Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/720

 688 PESSIMISM haner s ethics. human race from the restless tyrant which works in them now, as it ere while brought them to the birth. For, firstly, knowledge in its own character emancipates ; it lets its possessor know that he suffers and why he suffers. Such is the first prerogative of reason. But, secondly, in the occasional intervals when the storm of Will is laid to rest, the mind, instead of striving in the interests of practical intelligence to detect the causal relations of things, can concentrate itself exclusively on a single isolated object. A transformation is thus accomplished whereby the object, ceasing to be a mere particular, becomes the type-idea, the Will and eternal form, the generic and adequate embodiment of Art - Will in a special grade ; while, on the other hand, the in dividual who has become absorbed in such contemplation is no longer a mere individual, but has become the &quot;will- less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge.&quot; It is this power of rising above the prosaic requirements which science gratifies, of seeing the permanent and one reality in the dependent and disunited phenomena of the particu lars, which what we call Art imitates by production. The artist produces the eternal types which the blind Will only realizes in many imperfect and particular adumbrations ; he conquers nature by fixing in a single image the traits which constitute the true and permanent meaning con fusedly presented by her in many exemplars. For the mind which can see that idea in the natural forms, or which beholds it in the works of art, for him who contem plates without reference to the Will, &quot; the wheel of Ixion stands still ; freed from the prison-house of blind desire, he enjoys the sabbath of aesthetic beatitude.&quot; Schopen- But the relief obtained in art is only for blessed moments. Perennial consolation can be found only in the ethical life, and in an ethics of asceticism and self-sacrifice. True life begins only when Ave have learnt that happiness is impossible by means of gratifying the cravings of desire. Each satisfaction of the will is only a starting-point for fresh effort ; the achievement of the desired object sug gests a new want. &quot; Alles Leben ist Leiden.&quot; At every point desires are thwarted ; even when they gain their end the satisfaction is merely negative. The weary Titan of humanity knows no repose ; his feeble pleasures are drops in a sea of pain. Thus the central principle of pessimism asserts that in the order of nature, i.e., so long as the will to live remains unbroken, happiness in the true sense is impossible. Life as life necessarily involves misery. No doubt the man of the world may turn round and declare that notwithstanding this he means to gather the rose without the thorn. Undismayed by the analysis of the consequences involved in will, he affirms the will to life. Adopting the principles of the Cyrenaic hedonists, he closes his eyes to far-reaching eventualities and lives in the moment ; he turns life in every portion into art ; he revels in the inspiring sense of action without care for past obli gations and future anxieties. It is otherwise with the man who has surveyed all the issues of things, who looks at the net result of life as a whole and in all individuals. For him it is a duty to deny and abjure this will to life. He must, in other words, renounce the works of egoism and of injustice. He must see through the illusion of the principium indiinduationis, must recognize that his very self, his will, is identical in essence with every creature, even with the suffering. When he has done this, and is in love and sympathy with all around him, &quot; the veil of Maya &quot; has for him become transparent. In every way he proceeds (over and above cultivating in active love com passion for others) to deny the exercise of the will to life in his individual case, in his own body. He will, above all, according to Schopenhauer, perpetually keep the vow of chastity ; he will by fasting and penance so mortify his body that the will to life shall be utterly broken in him. &quot;And,&quot; adds Schopenhauer ( 67), &quot;I think I may assume that along with the highest manifestation of will the feebler counterpart of it in the animal kingdom would also dis appear.&quot; Man, by ascetic mortification of the will, and by sanctity of beneficence, becomes the redeemer even of the rest of the animated creation. The contrast between nature and grace, between the physical and the moral, the life of the flesh and the life of the spirit, stands out in these outlines as the central doctrine of pessimism. It is in essentials the same doctrine which was preached by Buddha, which is put into the mouth of Socrates in the Phcedo (philosophy is a rehearsal of death : /ieAerry/za Oavdrov) ; it is the doctrine which stands indelible in the early archives of Christianity, and was proclaimed as the better and more excellent way by myriads of the noblest Christian teachers for more than ten centuries of the church. The pessimistic ethics of Schopenhauer casts aside the feeble compromises by which it is alternately asserted that morality makes for happiness and happiness is morality ; it rejects the postulates by which Kant tried to lighten for human nature the burden of imperative duty ; it goes behind the social sanctions which see in good conduct acts subservient to the good of a human community. In pessimistic ethics and the pessimism of Schopenhauer has essentially an ethical aim we have the wreck left on the wastes of time by Hegelianism. Hegel- ianism had taught, or seemed to teach, that God was in the beginning by Himself as a Logos, or self-evolving idea, which uttered itself in the unconscious forms of nature, till in the conscious spirit of man He gradually realized Him self in moral and intellectual life, in art and religion. Schopenhauer stripped this cycle of its first period. There was no idea, no logical machinery, at the basis of things ; nature began out of a blind impulse ; and it was only in man s intelligence that the vague longing of the heaving world knew itself to be. But that intelligence has for its supreme aim not, as in Hegel, to enter into and carry on the great process Avhich is the absolute, but to deny its creator and annihilate the principle of being. The world of Will, in its process of objectification, has thus given birth to a child w T hich in the fulness of time will destroy the womb that bore it. It will be apparent that in Schopenhauer s system we can distinguish two parts, the first, the doctrine of the positivity of pain, and that life is always and only pain : the second, the ethical condemnation of the principle of such a world, and the method for correcting the evil which it had introduced. In the latter lies his chief and charac teristic achievement, in what we may call his nietaphysic of ethics. Man by morality (ascetical morality) is to be the redeemer of the world. In this conviction Schopen hauer shows himself the descendant of the metaphysical systems of the past, which find in man the key to the mystery of the universe. It is a strange and a weary way of redemption which he delineates ; the cross is heavier than humanity seems able to bear. Yet the suggestion to deliver ourselves shows that the old belief in human spontaneity, in the primacy of the moral principle, in the possibility of noble deeds and of a victory over egoism, was still vigorous in his mind. Another pessimism neglects this ethical element altogether. To this ignoble pessimism man is in truth only an animal like the rest, and the distinction on which he prides himself his moral nature is but a confused and illusory product of simpler animal experiences. He has knowledge of wider range, it is true ; but knowledge is powerless to change his nature. His acts in every case are necessarily determined ; his fancied freedom is found on examination to be no whit more spon taneous than the fall of the unsupported stone. The necessitarianism of evolution did away with the independ-