Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/471

Rh SCHOPENHAUER 449 as ends in themselves. Accordingly lie offered his son the choice between the classical school and an excursion to England. A boy of fifteen could scarcely hesitate. In 1803 the Schopenhauers and their son set out on a lengthened tour, of which Johanna has given an account, to Holland, England, France, and Austria. Six months were spent in England, and Arthur, while his parents proceeded as far as Scotland, was left for a few weeks as a boarder with a Rev. Mr Lancaster at Wimbledon. He found English ways dull and precise and the religious observances exacting; and his mother had not for the last time to talk seriously with him on his unsocial and wilful character. Perhaps the part of the tour which gave him most pleasure was the last, a solitary pedestrian stroll along the ridge of the Riesengebirge, just before he joined his mother at Dantzic, September 1804, where he was confirmed. At Hamburg in the beginning of 1805 he was placed in the office of a merchant called Jenisch. He had only been there for three months when his father, who had shown symptoms of mental alienation, fell or threw himself from an elevated opening of his warehouse into the canal. After his death the young widow (still under forty) got affairs wound up, and, leaving Arthur at Hamburg, proceeded with her daughter Adele in the middle of 1806 to Weimar, where she arrived only a fortnight before the tribulation which followed the victory of Napoleon at Jena. At Weimar her talents, hitherto held in check, found an atmo- sphere to stimulate and foster them ; her aesthetic and literary tastes formed themselves under the influence of Goethe and his circle, and her little salon gained a certain celebrity. Arthur, meanwhile, was left at his desk in Hamburg, cursing his prosaic lot, and smuggling literature under the ledger ; the hot blood of youth was turning his thoughts to morbid cynicism, and his easy-minded mother, alarmed at his discontent, adopted the advice of her friend Fernow, and offered him a release from the loathed task- work. He hastened to make up lost ground, and at the age of nineteen began to decline mensa with Doering at Gotha. But the wantonness and restiveness which he had grown familiar with in the lax schooling of the world would not let him alone : he allowed his satirical pen to play on one of the teachers of the grammar-school, and pro- fessional etiquette required Doering to dismiss his pupil. After a plain but gentle rebuke for his folly, his mother settled him at Weimar not in her own house, for, as she told him, she was content to know that he was well and could dispense with his company but with the Greek scholar Passow, who superintended his classical studies. This time he made so much progress that in the course of two years he became a tolerable scholar, and read Greek and Latin with fluency and interest. In 1809 his mother handed over to him (aged twenty- one) the third part of the paternal estate, a sum of 19,000 thalers, which, being invested in good securities, yielded him from the first a yearly income of more than 1000 thalers = 1 50. Possessed of this fair patrimony, Schopen- hauer in October 1809 entered the university of Gottingen, with a clear plan of acquiring all that machinery of know- ledge which schools can give. The direction of his philo- sophical reading was fixed by the advice of Professor G. E. Schulze to study, especially, Plato and Kant. For the former he soon found himself full of reverence, and from the latter he acquired the standpoint of modern philo- sophy. The names of " Plato the divine and the marvel- lous Kant " are conjunctly invoked at the beginning of his earliest work. But neither the formal exercises of the class-room nor the social and hygienic recreations which he did not fail to combine with them filled his hours to the exclusion of the ideas which began to formulate them- selves in him. Contempt for the superficiality of human life settled itself more and more deeply in his heart, with the sense of a bitterness tainting the very source of being, and the perception that the egoism of individuals seeks for nothing better than to push on the load of misery from one to another, instead of making an effort to re- duce the burden. These pessimistic reflexions (which his mother found eminently unsocial) were naturally concomi- tant with groundless nervous terrors; sudden panics would dash over his mind, and even in those days he had begun to keep loaded weapons always ready at his bedside. As a philosopher has said, " the sort of philosophy we choose depends on the sort of people we are ; for a philosophical system is not a dead bit of furniture : it draws its life from the soul of the man who has it." He was a man of few acquaintances, amongst the few being Bunsen, the subsequent scholar-diplomatist, and Bunsen's pupil, W. C. Astor, the son of Washington Irving's millionaire hero. Even then he found his trustiest mate in a poodle, and its bearskin was an institution in his lodging. Yet, precisely because he met the world so seldom in easy dialogue, he was unnecessarily dogmatic in controversy ; and many a bottle of wine went to pay for lost wagers. But he had made up his mind to be not an actor but an onlooker and critic in the battle of life ; and, when Wieland, whom he met on one of his excursions, suggested doubts as to the wisdom of his choice, Schopenhauer replied, "Life is a ticklish business ; I have resolved to spend it in reflecting upon it." After two years at Gottingen, he took two years at Berlin, where the university had been founded only four years before. Here also he dipped into divers stores of learning, notably classics under Wolf. In philosophy he heard Fichte and Schleiermacher. Between 1811 and 1813 the lectures of Fichte (subsequently published from his notes in his Nachgelassene Werke) dealt with what he called the "facts of consciousness" and the "theory of science," and struggled to present his final conception of philosophy. These lectures Schopenhauer attended, at first, it is allowed, with interest, but afterwards with a spirit of opposition which is said to have degenerated into con- tempt, and which in after years never permitted him to re- fer to Fichte without contumely. Yet the words Schopen- hauer then listened to, often with baffled curiosity, certainly helped to give direction to the current of his speculation. Schopenhauer did not find the city of intellect at all to his mind, and was lonely and unhappy. One of his inter- ests was to visit the hospital La Charit6 and study the evidence it afforded of the interdependence of the moral and the physical in man. In the early days of 1813 sym- pathy with the national enthusiasm against the French carried him so far as to buy a set of arms; but he stopped short of volunteering for active service, reflecting that Napoleon gave after all only concentrated and untram- melled utterance to that self-assertion and lust for more life which weaker mortals feel but must perforce disguise. Leaving the nation and its statesmen to fight out their freedom, he hurried away to Weimar, and thence to the quiet Thuringian town of Rudolstadt, where in the inn Zwn Hitter, out of sight of soldier and sound of drum, he wrote, helped by books from the Weimar library, his essay for the degree of doctor in philosophy. On the 2d of October 1813 he received his diploma from Jena; and in the same year from the press at Rudolstadt there was published without winning notice or readers his first book, under the title Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzts Satz vo vom zureichenden Grunde. in 148 pages 8vo. zureich enden Schopenhauer's monograph On the Fourfold Hoot of the Prin- Grunde. ciple of Sufficient Reason urged that, in discussing the principle of necessary connexion, philosophers had failed to distinguish between