Page:A Brief History of Modern Philosophy.djvu/203

200 some work of art, the will is subdued and we forget that we are denizens of the world. Art everywhere represents the climax. The agony of life subsides in the presence of the image of life. — This is the course taken by Schopenhauer himself. — In the case of human love, which — because all life is full of agony — necessarily assumes the character of sympathy, the individual will vanishes from the fact that it is lost in its identity with its object. This thought forms the basis of Schopenhauer's ethics (Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, 1841). — It is after all only the saints, the ascetics, for whom every motive has vanished, who are capable of an absolute suppression of the will. Schopenhauer finds the best practical solutions of the riddle of life and of the agony of life in Buddhism, in primitive Christianity, and in mysticism, and he has the most profound regard for the chief representatives of asceticism, — the more so, because of the consciousness that he was not a saint himself. 3. The romantic philosophy made a profound impression in the Scandinavian North, differing according to the different character of the northern peoples. — In Sweden the romantic opposition to empirical philosophy is particularly evident. The fundamental principle of the philosophy characteristic of Sweden was this, namely, that truth must be a perfect, inherently consistent totality, and since experience merely presents fragments, and such forsooth as are constantly undergoing change, a constant antithesis of ideal and empirical truth must follow. After this idea had been elaborated by a number of thinkers, the most noteworthy of whom are Benjamin Hoyer and Eric Gustav Geyer, the school attained its systematic culmination in the philosophy of Christopher Jacob Boström (1797-1855), professor of the University of