Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/479

Rh SCHOPENHAUER 457 in his successors, from Fichte to Hegel, this axiom of the plain man is set aside as antiquated. Thought or conception without a sub- ject-agent appears as the principle, thought or thinking in its universality without any individual substrata in which it is em- bodied : TO voetv or vf>T]cns is to be substituted for vovs. This is the step of advance which is required alike by Fichte when he asks his reader to rise from the empirical ego to the ego which is subject- object (i.e., neither and both), and by Hegel when he tries to sub- stitute the Begriff or notion for the Vorstellung or pictorial concep- tion. As spiritism asks us to accept such suspension of ordinary mechanics as permits human bodies to float through the air and part without injury to their members, so the new philosophy of Kant's immediate successors requires from the postulant for initia- tion willingness to reverse his customary beliefs in quasi-material subjects of thought. But, besides removing the psychological slag which clung to Kant's ideas from their matrix and presenting reason as the active principle in the formation of a universe, his successors carried out with far more detail, and far more enthusiasm and historical scope, his principle that in reason lay the a priori or the anticipation of the world, moral and physical. Not content with the barren asser- tion that the understanding makes nature, and that we can construct science only on the hypothesis that there is reason in the world, they proceeded to show how the thing was actually done. But to do so they had first to brush away a stone of stumbling which Kant had left in the way. This was the thing as it is by itself and apart from our knowledge of it, the something which we know, when and as we know it not. This somewhat is what Kant calls a limit-concept. It marks only that we feel our knowledge to be inadequate, and for the reason that there may be another species of sensation than ours, that other beings may not be tied by the special laws of our constitution, and may apprehend, as Plato says, by the soul itself apart from the senses. But this limitation, say the successors of Kant, rests upon a misconception. The sense of inadequacy is only a condition of growing knowledge in a being subject to the laws of space and time ; and the very feeling is a proof of its implicit removal. Look at reason not in its single temporal manifestations but in its eternal operation, and then this universal thought, which may be called God, as the sense-condi- tioned reason is called man, becomes the very breath and structure of the world. Thus in the true idea of things there is no irreduc- ible residuum of matter : mind is the Alpha and Omega, at once the initial postulate and the final truth of reality. In various ways a reaction arose against this absorption of every- thing in reason. In Fichte himself the source of being is primeval activity, the groundless and incomprehensible deed-action ( That- Handlung) of the absolute ego. The innermost character of that ego is an infinitude in act and effort. "The will is the living principle of reason," he says again. "In the last resort," says Schelling (1809), in his Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, "there is no other being but will. Wollen ist Ursein (will is primal being) ; and to this alone apply the predicates fathomless, eternal, independent of time, self - affirming. " It is unnecessary to multiply instances to prove that idealism was never without a protest that there is a heart of existence, life, will, action, which is presupposed by all knowledge and is not itself amenable to ex- planation. We may, if we like, call this element, which is assumed as the basis of all scientific method, irrational, will instead of reason, feeling rather than knowledge. It is under the banner of this protest against rationalizing idealism that Schopenhauer advances. But what marks out his armament is its pronounced realism. He fights with the weapons of physical doctrine and on the basis of the material earth. He knows no reason but the human, no intelligence save what is ex- hibited by the animals. He knows that both animals and men have come into existence within assignable limits of time, and that there was an anterior age when no eye or ear gathered the life of the universe into perceptions. Knowledge, therefore, with its vehicle, the intellect, is dependent upon the existence of certain nerve -organs located in an animal system; and its function is originally only to present an image of the interconnexions of the manifestations external to the individual organism, and so to give to the individual in a partial and reflected form that feeling with other things, or innate sympathy, which it loses as organization becomes more complex and characteristic. Knowledge or intellect, therefore, is only the surrogate of that more intimate unity of feeling or will which is the underlying reality the principle of all existence, the essence of all manifestations, inorganic and organic. And the perfection of reason is attained when man has transcended those limits of individuation in which his knowledge at first pre- sents him to himself, when by art he has risen from single objects to universal types, and by suffering and sacrifice has penetrated Schopen- to that innermost sanctuary where the euthanasia of consciousness haner is reached, the blessedness of eternal repose. knd Her- In substantiate the theory of Schopenhauer may be compared bert with a more prosaic statement of Mr Herbert Spencer (modernizing ppencer. Hume). All psychical states may, according to him, be treated as incidents of the correspondence between the organism and its en- vironment. In this adjustment the lowest stage is taken by reflex action and instinct, where the change of the organs is purely automatic. As the external complexity increases, this automatic regularity fails ; there is only an incipient excitation of the nerves. This feeble echo of the full response to stimulus is an idea, which is thus only another word for imperfect organization or adjustment. But gradually this imperfect correspondence is improved, and the idea passes over again into the state of unconscious or organic memory. Intellect, in short, is only the consequence of insufficient response between stimulus and action. Where action is entirely automatic, feeling does not exist. It is when the excitation is partial only, when it does not inevitably and immediately appear as action, that we have the appearance of intellect in the gap. The chief and fundamental difference between Schopenhauer and Mr Spencer lies in the refusal of the latter to give this "adjustment" or "automatic action" the name of will. Will according to Mr Spencer is only another aspect of what is reason, memory, or feel- ing, the difference lying in the fact that as will the nascent ex- citation (ideal motion) is conceived as passing into complete or full motion. But he agrees with Schopenhauer in basing conscious- ness, in all its forms of reason, feeling, or will, upon "automatic movement, psychical change," from which consciousness emerges and in which it disappears. What Schopenhauer professed, therefore, is to have dispelled Main the claims of reason to priority and to demonstrate the relativity tenden- and limitation of science. Science, he reminds us, is based on final ciesof his inexplicabilities ; and its attempts by theories of evolution to find system, an historical origin for humanity in rudimentary matter show a misconception of the problem. In the successions of material states there can nowhere be an absolute first. The true origin of man, as of all else, is to be sought in an action which is everlasting and which is ever present : nee te quxsiveris extra. There is a source of knowledge within us by which we know, and more intimately than we can ever know anything external, that we will and feel. That is the first and the highest knowledge, the only knowledge that can strictly be called immediate ; and to ourselves we as the subject of will are truly the "immediate object." It is in this sense of will of will without motives, but not without conscious- ness of some sort that reality is revealed. Analogy and experi- ence make us assume it to be omnipresent. It is a mistake to say will means for Schopenhauer only force. It means a great deal more ; and it is his contention that what the scientist calls force is really will. In so doing he is only following the line predicted by Kant l and anticipated by Leibnitz. If we wish, said Kant, to give a real existence to the thing in itself or the noumenon we can only do so by investing it with the attributes found in our own internal sense, viz. , with thinking or something analogous thereto. It is thus that Fechner in his "day -view " of things sees in plants and planets the same fundamental "soul" as in us that is, "one simple being which appears to none but itself, in us as elseAvhere wherever it occurs self-luminous, dark for every other eye, at the least connecting sensations in itself, upon which, as the grade of soul mounts higher and higher, there is constructed the conscious- ness of higher and still higher relations." 2 It is thus that Lotze declares 3 that "behind the tranquil surface of matter, behind its rigid and regular habits of behaviour, we are forced to seek the glow of a hidden spiritual activity." So Schopenhauer, but in a way all his own, finds the truth of things in a will which is indeed unaffected by conscious motives and yet cannot be separated from some faint analogue of non-intellectual consciousness. In two ways Schopenhauer has influenced the world. He has shown with unusual lucidity of expression how feeble is the spon- taneity of that intellect which is so highly lauded, and how over- powering the sway of original will in all our action. He thus re- asserted realism, whose gospel reads, "In the beginning was appetite, passion, will," and has discredited the doctrinaire belief that ideas have original force of their own. This creed of naturalism is dangerous, and it may be true that the pessimism it implies often degenerates into cynicism and a cold-blooded denial that there is any virtue and any truth. But in the crash of established creeds and the spread of political indifferentism and social disin- tegration it is probably wise, if not always agreeable, to lay bare the wounds under which humanity suffers, though pride would prompt their concealment. But Schopenhauer's theory has another side. If it is daringly realistic, it is no less audacious in its ideal- ism. The second aspect of his influence is the doctrine of redemp- tion of the soul from its sensual bonds, first by the medium of art and second by the path of renunciation and ascetic life. It may be difficult in each case to draw the line between social duty and individual perfection. But Schopenhauer reminds us that the welfare of society is a temporal and subordinate aim, never to be allowed to dwarf the full realization of our ideal being. Man's duty is undoubtedly to join in the common service of sentient 1 Kritik (Trans. Anal.), bk. ii., Appendix. 2 Ueber die Seelenfrage, p. 9, Leipsic, 1861. 3 Mikrokosmus, vol. i. p. 408 (2d ed.). XXL 58