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262 of the triumphant rationality that reigns above all the conflicts of the spiritual world. But as to Schopenhauer’s own account of life, I find indeed that his pessimism is usually wholly misunderstood and unappreciated, as well by those who pretend to accept as Weil by those who condemn it. What people fail to comprehend concerning these deep and partial insights which are so characteristic of great philosophers is that the proper way to treat them is neither to scorn nor to bow down, but to experience, and then to get our freedom in presence of all such insights even by the very wealth of our experience. We are often so slavish in our relations with doctrines of this kind! Are they expressed in traditional, in essentially clerical language, as in the “Imitation” or in some other devotional book, then the form deceives us often into accepting mystical resignation as if it were the whole of spirituality, instead of bearing, as it does bear, much the same relation to the better life that sculptured marble bears to breathing flesh. But if it is a Schopenhauer, a notorious heretic, who uses much the same speech, then we can find no refuge save in hating him and his gloom. In fact, pessimism, in its deeper sense, is merely an ideal and abstract expression of one very deep and sacred element of the total religious consciousness of humanity. In fact, finite life is tragic, very nearly as much so as Schopenhauer represented, and tragic for the very reason that Schopenhauer and all the counselors of resignation are never weary of expressing, in so far, namely, as it is at once deep and restless. This is its paradox, that it is always unfinished, that it never attains, that it throbs as the heart does, and ends one pulsation only to begin an- other. This is what Hegel saw. This is what all the great poets depict, from Homer’s wanderings of the much tossed and tried Odysseus down to “In Memoriam” of Tennyson, or the “Dramatic Lyrics” of Browning. Not only is this so, but it must be so. The only refuge from