Page:Philosophical Review Volume 9.djvu/250

234, and Schleiermacher, would be sufficient to establish an indirect acquaintance. To Spinoza he owed the advance from a theory of a multiplicity of things-in-themselves, or Platonic ideas, to a subordination of all to the one will. The influence of Giordano Bruno and the Vedas must, of course, be admitted, but they are never of more than secondary importance. The first place must be given to Spinoza.

The author, who writes from the standpoint of a physician rather than from that of a philosophical critic, devotes the first half of his book to an account of Schopenhauer's life, including a minute description of his skull and of the various portraits. The second part contains a discussion of his philosophy, and is a criticism rather than an exposition. Dr. Mobius regards Schopenhauer's system as at bottom the same as Fechner's, who succeeded, however, in avoiding Schopenhauer's faults. The chief merit of both writers is the fact that they deserted scholasticism, or the attempt to build a system out of concepts, and instead looked upon philosophy as the exposition of experience. Wherever Schopenhauer remains true to this ideal, he is worthy of the greatest attention; but his philosophical training unfortunately subjected him to the influence of Kant and Plato, and brought about many contradictions of thought, most of which a study of the natural sciences would have enabled him to avoid. He was justly proud of his fundamental metaphysical principle, that of the will, but erred in supposing it to be his own discovery. What he did was to give philosophical form to the oldest and most naïve mode of thinking, and thus to state as the principle of metaphysics that which really is its principle. His formula is the same as Fechner's. The one reads: 'For us the world is idea, for itself, will'; the other is as follows: 'That which received from without is physics, viewed from within is psyche.' Schopenhauer's theory of pessimism is vitiated by the too great attention paid to cases of exceptional suffering, while the small and frequent pleasures are ignored. Nevertheless, his treatment of ethics is on the whole correct, and is to be counted among the best things that have been written on the subject. Its value lies in its recognition of the fundamental part played by the obliteration through sympathy of the limits of individuality. He was right, too, in his theory of religion, the kernel of which, according to him, is self-denial for the sake of the highest. In fact, in spite of his errors, he was a reformer in psychology, metaphysics, and ethics.

This attractive little volume contains, in addition to an account of the life and times of Ferrier, a general statement of his philosophical standpoint