Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/474

Rh 452 SCHOPENHAUER for all in the beginning, knowledge is not useless. We can learn to adopt new means though the end of will remains unaltered. It is this new knowledge wnich causes repentance, when we see we have adopted undue methods to attain our aim. The survey of the phenomena of life in the light of their principle shows that all life is a ceaseless battle for existence between individuals, that happi- ness is only negative, viz. , a relief from pain, that life is a tragedy. But the natural man, immersed in the sense of life, plays the egoist as if he were the centre of existence and the wifi to life spoke in him alone. In such a spirit he not merely acts as if affirming his own will to life, but as if he denied that of others. He com- mits injustice. The sense of wrong-doing, he may feel, is the wit- ness of consciousness to the identity between himself and others ; it is the appearance of moral law and gives rise to that sense of right which is the beginning of ethics. But for the most part practical reflexions note only the evils caused by egoism, and induce the sufferers to form a law to produce by repression the same results as morality attains by stimulation. Thus penal law, as opposed to moral law, aims only at checking intrusions upon the rights of others, and the whole political organization is only an instrument for checking egoism by egoism, for making each seek the welfare of all because it includes his own. Its justice is temporal ; it adds an additional pain by legislative machinery, with a view to the welfare of the greater number. But there is another and an eternal justice. Hero there is no separation of time and place between the wrongdoer and the sufferer. This eternal justice reveals itself to him who, having seen through "the veil of Maya," has found that in the world of truth the divisions between individuals fall away, and that he who does wrong to another has done the wrong to his own self. The persuasion of this doctrine of eternal justice is so ingrained in human nature that we welcome the punishment that overtakes the victorious evildoer. Similar lessons are hidden in the myths of transmigration of souls. The secret sense that the pains of others are in reality not alien constitutes the torments of remorse which visit the wicked. The good man, on the contrary, who has been brought to see through the veil of individuality into the unity of all being, will not merely practise justice, he will be animated by a universal benevolence. Instead of (put or the blind lust of life (seen at its strongest in sexual appetite), he has learned, by means of self-knowledge, that dyav/i which is pitying love, or caritas yeneris humani. Such benevolence only alleviates the misery of others. It culmi- nates in self-sacrifice, which is carried out by voluntary and com- Elete chastity, by utter poverty, by mortification, by fasting, and ist of all by death. Such a course of life, however, is seldom taught by instruction alone, and the broken will generally comes only where a mighty shock of grief reveals the inevitable pain of existence and brings a quietive to the lust of life. Yet the victory over the will to life is not attained once for all ; the supremacy must be retained by a career of asceticism. Such ascetics, in whom the will to life was deadened and the body remained as a mere empty semblance, were the saints and mystical devotees of all ages. They had crucified the flesh with its affections and lusts. Their will had been emancipated from the bondage to which in life it was subject, had been released from the objectification in corporeity and restored to its original infinity. In such saints alone has the essen- tial freedom of the will appeared on the temporal scene, but appeared only to destroy the old Adam and bring in the new birth. By the lively knowledge of the truth of things the will has denied itself, has passed into a stage where the objective world is as if it were not, the stage which was when will as yet had not gone forth to objectify itself in a world and when knowledge had not yet mirrored the reality in an idea, when, in short, nothing was. Visit to Long before the work had come to the hands of the Italy. public, Schopenhauer had rushed off to Italy and ex- changed the labours of giving the gospel of renunciation a metaphysical basis for the gaiety of southern life and the influences of classic art. At Venice, where he first lingered for a while, he found himself a fellow -denizen with Lord Byron ; but, except for a solitary chance when his jealousy was stirred by the outspoken admiration of his fair Venetian companion for the handsome Briton who rode past them on the Lido, the two insurgent apostles of the Wdtschmerz never came across each other's path. At Rome, where he passed the depth of winter, he saw the first copies of his book. It found him in assiduous attend- ance on the art galleries, the opera, and theatre, turning from the uncongenial companionship of his romantic coun- trymen and gladly seizing every chance of conversing in English with Englishmen. In March 1819 he had gone as far as Naples and Paestum. On his way homewards he was startled by receiving at Milan a letter from his sister announcing that in consequence of the failure of the Dantzic house a large part of his own and his mother's and nearly the whole of his sister's fortune were endangered. This change of circumstances was a heavy blow to the ladies, and he himself was almost induced by the mischance to qualify himself to teach in the university at Heidelberg in July 1819. But he sternly refused the compromise of seventy per cent, offered by the insolvent firm, and was so angrily suspicious with his sister who accepted it that he ceased to correspond with her for about fourteen years. Fortunately his determined and skilful assertion of his rights was crowned, after a long dispute, with success. He recovered the whole debt, receiving in principal and interest the sum of 9400 thalers. After some stay at Dresden, hesitating between fixing Appc himself as university teacher at Gottingen, Heidelberg, men * or Berlin, he finally chose the last-mentioned. In his ex- amination before the faculty (disputatio pro venia legendi) he enjoyed what he reckoned the satisfaction of catching up Hegel (who had just been appointed professor) in a lax use of a technical term ("animal" for "organic" functions). And in his first and only course of lectures he had the further satisfaction of selecting as his hours the same times (12 to 1 on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) as Hegel had taken for his principal class. This course on the first principles of philosophy or knowledge in general, given in the summer of 1820, was not a success, indeed did not reach its natural end, and, though the notice of lecture was repeated during his stay in Berlin up to 1831, the lecture- room knew him no more. Brilliant as he was in powers of luminous illustration and characteristic as is his style, he was wanting in the patient exposition of a subject for its own sake and not as the field for exemplifying a favourite thesis. The result of his experiences in 1820-21, which he attributed to Hegelian intrigues, was to intensify his suspicions of his colleagues, one of whom, F. E. Beneke (another alleged victim to Hegel's jealousies), he accused of garbled quotations in his review of The World as Will and Idea. Except for some attention to physiology, the first two years at Berlin were wasted. In May 1822 he set out by way of Switzerland for Italy. After spending the winter at Florence and Rome, he left in the spring of 1823 for Munich, where he stayed for nearly a year, the prey of illness and isolation. When at the end of this wretched time he left for Gastein, in May 1824, he had almost en- tirely lost the hearing of his right ear. Dresden, which he reached in August, no longer presented the same hospitable aspect as of old, and he was reluctantly drawn onwards to Berlin in May 1825. The place had unpleasant associations of many kinds, but one disagreeable incident of his former stay now re- turned to him in a judicial award of pains and penalties. One day, about a year after his first settlement in Berlin, on 12th August 1821, on returning to his lodging he found three women standing in the passage in front of his room door. The event had annoyed him before, and his land- lady had promised it should not occur again. On this occasion accordingly Schopenhauer ordered them out of what he held to be his own " stair-head," walked into his room, and emerged in a few minutes with hat and stick as he had entered. One of the women was still on the spot, a semptress, forty-seven years old, a friend of the land- lady, and occupant of a small chamber adjacent to that of Schopenhauer. This person he ejected; and when she returned to pick up a piece of cloth (there stood a chest of drawers belonging to her in the passage) he put her forcibly out again, upon which she fell with a shriek that alarmed the house. Next day she lodged an action against him for personal injuries ; and, after a variety of opposing deci-