Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/477

Rh SCHOPENHAUER 455 a translation by Mrs Lindner of an article by John Oxen- ford which appeared in the Westminster Revieio for April 1853, entitled "Iconoclasm in German Philosophy," being an outline of Schopenhauer's system. In 1854 Frauen- stadt's Letters on the Schopenhauerean Philosophy showed that the new doctrines were become a subject of discus- sion, a state of things made still more obvious by the university of Leipsic offering a prize for the best exposi- tion and examination of the principles of Schopenhauer's system. Besides this, the response his ideas gave to popular needs and feelings was evinced by the numerous correspondents who sought his advice in their difficulties. And for the same reason new editions of his works were called for, a second edition of his degree dissertation in 1847, of his Essay on Colours and of The Will in Nature in 1854, a third edition of The World as Will and Idea in 1859, and in 1860 a second edition of The Main Problems of Ethics. In these later years Schopenhauer had at length realized that peace which can be given in the world; he had become comparatively master of himself. His passions had slackened their strain, and he was no longer the victim of unavailing regrets. As a youth he had known none of those ties which give the individual an esprit de corps, a sense of community which he never quite loses. Wandering about from place, to place throughout Europe, with no permanent home sweetened by the different phases of family affection, with no reminiscences of com- radeship in schoolboy days, with no sentiment of the dues of nationality, Schopenhauer is the fitter interpreter of that modern cosmopolitanism which disdains the more special ties of common life and mutual obligation as being obstacles to free development. In exaggerated self -con- sciousness, he looks down upon the common herd who live the life of convention and compromise, and puts the supreme value on that higher intellectual life which leisure and means permit him to enjoy. A subtler egoism, which emancipates itself from the lusts and the duties of the world, takes the place of the vulgar self-seeking of the multitude and of the self-devotion of the patriot or philanthropist. To such a mind the friction of professional duties seems irksome : the bonds of matrimony and the duties incumbent on social membership are so many checks on freedom of thought and resolution. The indi- vidualist recognizes none of those minor morals and parochial or provincial duties which appropriate three- fourths of our conduct. In the wide universe he sees himself and others, none more akin to him than another, beings not bound by external ties, and united only in the fundamental sameness of their inner nature. To ordinary mortals, absorbed in " the trivial round, the common task," the links that bind individuals are forged by the petty ordinances and observances of society. But to those whom temper and circumstances have denied local and partial associationship, the craving for totality is so keen that it makes them seek their higher country in that far- off world (strangely called " intelligible ") where their per- sonality disappears in the one being of the universe. Thus wide is the antagonism between the eudaemonism of civilization, with aspirations towards perfecting our homes and bodies, so that in all things comfort may be established, and the pessimistic asceticism of Schopen- hauer, which sees the perfection of life not in the abun- dance of those things which we eat and drink and where- with we are clothed but in a deadening of passion, a negation of the would-live-and-enjoy, and an existence in a calm ecstasy of beatific vision, of knowledge not abstract but lively intuition. It is this protest of Schopenhauer against the vanity of the aims prescribed by conventional civilization and enlightenment which has gained him some of those ardent followers who find in his doctrine that religion of which they stand in need. It is a religion which owns no connexion with theism His or pantheism. Unlike Spinoza and Hegel and the other religion, leaders of modern speculation, Schopenhauer disdains the shelter of the old theology. His religion is cosmic and secular; it finds its saints in Buddhist and Christian morasticism, in Indian devotees and 19th-century "beau- tiful souls," and holds the one to be no nearer or more impressive as an example than the other. Of Judaism he has no good to say : its influence on Christianity has been pernicious. The new faith is a ministry of art and of high thinking, which may be rendered by all those who by plain living and unselfish absorption in the great mean- ing and typal forms of the world have slain the root of bitterness that constantly seeks to spring up within them. It is far from being a worship of the blind force which lies at the back of phenomena : it is a " re-implication " of the individual into the absolute from which life has separated him. Each seeker after this reunion is himself (when he has learnt wisdom by experience and self-restraint) the very being who has become all things ; and if the " cosmic will " may be termed God (an impossible identification) then he knows God more intimately than he knows anything else. And here if anywhere it may be said, " He serveth best who loveth best all things both great and small." Yet love in this creed is second to knowledge ; the odi pro- fanum vulgus of the misanthrope is heard from the soli- tary's shrine, and instead of the service of humanity we have the contemplation of the eternal forms, and the ele- vation to that world where self ceases to be separated from other selves, and where, in the ultimate ecstasy of know- ledge, all things positive and definite disappear and there is a being which the sensuous soul of man fails to dis- tinguish from non-being. It is often said that a philosophic system cannot be Relation rightly understood without reference to the character and f the circumstances of the philosopher. The remark finds ample l' hl j~ application in the case of Schopenhauer. The conditions to^i-f of his training, which brought him in contact with the system, realities of life before he learned the phrases of scholastic language, give to his words the stamp of self-seen truth and the clearness of original conviction. They explain at the same time the naivete which set a high price on the products his own energies had turned out, and could not see that what was so original to himself might seem less unique to other judges. Pre-occupied with his own ideas, he chafed under the indifference of thinkers who had grown blase in speculation and fancied himself persecuted by a conspiracy of professors of philosophy. It is not so easy to demonstrate the connexion between a man's life and doctrine. But it is at least plain that in the case of any philosopher, what makes him such is the faculty he has, more than other men, to get a clear idea of what he himself is and does. More than others he leads a second life in the spirit or intellect alongside of his life in the flesh, the life of knowledge beside the life of will. It is inevi- table that he should be especially struck by the points in which the sensible and temporal life comes in conflict with the intellectual and eternal. It was thus that Schopenhauer by his own experience saw in the primacy of the will the fundamental fact of his philosophy, and found in the en- grossing interests of the selfish epws the perennial hin- drances of th,e higher life. For his absolute individualism, which recognizes in the state, the church, the family only so many superficial and incidental provisions of human craft, the means of relief was absorption in the intellectual and purely ideal aims which prepare the way for the cessa- tion of temporal individuality altogether. But theory is one thing and practice another ; and he will often lay most