IRRATIONALISM. W. Windelband has given the name Irrationalism to the philosophical system of Schopenhauer (1788-1860), and to the later theological and philosophical speculations of F. W. J. von Schelling (1775-1854). Josiah Royce thinks this kind of philosophy, which is based on the teaching of Kant, may be sum marized as follows: "The world as we see it exists only in our ideas. We all have a common outer show-world because we all possess a common deeper nature, wherein we are one. You are essentially the same ultimate being that I am. Otherwise we should not have in common this outer projected world of seeming sea waves, star clusters, and city streets. For, as ideas, those things have no outer basis. As common to us all, they must have a deep inner basis. Yet this their basis can't be anything ultimately and universally rational. For in so far as we actually have reason in common, we think necessary, clearly coherent, exactly interrelated groups of ideas, such, for instance, as the multiplication table. But about the star clusters and the sea waves there is no such ultimate rational unity and coherency. . .
The world of the true idealism is n't so much the world of the rational and divine self, as it is the world of the deep unreason that lies at the very basis of all of our natures, of all our common selfhood. Why should there be. any world at all for us? Is n't it just because we are all actually minded to see one? And is n't this being minded to see a world as ultimately and brutally unreasonable a fact as you could name? Let us find for this fact, then, a name not so exalted as Fichte's high sounding speech would love. Let us call this ultimate nature of ours, which forces us all alike to see a world of phenomena in the show forms of space and time, simply our own deep common Will. Let us drop the divine name for it. Will, merely as such, is n't precisely a rational thing; it's capricious. It wills because it does will: and if it wills in us all to be of such nature as to see just these stars and houses, then see them we must, and there is the end of it." See Josiah Royce, The Spirit of liodern Philosophy, 1806.