Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/257

Rh analysis of the nature of consciousness. Such analysis was the problem that Kant bequeathed to his successors. For Kant showed that we know the world only in terms of consciousness and its laws, so that the understanding is the creator of the show nature that stands before our senses. Fichte tried to solve this Kantian problem by proving that it is the moral law which is the very heart and essence of our consciousness, so that our seemingly outer world is there as a means whereby we can do our work and win our deeper self. The romanticists, however, felt that consciousness was no more exhaustively expressed by the moral will than by any other humane interest of the self. Thus, there entered into philosophy a reign of caprice, to which even Hegel did not put an end. Once understand the nature of this caprice, and you will see the place which Schopenhauer’s system is to hold in the development of doctrine.

Were it not, says all idealism, were it not that I am just such a conscious being as I am, my world would be a wholly different one from the world that I see. To know the real nature of my world I must therefore understand my own deeper self. Is there anything fixed, stable, necessary, about my nature? If so, then I am necessarily forced to exist in just this sort of world. Bat if I am essentially of no one fixed and necessary nature, then at any moment my whole world might alter. The ordinary realism of common sense doesn’t fear this, doesn’t feel the necessity of an ultimate appeal to anything stable or fixed about me as the real source of truth, because ordinary realism holds that the truth is there beyond me, as something knowable to all people of good intelligence, in the hard and fast matter of the world of sense. There is the moon yonder. For ordinary realism, the moon is as permanent as nature makes it, and stays there whether any one knows it or not. Hence, in order to ask whether there is anything stable about the world,