Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/472

Rh 450 SCHOPENHAUER reason as ground of belief and reason as cause of a fact. The prin- ciple gives expression to the law that nothing singular and uncon- nected can be an object for us but only as forming part in a system. This law has four main roots, according to the four classes of objects, in each of which a special form of connexion prevails. These objects are (1) real oojects of perception, where the relation of cause and effect requires each state to be dependent on its ante- cedent ; (2) propositions, which are tied together as premises and conclusions ; (3) the formal conditions of perception, viz., space and time, where each part is intuitively seen to be in reciprocal depend- ence on every other ; (4) voluntary agents, where the law of motiva- tion prescribes the dependence of action upon the idea of an object presented to the character of the agent. 1 Modifying the Kantian theory, that things are mental projections, he emphasizes the intel- lectual operation which elevates sensation to perception. The feeling of alteration in an organ is taken by the intellect, whose one category is causality, to refer to a real, i.e., material object which generates the change in our body. But the reference is an intuitive interpretation of a felt modification in the organism. Hence the important place assigned to the human body : it is the first of objects, the "immediate object," the means by which all other objects come within consciousness. As a perpetual correlative of external perceptions, the body further serves as an instrument for separating phantasm from fact. To detect and scare away hallucina- tion we have only to realize the presence of our bodies. In dealing with motives Schopenhauer touches upon the relation between volition and cognition. The ego which is the subject that knows is a mere correlative to the known object : object perceived and subject perceiving are not two things, but one, perpetually dividing itself into two poles ; and what are called the several faculties of the ego are only an inference or a reflex from the several classes of mental object. The " I " in " I know " is already the implication and virtual presence of knowledge. But the "I will" is a new fact, the revelation of another aspect of the world, the first fact of inner and real existence. In this perception there is given us the unity of the volitional self with the knowing subject ; and this identity of the "I" who "will" with the "I" who "know" is in Schopenhauer's words the miracle par excellence (das Wunder KO.T', 43). In November 1813 Schopenhauer returned to Weimar, and for a few months boarded with his mother. But the strain of daily association was too much for their antagon- istic natures. The mother felt herself genee in the pre- sence of a disputatious and gloomy son ; she missed the ease of her emancipated life ; and her friends found their movements watched by a suspicious eye, which was ready to surmise evil in the open and light-hearted style of housekeeping. In short, his splenetic temper and her Rupture volatility culminated in an open rupture in May 1814. with his From that time till her death in 1838 Schopenhauer never other ' saw his mother again. It was during these few months at Weimar, however, that he made some acquaintances de- stined to influence the subsequent course of his thought. Conversations with the Orientalist F. Mayer directed his studies to the philosophical speculations of ancient India. In 1808 Friedrich Schlegel had in his Language and Wis- dom of the Old Hindus brought Brahmanical philosophy within the range of European literature. Still more in- structive for Schopenhauer was the imperfect and obscure Latin translation of the Upanishads which in 1801-2 Anquetil Duperron had published from a Persian version of the Sanskrit original. Another friendship of the same period had more palpable immediate effect but not so per- manent. This was with Goethe, who succeeded in securing his interest for those investigations on colours on which he was himself engaged. Schopenhauer took up the subject in earnest, and the result of his reflexions (and a few ele- mentary observations) soon after appeared (Easter 1816) as a monograph, Ueber das Sehen und die Farben. The essay, which must be treated as an episode or digression from the direct path of Schopenhauer's development, due to the potent deflecting force of Goethe, was written at Dresden, to which he had transferred his abode after the 1 This classification Schopenhauer subsequently modified, substitut- ing for the first and fourth a graduated scale rising from cause proper (in inorganic nature) to stimulus (in vegetative life) and motive (in the animal world), the last again being either intuitive motive, as in the lower animals, or rational motive, as in man. rupture with his mother. It had been sent in MS. to Goethe in the autumn of 1815, who, finding in it a trans- formation rather than an expansion of his own ideas, in- clined to regard the author as an opponent rather than an adherent. The pamphlet begins by re-stating with reference to sight the Essay o general theory that perception of an objective world rests upon an Siyht instinctive causal postulatiou, which even when it misleads still and remains to haunt us (instead of being, like errors of reason, open Colours to extirpation by evidence), and proceeds to deal with physiological colour, i.e., with colours as felt (not perceived) modifications of the action of the retina. First of all, the distinction of white and black, with their mean point in grey, is referred to the activity or inactivity of the total retina in the graduated presence or absence of full light. Further, the eye is endowed with polarity, by which its activity is divided into two parts qualitatively dis- tinct. It is this circumstance which gives rise to the phenomenon of colour. All colours are complementary, or go in pairs ; each pair makes up the whole activity of the retina, and so is equivalent to white ; and the two partial activities are so connected that when the first is exhausted the other spontaneously succeeds. Such pairs of colour may be regarded as infinite in number ; but there arc three pairs which stand out prominently, and admit of easy expres- sion for the ratio in which each contributes to the total action. These are red and green (each = ), orange and blue (2 : 1), and yellow and violet (3 : 1). 2 This theory of complementary colours as due to the polarity in the qualitative action of the retina is followed by some criticism of Newton and the seven colours, by an attempt to explain some facts noted by Goethe, and by some reference to the external stimuli which cause colour. The grand interest of his life at Dresden was the com- position of a work which should give expression in all its aspects to the idea of man's nature and destiny which had been gradually forming within him. Without cutting himself altogether either from social pleasures or from art, he read and took notes with regularity. More and more he learned from Cabanis and Helvetius to see in the will and the passions the determinants of intellectual life, and in the character and the temper the source of theories and beliefs. The conviction was borne in upon him that scien- tific explanation could never do more than systematize and classify the mass of appearances which to our habit-blinded eyes seem to be the reality. To get at this reality and thus to reach a standpoint higher than that of jetiology was the problem of his as of all philosophy. It is only by such a tower of speculation that an escape is possible from the spectre of materialism, theoretical and practical; and so, says Schopenhauer, " the just and good must all have this creed : I believe in a metaphysic." The mere reasonings of theoretical science leave no room for art, and practical prudence usurps the place of morality. The higher life of aesthetic and ethical activity the beautiful and the good can only be based upon an intuition which penetrates the heart of reality. Towards the spring of 1818 the work was nearing its end, and Brockhaus of Leipsic had agreed to publish it and pay the author one ducat for every sheet of printed matter. But, as the press loitered, Schopen- hauer, suspecting treachery, wrote so rudely and haughtily to the publisher that the latter broke off correspondence with his client. In the end of 1818, however, the book Welt al, appeared (with the date 1819), in 725 pages 8vo, with the ]l ' ille r title Die Welt als Wille und Vorstdlung, in four books, with an appendix containing a criticism of the Kantian philosophy. The first book of The World as Will and Idea resumes the argu- Book i. ment of the earlier work, that all objects are constituted by intel- lectual relations, describable as forms of the causal principle. As so apprehending a world of objects, man is said to possess in- telligence (Verstand), the perception of individual sequences and coexistences. It is a faculty he shares with the animals, and by its means the world presents itself as an endless number of objects in space and time bound together by necessary laws of causality. But man has also the power of reason ( Vernunft), by which he generalizes, the vehicle of this generalization being language. By means of 2 In this doctrine, so far as the facts go, Schopenhauer is indebted to a paper by R. Waring Darwin in vol. Ixxvi. of the Transactions of the Philosophical Society.