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 WM. CALDWELL, Schopenhauer' s System, etc. 247 itself, in this book, into a series of attempts to reconcile those con- tradictions where possible. This is not easy, nor indeed always desirable in the case of one who, as the interpreter admits, never concerned himself about the mutual consistency or inconsistency of one fetch of his thought with another, nor measured the success of a philosophy by its logical symmetry. He left it to the Charla- tanerei of his great contemporary (likened by the author, with a flicker of humour, to a kind of metaphysical Zollverein of Germany) to make reality square with (Hegelian) thought. Schopenhauer sought to square thought with reality a matter for progressive adjustment and re-adjustment. It is true that he is accused, some pages later, of desiring "to get, at all costs, a philosophical synthesis " (p. 337). Letting this pass, we may note how the author faces the task he has set himself. " The whole enigma of his philosophy," we read (p. 26), " and the whole contradiction that his life was, depend on his mental effort to reconcile these two positions that of a philo- sophy which says, first a metaphysic or theory and then action, and that of nature which says, first action and then theory." " The world was cleft for him into two halves (Will and Idea, or noumenon and phenomenon) which could never be brought into vital relation with each other " (p. 271 et passim). We are also told, the supreme contradiction in Schopenhauerism is the confusion it exhibits " between the critical and the dogmatical methods of philosophising," while its hardest problem is the effort to reconcile " Schopenhauer's teaching on instinct and passion with his noto- rious belief in what he called genius and the pure insight of genius "'. So hopeless indeed do these labours seem to be, that our author (incidentally) stigmatises Schopenhauer's philosophy of reality as, "at the outset, logical or irrational, and, in the end, mystical and inarticulate," his theory of art as too ontological and rigid, his treatment of religion as lacking in "intellectual content " and " objective reality," and his ethical philosophy (if its termino- logy and notions be tested by analysis and historical criticism) as one that falls to pieces in our hands. Yet, on the ground already given, Professor Caldwell argues for a broad acceptance as a whole of Schopenhauer's teachings about life. His philosophy of will was the Nemesis that overtook the philosophy of the Absolute Idea ; and though his conception of will as merely automatic impulse and bare conation was inadequate and undeveloped, though in it he merely set up another Ding-an-sich in place of the psyche he swept away, or the intellect that he reduced to pheno- menon, yet, by suggesting " a path along which the reality of the world, as a whole, can best be understood," by arousing philosophy to listen to the pulse of the life of the world, he was the pioneer of a juster, because of a more dynamically conceived synthesis of things. Among the causes that let and hindered Schopenhauer, in Pro- fessor Caldwell's opinion, from achieving a rational and noble