Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/270

246 dream of something called the divine perfection, — something pure, abstract, extra-mundane. He comes on “that which is,” and catches, like Tennyson in the famous night vision on the lawn, in the “In Memoriam,” “the deep pulsation of the world.” Only by and by morning comes. Your mystic must awake; his vision must vanish, “stricken through with doubt.” Tennyson seems to have endured the waking better than others. But, generally speaking, the pessimist of Schopenhauer’s type is simply the mystic of the type of the “Imitation,” at the moment when he has awakened from the false glory of this religious intoxication.

The events of our hero’s life may be briefly disposed of. His father took or sent him on long travels during his early youth, made him well acquainted with both French and English, and insisted that he should in due time learn the mercantile business, and train himself to be a busy, intelligent, and many-sided man of the world. Scholarship and the university formed no part in the father’s plans. The boy spent also considerable time on his father's country estate, loved nature, but was always a lonely child. As youth waxed, moodiness tormented him; he already showed also the metaphysical turn. His father’s death, in 1805, left him free to follow his own plans. He forsook the hated counting-house, where he had already set about his work, and began to study for the university; making rapid progress in Latin, quarrelling with his elders, and writing rhetorically gloomy letters to his mother, who had now entered on her Weimar career. The son’s native pessimism was still far, of course, from the later philosophical formulation, but he already perceived that one great evil about the world is its endless change, which dooms all ideal interests and moods to alteration and defeat. “Everything,” he writes to his mother, “is washed away in time’s stream. The minutes, the numberless atoms of pettiness into which