Page:Philosophical Review Volume 19.djvu/537

523 entity, manifested in each and all of them." When we finally come to recognize the illusoriness of the distinction between the ego and the non-ego, we experience reality as it is in its essence. This, then, is what Schopenhauer regards as the metaphysical foundation of ethics: "The sense which identifies the ego with the non-ego, so that the individual directly recognizes in another his own self, his true and very being." This higher metaphysical knowledge becomes immediately present to the ethical saint, to the ascetic who renounces the will-to-live in himself, and recognizes completely the mystic truth of the Sanskrit tat twam asi: "This thou art." This last conclusion, to which both ethics and metaphysics lead, is not capable of being stated in terms of exact philosophical principles; the philosopher himself can only catch a vague glimmer of what the hermit-saint directly experiences. "Every purely beneficent act, all help entirely and genuinely unselfish, being, as such, exclusively inspired by another's distress, is, in fact, if we probe the matter to the bottom, a dark enigma, a piece of mysticism put into practice; inasmuch as it springs out of, and finds its only true explanation in, the same higher knowledge that constitutes the essence of whatever is mystical." But the way in which the compassionate conduct, universally recognized as moral, and the epistemological illusionism which leads Schopenhauer to his doctrine of self-renunciation, inevitably point to and involve each other, shows clearly, Schopenhauer thinks, the correctness of his analysis of human conduct as well as the truth of his interpretation of the nature of reality. Thus do his ethics and his theoretical philosophy mutually vindicate each other.

Let us keep in mind the chief points in Schopenhauer's criticism of Kant's theory of morals and turn our attention to the philosophical implications and practical significance of the ethics of sympathy and self-obliteration which Schopenhauer advances as the only true solution of the moral problem.