Page:A Brief History of Modern Philosophy.djvu/198

Rh by means of an intuition which instantly drops all limitations. His great importance rests on his psychological views and on his philosophy of life which is based on personal experience.

Shopenhauer, the son of a wealthy Dantzig merchant, enjoyed a well-rounded education and became acquainted with the world early in life by means of travel and a variety of social intercourse. His complete independence enabled him to devote himself entirely to his studies and to the elaboration of his theory of life. After an unsuccessful attempt in a professorship at the University of Berlin, he withdrew into private life at Frankfort-on-the-Main where he spent the rest of his days. From his own inner experience he had very early become acquainted with the mysterious, conflicting energies and impulses of life; and the things which he saw around him at times aroused his anger, and again his sympathy. He concluded from these experiences that the beginning of philosophy is not wonder, but confusion and despair, and he endeavored to rise above them by reflective thought and artistic contemplation. a. Schopenhauer elaborated his critical theory already in his first essay (Über die vierfachen Wurzeln des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde, 1813). The principle of sufficient reason receives its four different forms from the fact that our ideas may be inter-related in four different ways: as ground and consequence, as cause and effect, in space and time, and as motive and act. Contemporaneously with Hegel's attempt to annul the distinction between ground and cause, emphasized by Hume and Kant, Schopenhauer shows clearly the importance of this distinction. The first book of his chief work (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 1819) contains his theory of knowledge. He differs from Kant especially on account of the intimate