Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/265

 WM. CALDWELL, Schopenhauer s System, etc. 249 artistic impulse. Indeed, it may possibly strike the reader as he comes across fragments of psychological consideration throughout this book, that to have collected and expanded these in one prole- gomenal essay, would have afforded a most instructive criticism of Schopenhauer, supplemental to, and more specialised than, Professor Sully's admirable criticism of the confused psychology of modern pessimists in his Pessimism. Crude Schopenhauer's psychology is, but that would not detract from the interest of the analysis. On the ' five ' senses Schopenhauer is no advance on Aristotle ; and it is noteworthy that a mind so possessed with the ultimate significance of activity, and whose term of work lay between the age of Thomas Brown and Professor Bain, should have had nothing to say concerning muscular sense proper or the "consciousness of activity put forth". He might possibly have found a better "mediating element" here than even in feeling (in the strict sense of the word) to heal his pet conflict between will and idea. Finally, it strikes our author as strange that a philosophy of the will should not have sought to connect itself more organically with the philosophy of history. He charges Schopenhauer with a vandalism in his historical allusions, which took this and left that without any respect for the organic character of knowledge as a whole. And he frequently points out how this contempt has avenged itself in Schopenhauer's shortened vision how he failed to see in history that rational will which is the best negation of the merely blind Will in which he saw the essence of all reality. " That there is a history of the world is a justification of the world, because it means that the world has attained to something" the author here not only citing but unconsciously improving on the German epigram in which history only brings the world to its own judgment bar (Weltgericht). This callousness to history in Schopenhauer he attributes to a radical defect in his mental constitution, or, more positively ex- pressed, to his view of time as a mere subjective process, history be- ing ' in ' time. Much, indeed, has the Transcendental Analytic here to answer for, though it scarcely seems responsible for Schopen- hauer's arbitrary dismissal of the evolution of history (unnoticed by Professor Caldwell) on the ground that an eternity of time having already elapsed, everything that could happen has hap- pened ! (Welt., etc., i., bk. iv.). Elsewhere, as we know, Schopenhauer is more discriminating, rejecting untenable claims made for history, while holding it to fulfil the function of a collective reason of humanity. And it may be questioned perhaps how far he may justly be called Vandal who, first of modern philosophers, did not arbitrarily confine him- self in the matter of the history of earlier ideas, to the basin of the Mediterranean, but, with much toil, broke out of the groove to discover what all early civilisations had thought and desired. What metaphysician since, what philosophic historian, has pro-