Arthur Schopenhauer

It is under the banner of this protest against rationalizing idealism that Schopenhauer advances. But what marks out his armament is its pronounced realism. He fights with the weapons of physical doctrine and on the basis of the material earth. He knows no reason but the human, no intelligence save what is ex hibited by the animals. He knows that both animals and men have come into existence within assignable limits of time, and that there was an anterior age when no eye or ear gathered the life of the uni verse into perceptions. Knowledge, therefore, with its vehicle, the intellect, is dependent upon the existence of certain nerve-organs located in an animal system ; and its function is originally only to present an image of the interconnections of the manifestations external to the individual organism, and so to give to the indi vidual in a partial and reflected form that feeling with other things, or innate sympathy, which it loses as organization becomes more complex and characteristic. Knowledge or intellect, therefore, is only the surrogate of that more intimate unity of feeling or will which is the underlying reality—the principle of all existence, the essence of all manifestations, inorganic and organic, And the perfection of reason is attained when man has transcended those limits of individuation in which his knowledge at first presents him to himself, when by art he has risen from single objects to universal types, and by suffering and sacrifice has penetrated to that innermost sanctuary where the euthanasia of consciousness is reached—the blessedness of eternal repose.

Schopenhauer disputes the claims of reason to priority and seeks to demonstrate the relativity and limitations of science. Science, he says, is based on final inexplicabilities; and its attempts by theories of evolution to find an historical origin for humanity in rudimentary matter show a misconception of the problem. In the successions of material states there can nowhere be an absolute first. The true origin of man, as of all else, is to be sought in an action which is everlasting and which is ever present : nec to quaesiveris extra. There is a source of knowledge within us by which we know, and more intimately than we can ever know any thing external, that we will and feel. That is the first and the high est knowledge, the only knowledge which can strictly be called im mediate ; and to ourselves we as the subject of will are truly the "immediate object." It is in this sense of will—of will without motives, but not without consciousness of some sort—that reality is revealed. Analogy and experience make us assume it to be omnipresent. It is a mistake to say will means for Schopenhauer only force. It means a great deal more ; and it is nis contention that what the scientist calls force is really will. In so doing he is only following the line predicted by Kant (Kritik trans. anal.,

bk. ii., appendix) and anticipated by Leibniz. If we wish, said Kant, to give a real existence to the thing in itself or the noumenon we can only do so by investing it with the attributes found in our own internal sense, viz., with thinking or something analogous thereto.

It is thus that Fechner in his "day-view" of things sees in plants and planets the same fundamental "soul" as in us—that is, "one simple being which appears to none but itself, in us as elsewhere wherever it occurs self-luminous, dark for every other eye, at the least connecting sensations in itself, upon which, as the grade of soul mounts higher and higher, there is constructed the consciousness of higher and still higher relations" (fiber die Seelen frage, p. 9, 1861). It is thus that Lotze declares (Mikrokosmus, i., 408, 2nd. ed.) that "behind the tranquil surface of matter, be hind its rigid and regular habits of behaviour, we are forced to seek the glow of a hidden spiritual activity." So Schopenhauer, but in a way all his own, finds the truth of things in a will which is indeed unaffected by conscious motives and yet cannot be separated from some faint analogue of non-intellectual conscious ness.

Influence Upon the World.

In two ways Schopenhauer has influenced the world. He has shown with unusual lucidity of expression how feeble is the spontaneity of that intellect which is so highly lauded, and how overpowering the sway of original will in all our action. He thus reasserted realism, whose gospel reads, "In the beginning was appetite, passion, will," and has discredited the doctrinaire belief that ideas have original force of their own. This creed of naturalism is dangerous, and it may be true that the pessimism it implies often degenerates into cynicism and a cold blooded denial that there is any virtue and any truth. But in the crash of established creeds and the spread of political indiffer entism and social distintegration it is probably wise, if not always agreeable, to lay bare the wounds under which humanity suffers, though pride would prompt their concealment. But Schopen hauer's theory has another side. If it is daringly realistic, it is no less audacious in its idealism. The second aspect of his influence is the doctrine of redemption of the soul from its sensual bonds, first by the medium of art and second by the path of renunciation and ascetic life. It may be difficult in each case to draw the line between social duty and individual perfection. But Schopen hauer reminds us that the welfare of society is a temporal and subordinate aim, never to be allowed to dwarf the full realization of our ideal being. Man's duty is undoubtedly to join in the common service of sentient beings; but his final goal is to rise above the toils and comforts of the visible creature into the vast bosom of a peaceful Nirvana.