom. But he always insisted that action was the result of two factors, character and circumstances or environment. It is an essential part of his doctrine that we cannot speak of a causal relation between a man’s will and his bodily acts, as if the will were a thing by itself. It is really wrong, he thinks, to distinguish the will from actions : “ will ” is an established tendency to action, and is, in fact, the sum-total of actions, the organic or total self. To the idea of the identity of mind and body, Schopenhauer may be said to have held quite rigidly, if not always with perfect consistency, really believing, and say- ing a score of times, that the notion of an independent soul was a positive hindrance and bugbear in the way of a truly scientific psychology. “ There is no soul,” he wrote in a burst of enthusiasm after hearing Gall at Hamburg, and no psychology : brain and bodily processes explain all that we call mental.” Throughout his philosophy the organic body is simply “ will ” objectified, each particular volition having its particular organ or organs, the teeth and stomach being objec- tified hunger, the feet objectified haste, and so on. 28 Schopenhauer’s system. AVe shall later encounter the issues at stake between the metaphysician, who objects to the intrusion into metaphysic of psychological ideas and categories, and the psychologist, who objects to the intrusion into psychology of metaphysical ideas and categories. We may learn from the facts which Schopen- hauer’s study of the human personality reveals, that neither the Cartesian nor the Kantian dualist, nor the Spinozistic nor the Hegelian monist, can be regarded as having set forth in a complete or actual way the relation of the mind to the body.^ It is needless here to enumerate and discuss the natural- istic philosophers whom Schopenhauer studied. Cabanis, Helvetius, and Diderot, and (later in his life) Burdach and Bichat, were some of the chief. His system got from this source its scientific aspect, which is another great reason for its modern interest. It moves all the time on that dismal fighting-ground, the border-land of religion (or philo- sophy) and science. The special problem of philosophy to him was to “ unite the cosmical and the ethical order,” to find “ in nature a basis for man’s conduct,” and he believed that his principle of will gave the human mind what it wanted. It was his special boast that he ‘‘ united, as no one else had done, Thales and Socrates,” the philosophy of nature and that of man, and this not by starting either from the subject or the object, as former systems had done. All other systems, he thought, had tried to explain the subject from the object or the object from the subject by the principle of causation or sufficient reason, forgetting that such principles applied only to things as phenomena. By placing the reality of human personality in will or in ^ As a metaphysician Schopenhauer objects to the introduction of the psycho- logical notion of an individual (empirical) self into the metaphysic of the will. See, e.g., p. 395. From the point of view of psychology, however, we might object to Schopenhauer’s seeming (see chap, iii.) to think that the self (or the will) is actually irrational (blind, unconscious, &c.), because it is difficult to comprehend or understand the self. GENERAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUER's SIGNIFICANCE. 29 functional activity, Schopenhauer certainly puts himself in line with the teaching of evolution about man, both as to his past history and his possible destiny in the future. Physical evolution seems to teach that man has attained to his present position in the scale of being by boundless struggle and war- fare ; and that nature puts each individual at its start in life upon the vantage-ground fought out for it by all its pre- decessors, and gives it an organism whose unconscious ten- dencies, instincts, and impulses chronicle the laborious and largely conscious efforts of all its predecessors to conform to their environment and to attain the maximum of life both as to quality and to quantity. And as far as the future goes there does seem to be more hope for the individual if the reality of his being is placed essentially in volition rather than in knowledge. Knowledge is not an end in itself. And further it is essentially impersonal in its nature. The Averroists saw this when they professed to find in mere knowledge no sufficient ground for immortality ; and Hegel’s “ Idea ” too is essentially impersonal in its nature. But to ivill endlessly means to aspire endlessly, and if there is pro- vision anywhere in the system of things for giving to man that which would not merely satisfy his intellect but also lift him on to a higher stage of life, we may then think of immortality as something that may fall to the lot of the individual who supremely desires it, and is supremely worthy of it. Another noticeable effect of Schopenhauer’s study of physi- cal and natural science was his acceptance of the doctrine of Malebranche that all causes are occasional causes. Male- branche is right in his theory of occasional causes {causes occa- sionelles)r This means that Schopenhauer held that the causal explanation of things, or aetiology, as he calls it (from airm, a cause), was simply the referring of one phenomenon to another 30 Schopenhauer’s system. phenomenon, and that therefore causal explanation was only partial explanation, valuable enough for the understanding of man who preserves his life by unravelling somehow the con- nections among things, but of no ultimate significance. “ The retiological explanation of things does nothing more than dis- cover the natural laws according to which circumstances happen in time and space, showing for all cases what pheno- mena must necessarily appear just at that time and in that place. . . . But about the inner nature of any single pheno- menon whatever we do not in this way attain to even the slightest decision.” ^ A phenomenon is only completely ex- plained, that is, by being assigned to its systematicT- place in the universe of which it forms a part ; and as we can at best do this but partially, all causal explanation is in a sense in- adequate and fortuitous, resting simply on our perception of the amount of reality which we at any one time happen to know. Of the world as a whole there is no explanation, and to ask for a cause of the universe is unmeaning ; we can only try to say whcd the world is and how things in it have be- come what they are, not how the world itself has become what it is. “ The absolute cannot be thought of as a first cause, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as a first cause.” “ Equally little can it be thought of as the absolutely necessary, because necessity only means being so and so for certain grounds, . . . and so the absolutely necessary is a contraclictio in adjccto!' ^ Thus Schopenhauer holds with many other profound thinkers that scientific knowledge only serves to stave off our ignorance, and that it seems from the standpoint of science extremely doubtful whether there can indeed ever be such a thing as absolute or final knowledge. There may be, and there is, a philoso'pJiy of nature in addition to mere £etiology (or scientific ^ Die Welt, &c., Werke, ii. 116. ^ U. d. Universitiits-Philosophie, Werke, v. 199. GENERAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUER’s SIGNIFICANCE. 31 causal explanation), but what this philosophy is, is utterly in- conceivable from the point of view of mere mechanical causa- tion, which is all that science has to do with. The real value of this idea seems to lie just in the very fact of its suggesting that metaphysical knowledge must be something quite different from scientific knowledge. Metaphysical knowledge cannot consist in knowledge merely of causes and of entities. Schop- enhauer practically teaches us that the key to the unity of a thing lies in the fact of its function, whether that is merely mechanical or to a certain extent organic. This is what his notion of will means. A philosophy of mere forces or causes only expresses the relation of the movement of some things to the movement of some other things. My body or the earth may be taken as a point of reference to which the movement of all other things is referred, but then it is at once apparent that the earth itself is in movement, and so is the sun in reference to other bodies, and so on act infinitum. The saying of Archimedes, “ Give me a fulcrum and I will move the world,” is truly the reductio ad absurdum of a mechanical philosophy, for every point in the universe is really a point of reference in relation to which all the other things in the universe may be conceived to be in motion. A point to which all mere motion could be referred is strictly speaking an imaginary point. A merely setiological or mechanical philo- sophy simply takes us from one cause to another antecedent cause, and so on ad infinitum. “ Or, if I may use an absurd but more striking comparison, the philosophical investigator must always have the same feeling towards the complete aetiology of the whole of nature as a man who, without knowing how, has been brought into a company quite un- known to him, each member of which in turn presents another to him as his friend and his cousin, and therefore as quite well known, and yet the man himself, while at each introduc- tion he expresses himself gratified, has always the question 32 Schopenhauer’s system. on his lips, ‘ But how the deuce do I stand to the whole company ? ’ ” ^ Then as to atoms and cells and monads and organisms, — the outcome of Schopenhauer’s thought virtually is that only such oro^anisms as seem to exist for themselves can be regarded as absolutely existing at all. All things move, and all animals to a certain extent may be said to vjill, but none of them attain anything for themselves. It is only man who seems to attain to something in his volition, to something for himself. Persons therefore are in a sense the only real existences, or at least all other organic beings are beings inferior to conscious persons. A conscious person is the highest outcome of nature. ^Schopen- hauer naturally regarded the universe itself as the sole ulti- mate reality, and even the universe in his eyes is always as it were running away from itself, because volition to him means continually going out of self without ever returning to the self in any valid sense of the word. Metaphysical know- ledge, however, has as little to do with mere entities as with mere causes. Any ordinary phenomenon “ will do for ” a ccmse, and anything, broadly speaking, is an “entity” or a sum of entities. Scientific knowledge in itself is not a search for final causes ; it only enables us to explain one thing by refer- ence to some other thing, or to some of its antecedents or some of its consequents. Only the ends or aims of conscious persons give us points of view for systematising the universe. Metaphysics therefore has to do with the ends or aims of con- scious persons. After the scientific philosophy of the century we are coming to see that metaphysical knowledge is quali- tatively different from scientific knowledge ; it “ goes beyond ” mere physical knowledge as the name itself implies. It ought to start, in short, with what has been called the summum honum, the highest good for man. All this arises by way of natural consequence from holding will to be the only ultimate 1 Die Welt, &c., Werke, ii. 117 ; H. and K.’s transl., i. 127. GENERAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUER’s SIGNIFICANCE. 33 reality, seeing that will at its highest stage simply means, in the first instance, our volition. Schopenhauer had the scientific tendency to try to see all things reduced to their naturalia or simplest natural ele- ments ; inorganic objects to atoms which attracted and repelled each other, and organic objects to the play of their fundamental organs. His supreme principle, will, is not will of the highest type, the rational self-determining will of the philosophers, — he believed that to be a hitherto unchallenged fiction, and it certainly is an extremely misleading phrase, — but will of the lowest type, impulse or instinct, the will which is more perfectly exemplified in animals than in man. This was so because Schopenhauer was not himself free from the scientific conception of philosophy that we have just referred to, the tendency, namely, to regard the last elements of things, the piZw/j-ara Travrcov, in the language of Empedocles, as something beneath or prior to the existence of conscious persons. He had this tendency in spite of the fact that he accepted the teaching of Berkeley and Kant about the “ object ” being dependent upon the “ subject,” about there being no world apart from consciousness or thought. Now if the essence of all things is will, the entities or things lower down in nature than human personality are not strictly speaking things in themselves at all, things that have an absolute existence apart from other things. Matter without form is nothing, and formed matter has significance only in relation to conscious persons. If Schopenhauer had not been influenced by the idea that metaphysic or philosophy enables us in some way to speak about the simplest elements of organic as well as of physical matter, he would not have taken as his type of will the lowest phase of volition, animal instinct. We may, of course, learn to a certain extent what the higher phases of volition are from a study of the lower phases, just as we learn much about c 34 Schopenhauer’s system. organic nature from the study of inorganic nature. Indeed the study of instinct leads the mind naturally onwards to a study of reason and reasoned action. Nature can be under- stood only by reference to man, and instinct can be under- stood only by reference to its highest development in human volition. Schopenhauer thus put philosophy upon the path best calculated to yield a full understanding of man’s nature. Kant had suggested that in the will of man was to be found somehow the key to the nature of things. But because the ethical reconstruction which he attempted in the ‘ Criticism of Practical Eeason ’ seemed to be something which he was not theoretically entitled to make, the philosophical world could not take the hint for what it was really worth. Schopenhauer’s writings further exhibit the bluff realistic way of talking about man’s life characteristic of the anatomy- room. His language largely corresponds to his conviction that all human beliefs and feelings can be systematised under the idea of the continuance and furtherance of the life of the world-will. He saw that normal mental life included the normal play of man’s thousand and one organic activities, and that man’s activity is so organised that, in studying it even from one point of view, one implicitly appeals to the total activity of which the one side in question is only an aspect. He felt convinced that man, as a natural organism or living being, could claim no exemption from the so-called laws of animate nature as to birth and maturity and decay, although he certainly would not have been rash enough to hold that man can think a transitory existence to be his only existence. We shall have to consider how far we can agree with him that the mere reason of man cannot be said to guarantee for man a more than phenomenal or transitional existence.^ There had been an understanding among philo- sophers of his own day that, as Novalis said, while philosophy ^ Cf. chap. viii. ; also p. 464, &c. GENERAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUER’s SIGNIFICANCE. 35 “ could bake no bread,” she could yet procure for us “ God and freedom and immortality ” ; but Schopenhauer, like von Hartmann, ridicules the idea of any serious mind coming to philosophy with any expectation whatever about what it could possibly do. It is well known that as a young man he him- self came to the study of the world with none of the tra- ditional beliefs and spiritual inheritances common to the youth of Germany in his day. This is seen in his perfectly in- genuous willingness to accept completely any statement about the ultimate elements of man’s life, which purported to be matter of fact ; he was a physical realist from beginning to end of his thinking. One must be careful, too, when stating the results of his speculations in the stereotyped phraseology either of philosophy or theology to remember not only that Schopenhauer himself made little serious attempt to correlate his own thought with any other system in existence (save perhaps the Kantian philosophy), but that he did not care in the least to be understood. The majority of men were a mere profanum mdgus in his eyes, a servile 'pecus at once too ignorant and too sordid to care for fundamental knowledge, especially such fundamental knowledge as failed to justify established beliefs and customs, prejudice and practice. He had, too, the effrontery or the courage (“ si omnes patres sic, at ego non sic’') to believe that he wrote more for posterity than for contemporaries. And he really wrote about the “ natural man ” for “ all time,” saying perhaps the last word on that subject in philosophy. Schopenhauer may be said to make people believe that the world is worse than they had taken it to be, rather than to make them feel that it can be reconciled with their highest desires, and this sense of disenchantment makes his system pleasing to the sour or morbid or sceptical mind. “ Philo- sophy is no church and no religion. It represents that small 36 Schopenhauer’s system. ' spot on the earth’s surface, accessible only to the veriest few, where truth, that is everywhere hated and persecuted, is for once unwedded to any pressure and compulsion.” In the very connection in which we are speaking, it is right to say that Schopenhauer gives man an impersonal immortality in impersonal will just as the Averroists gave him an impersonal immortality in impersonal reason ; but one must never think that this statement (which is in its very nature a concession) at all represents the spirit of a philosophy whose essence is to make no concessions to any mind. Not that Schopenhauer’s philosophy is purely positive in tone, or that his mind was indeed rationally free in the complete sense, but that his philosophy is a most serious and most honest attempt of what some people like to call the natural unassisted reason of man to solve the mystery of the world, without making compromises with existing philosophy or religion. The on- tology of Schopenhauer is certainly more a cosmology than a theology, for he is primarily in search of a doctrine con- taining some statement as to the last elements of the natural world. Only we must remember that the very expression the “ natural world ” has come to be used as antithetical to something else (a spiritual world), although there is no real warrant for attaching any such limited signification to it. Schopenhauer is one of those to whom the natural is also supernatural,^ and it is really the outcome of his doctrine that we must give up the search for an ontology and content our- selves with a teleology — not the teleology of a Paley or a Kant, but simply a practical philosophy or a philosophy of action. Strictly speaking, the teaching of Schopenhauer closes with a negative solution of the problem of the nature of reality. He indeed maintains that the world is will, and will means for him force or impulse ; but he still conceives of will in ^ Cf. the reference to J. S. Mill on p. 23. GENERAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUER's SIGNIFICANCE. 37 primarily a negative way. He comes in the end to tell us what the world is not, and what the end of life is not. The closing sentences of his chief work are to the effect that this world, with all its “ suns and milky ways, is really nothing,” and that “ before us there is certainly only nothingness.” All that seemingly exists is in his view only illusory appearance. The reason for this has already been suggested. In saying that all things are will he had in his mind’s eye the form of activity that we call instinct, and not volition in the highest sense of conscious purpose. A being that merely acts in accordance with instinct is no being at all in the highest sense ; it does not know what it is doing or what it is realising. Schopenhauer thought of the world- will as largely instinctive and automatic (chiefly because that was what seemed to strike him in the biological way of looking at man), and therefore nugatory ; it did not really know what it realised. A being that wills consciously is of course more real through its volition, because in its volition it knows that it attains to something which at one time it had not. But Schopenhauer did not see this truth or did not grasp its significance. It is perhaps better to say that he did not grasp its significance. He maintains that the very idea which con- scious beings have of realising certain ends is an illusion : men do not realise that which they think they realise. And his teaching must be examined seriously, for the reason that he does at least show what men do not realise — namely, individual happiness or pleasure. Though Schopenhauer’s system has a strong materialistic colouring it is not materialism. It is rather animism or panpsychism {j)antlielism, in point of fact). His theory of life is essentially metaphysical : living beings are individua- tions of the will to live, the principles of individuation being 38 Schopenhauer's system. space and time.^ Genus or species is to him at bottom a mere conceptual idea having no real existence ; there are no such things, that is, as groups of beings definitely marked off in space and time from other beings which we might call genera or s'peeies. Different species are mere variable and varying objectifications of the one will -to -lived And just as in modern biology it is difficult to say where the individu- ality of an organism begins, since all organisms are sums of organic units, each of which may in a sense be said to have individuality, and since, further, individuality is often a transitional phenomenon (as in animals that are groups of animals), so in Schopenhauer there is no discontinuity between one organism and another, and between all apparent organ- isms and the will of the world. Individuality is there only a form of the present, like the imaginary point where the rainbow rests on the particles of water that fall down a cataract. “ The life of the individual is not enough for me,” says the will, according to Schopenhauer. “ I need the life of the species to endless time, for endless time is the form of my appearance.” “ All life is nothing but a continual change of matter under the steady persistence of form ; this is what we mean by the transitoriness of the individual in the eternity of the species.” Most thinkers are now prepared to admit that conscious existence for self or conscious personality is something that we do not find lower down in the biological scale than man. (“ Sticks and stones ” are hardly individuals or organic units at all ; there is no question about their being final existences : they simply are not such.) But just because ^ It must be difficult for the average reader to grasp what Schopenhauer means by objectification and particularisation and individuation. These expres- sions refer to his theory of the origin of the world of particular things and persons. In itself the will has neither individuality nor personality ; these are merely forms that it seems to our intellect to assume when it becomes the object of our perception. GENERAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUER’s SIGNIFICANCE. 39 Schopenhauer, although in other respects a metaphysician (as to the external world depending upon our consciousness, for example), looked, as do most biologists, more at the instinc- tive and the automatic in man than at the conscious and deliberate, he did not see the full significance of the fact of conscious individuality in man. Man seemed to him a crea- ture led and dominated by his instincts, and therefore a mere puppet in the hands of nature. Society too is to him at once the fiction that it is to the anarchist, and the questionable entity that it is to the biologist. Take away the bolts and the chains which confine men, he suggests, and you will soon see, as in revolution and in anarchy, what beasts men really are. A nation or a people, he thinks, is nothing ; it is only the individuals therein that are real, and their existence is hut of the moment. We can appreciate the full force of these thoughts only when w’e come to study Schopenhauer’s teaching about the “ empirical character ” and the evil or wayward and selfish will of the individual.’^ All things to Schopenhauer are ob- jectifications or external manifestations of the will, — a highly metaphysical idea, the possible, sober, actual meaning of which we shall soon examine. Still for “ the materialists ” Schopenhauer has boundless contempt, the fellows with “ no humanities, no culture, nothing but their syringe-ology and instruments.” There is perhaps no philosopher to whom one could more easily refer a student offhand for a refutation of materialism than Schopenhauer. He sees in a nutshell the whole absurdity of trying to evolve a “ subject ” from an ‘‘ object ” which really presupposes an existing subject to start with. He accepts, as we shall see,^ the Berkeley an -Kantian analysis of the real in this regard. Materialism, as he says, always fills him with the “ Olympian laughter of the gods.” ^ Cf. chaps, iv. and viii. ^ In chap. ii. 40 Schopenhauer’s system. If Schopenhauer himself is not always, as he thinks he is, on Olympus, he is certainly the giant trying to scale it. It is often asked whether Schopenhauer was really a care- ful student of science. In the first place Schopenhauers habits of mind, as has been remarked, were not those of the ordinary systematic investigator or strict thinker. He jotted down his thoughts not in a systematic order but aphoristic- ally, just as ideas struck him, about things he saw or read. As Goethe has been called a Gelegenheitsclicliter, so Schopen- hauer has been called a Gelegenheitspliilosopli ; he philosophises about life as a whole, but also about all the facts of lif^ as they come before him. And what he had thus from time to time become convinced of or had seemed to perceive, he afterwards worked up in the study into some whole or system. The days of his devotion to science, again, were the days when science was not yet emancipated from Naturphilosopliie — the construction of nature under some theoretically conceived first principle — when mechanical physics was giving place to speculative biology. His own philosophy is still a cosmogony. Schopenhauer’s conception of intelligence led him to be- lieve in an intuitive perception of truth rather than in a reasoned apprehension of it. He would have approved of the “ intellectus sibi permissus ” of Bacon, and his whole philosophy rests on a hypothetical construction of the world, indicating undoubtedly a “ leap ” of the mind of man somehow beyond appearances into the core of reality, an attempt to say by way of speculation and “insight” what the physical world is. But though a cosmogonist, Schopenhauer never tried to think as exactly as even Lucretius, for example, did, about the way in which the apparent order of the world was maintained ; nor did he know anything like the amount of physical science that Kant did. He approved of a quick per- ceptual divination of the meaning of nature, and speaks wfith GENERAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUER’s SIGNIFICANCE. 41 admiration of all scientific discoveries which seem to have been made by a happy blending of the perceptual and re- flective powers on the part of the investigator. He speaks of Hooke and Hewton and Lavoisier and Goethe in this regard, and his immediate friends and disciples have com- pared him — on the strength of some direct and indirect con- fession and contention on his part — to Lavoisier, as a sort of Lavoisier-philosopher who tried to simplify the various ele- ments of the metaphysical philosophers. He compared the effort to understand the world wdth the attempt to read a manuscript written in a language the alphabet of which one does not know. It must be admitted that this feeling which one has in reading Schopenhauer of a purely hypothetical instead of a scientific and verifiable construction of things, is not nearly so strong as in the case of von Hartmann, and also that Schopenhauer believed himself to have verified by the studies of thirty years his early conceived scheme of the w'orld as an objectification of will. Still there is in him no complete and vigorous application of the inductive method which Bacon emphasised so strongly. There are a hundred gates to his system, he thinks, all leading to the central citadel of the will as the sole reality of things — which idea is also a fact of observation, he would add. This professed coincidence of indirect and direct proof is Schopenhauer’s real position about his logical method. Just as animals by a kind of clairvoy- ance divine the ends which nature intends them to follow, so — he holds — through a kind of a^perqu or intuitive divination does man obtain his deepest knowledge of the secret work- ings of nature. The intuitions of genius into nature surpass indeed in process and result the analytic method of the mere scientist, although in the end the method of genius and phil- osophy and the method of science and observation ought to •lead to the same results. 42 Schopenhauer’s system. It is somewhat difficult to allow for the various kinds of intuition that Schopenhauer supposes man to have. There are the intuitions of sense-perception, as to which Schopen- hauer is essentially Kantian in his ideas, maintaining that such intuitions imply the machinery of the understanding. Then he sometimes attributes to the understanding itself a kind of intuitive power of discerning the causes of things. And lastly there are the intuitions of genius and art and of perfect goodness, and the intuition of the wise mind regarding life as a whole. All intuition is for him a sort of direct beholding of truth which is higher than logical processes, although perhaps involving these.^ This fondness of Schopenhauer for the supra-logical char- acter of intuition and genius has its dangerous side.^ The intuition is the expedient not so much of the philosopher as of the artist. A philosophical system, of course, is always in a certain sense the attempt to fix an ideal, and so compar- able to the work of the artist. And perhaps no one in the t-wentieth century will write out a system of philosophy rest- ing upon one ultimate principle — ultimate principles must be to a certain extent abstract — who has not the courage and faith of the artist. ' But when once we confess that a system of philosophy is largely an artistic creation, can we be any longer dogmatic or didactic in. philosophy ? This question is part of the refrain of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. The “ truth ” in the notion that philosophy must be based on intuitions into nature is that philosophy must somehow learn the meaning of the world by taking up a passive and recipient attitude towards it, studying it not to conquer it with the “ might of thought ” but in order to conform its thought and feeling to things as they are. The meaning of the world will ^ In chap, iii, will be found an account of the different kinds of knowledge Schopenhauer supposes man to possess. ^ Cf. chaps. V. and vi. GENERAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUER’s SIGNIFICANCE. 43 reveal itself to man if he study patiently everything that pro- fesses to be in the world and everything that professes to be ex'planatory of it. Schopenhauer has painted life as a tragedy ; he had the intellectual ability and the artistic susceptibility to have painted it as something else if he had been born in a different age with a different temperament. But even more than in his insight and fine susceptibility of mind, his strength lay in his insistence on the necessity of a direct attitude to life on the part of the philosopher, and in his having recourse to observation as well as reflection. Hegel’s thinking through, by ‘‘ the might of thought,” to the core of things is a pleasing fallacy. “ Nature has neither kernel nor husk,” as Goethe ^ puts it. Schopenhauer, it may be repeated, arrived at the principle of will both by way of logic or dialectic and by way of observa- tion. The former way we shall examine when dealing with his theory of knowledge ; the latter we shall treat of through- out just as he himself did. We are supposed to And that the world is will by a sort of cumulative proof, by seeing it to be true of most ways of looking at the world and of most things in the world, and of the world as a whole. There is only one way to know what the world is, and that is observation. Of course it is equally certain that to state what the world is — to state what we see it to be, requires reflection. Schopen- hauer’s devotion to physical science is the proof that 'he did study the world directly ; - his being a Gelegenheitsphilosoph is a proof that' he went 'about with his eyes open, roaming- over things ; his mastering Plato is a proof that he had the power of abstract thought and artistic insight ; and his thorough mastery of Kant — he perceived the general drift of Kantism as well as Hegel did, and he knew the details of Kant’s work better than most of his contemporaries — proves him to have been the student capable of prolonged, systematic, hard intellectual labour. ^ ‘Gott und Welt,’ “ Allerdings.” 44 Schopenhauer's system. As to the influence of Plato upon Schopenhauer, we can quite well believe, as Professor Wallace puts it, that a youth whose belief at nineteen was that “ there is a spirit world, where, separated from all appearances of the outer world, we can, in detachment and absolute repose, survey them from an exalted seat, however much our bodily part may be tossed in their storm,” ^ was the sort of subject on whom the teacher of the theory of ideas would make a lasting impression.” All through his life the belief in Plato’s noumenal or ideal world probably represented to him the minimum amount of meta- physical belief which every sane person ought to have. The world of sense and of understanding ought, as compared with the really existent world, to appear merely phenomenal, vision- ary in fact, non-existent. It is easy to a certain extent to think of all men and things as shadows.” We shall see this in dealing with Idealism. “ The creed of every just and good man,” Schopenhauer says, is, I believe in a metaphysic.” In philosophy Schopenhauer followed to the letter the advice of Schulze, his first tutor, to study almost exclusively two men, Plato and Kant. Plato may be said to have for ever ruled his imagination, as Kant did his understanding ; they were the alpha and the omega of his philosophical alphabet. It is useless to think of Schopenhauer’s trying to learn philo- sophy from Hegel or from Hegel’s philosophical compeers and predecessors; he never could have done so. When, at the age of twenty, he heard Fichte at Berlin in 1811 say “ eloquent things about the ‘other ’ {i.e., about nature as different from the self), by the light of a lamp in Kovember afternoons,” the whole thing seemed to him to be hopelessly in the air. In the writings of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel he read statements about pro- cesses which purported to be objective events, but which never did happen, and never could have happened. There some- times the self seemed to create the world, and sometimes the ^ Quoted by Wallace, ‘Life of Schopenhauer,’ p. 63. GENERAL VIEW OF SCHOPENHAUER’s SIGNIFICANCE. 45 world to create the self : God was made to have difficulties and struggles and victories just like a human being, and His movements in general were put forward as something we could not only know, but ourselves determine and coni'pel beforehand. It was this idea that really annoyed Schopenhauer just as it has annoyed so many. The Absolute with which these post- Kantians seemed to be dealing, and with whose movements they seemed to have an intimate acquaintance, did not appear to him to have been in the language of Kant “ deduced ” or explained at all.^ It is generally confessed now that the objective dialectic which Hegel took to be God’s unfolding of Himself is primarily nothing else than a description of the categories which the human mind has to use in inter- preting reality. So much Schopenhauer must have seen on the mere inspection of Hegelianism. For the doctrine of the categories he preferred to turn to Kant, where he could get it at first hand. There is, to be sure, a great deal more in Hegel than his ‘ Logic,’ which he was certainly wrong in converting into an ontology. But what is more than mere dialectic in Hegel can be understood only by taking the view of philosophy already hinted at, as something more than the mere critical analysis of reality given in scientific metaphysic ; — in a word, by con- sidering the Hegelian system as having a place in the evolution of the thought of the nineteenth century. One may surely grant that it is impossible to say what the Hegelian system is without not merely a general knowledge of the Zeit-Geist at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but a pretty profound knowledge of the literary, philosophical and political aspira- tions of Germany during the period of the war of liberation. Here however Schopenhauer, as a post-Kantian, parts company with Hegel. If there was one thing, as we saw, for which Schopenhauer had no sense and perhaps no patience, that ^ Chap. viii. discusses in detail some of the points of this paragraph. 46 Schopenhauer’s system. was history and historical problems. If to appreciate Hegel meant an honest study of history, we need not wonder that Schopenhauer did not appreciate Hegel. Schopenhauer had the contempt for history that Plato had for poetry. We re- member how Aristotle ^ distinctly said that poetry was more philosophical than and superior to history ((^tXo