Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/264

 248 CKITICAL NOTICES: synthesis were his idealistic standpoint, his contempt for and ignorance of history, and his negation of the positive import of feeling. To the inadequacy and danger of Idealism the author recurs with unwearying persistence. It is this, he finds this excess of the idealistic temperament fostered by the trend of eighteenth century philosophy that in Schopenhauer leads to illusionism, and so to pessimism. If the world is only an idea in my mind or, by analogy, an effort of my will it is, for all practical purposes, a world of illusion ! Even the reality of subjective facts may come to be despaired of if that of things as external be questioned long enough. Schopenhauer, it is true, distinguished his own so-called 4 transcendental idealism,' " welche die empirische Realitdt der Welt unangetastet Idsst" from ' empirical idealism,' and would hereby seem to have guarded his position. But his critic is an ardent Eealist and is not content, accusing him of mixing up three kinds of idealism and arguing from any one of them. That the long arm of Substantialism, that child of hoary Animism, had its grip of Schopenhauer is not so forcibly brought out, though here and there (e.g. p. 449) it is virtually made explicit. But the emphasis is ever on the disastrous frivolity of the philosopher who lets go his hold upon that Proteus, reality. The author's impatience finds vent now in assertion, now in argument. As Eeid bade us open our eyes and see and as Berkeley had urged likewise, in order to arrive at the opposite conclusion so he exhorts his readers to trust that things ' ' are what they appear to be to our conscious- ness". For this reason, that "thought is not outside things but latent in them ". As my thought " comes out of my organic con- sciousness," so does this come out of the organic life of the world. The world is never to be thought of as something over against our consciousness. Nor is it any reason for refusing to admit that we really know things because, to become fact or idea, they have to become mental constructions for some one. Next, that Schopenhauer regarded feeling not as a positive phase of mind, not, as Professor Caldwell puts it, as a mediator between will and intellect, but as the mere negation of intellect, is also, according to the latter, a cause of much " gaping opposition" and illusionism. We feel so much more of reality than we know. Quietism, rest, intellectual calm, so attracted him that just as he recoiled from the ceaseless working of his will-to-live, he failed no less to discern and develop the import of feeling for his dynamic standpoint. Feeling, he held, waits upon the will-to-live ; we don't do things because they please us; we find or don't find pleasure in what we are impelled to do ; and there was an end of it. This negative attitude made Schopenhauer ill-fitted to deal with the receptive side of aesthetic experience, just as his theory respecting the escape in aesthetic enjoyment from the will spoilt his view of the nature of artistic production. Professor Caldwell justly remarks that a metaphysic of art is all very well in its way, but requires a preliminary psychology of the