BOOKS.

THE SYSTEM OF SCEIOPENHAITER.•

THE growth of the influence of Schopenhaner is a signficant chapter in the intellectual history of the latter half of the nineteenth century ; and it is interesting to those who are not professed students of philosophy. Schopenhauer • Schopealtaews 23Vatern. it, Philosophical Signigoance. By William Caldwell, M.A.. Professor of Moral and Social Philosophy, North-Weatern tinivereity. U.S.A. London, William Blackwood and Bona. is indeed the philosopher of the layman as distinguished from the philosophical expert. He lectured for some time at the University of Berlin, but with such indifferent success that he abandoned his profession in disgust. His writings, which have since become so famous, were on their first appearance received with indifference, or with contempt, by most of his contemporaries, although * very few, Goethe among them, recognised that a new force had appeared in the world of speculative thought. The indifference was the more remarkable as Schopenhauer was a master of style, the best writer of philosophical German that had appeared for centuries. The treatment accorded to his works still farther embittered a spirit not originally sweet, but it did not shake Sohopenhaner's arrogant con- fidence in the future of his philosophy. He predicted that his works would be read when those of Fichte, Hegel, and his other successful rivals, would lie upon the shelves of the scholar or of the dealer in old books. An author who can receive an adverse verdict in such a spirit is usually either a vain charlatan, or a man of conquering originality. Few will now deny that Schopenhauer belonged to the latter class. His prophecy about his own works has been completely fulfilled, and that regarding his rivals partially. Mr. Caldwell truly says that nowadays it is almost impossible to escape his influence, which is felt far beyond the philosophic circle. Echoes of it come to us in the music of Wagner, and its presence can be plainly detected in the strange outpourings of that weird prophet of moral revolu- tion, Nietzsche, who has taken young Germany by storm. Nietzsche, it is true, disavowed latterly his former disciple- ship to Schopenhauer, but he continued to speak of him as Germany's last philosopher.

Mr. Caldwell's careful and intelligent study does not pro- fess to give a complete exposition of Schopenhauer's philosophy. He has attempted rather, he says, to connect him with a few broad lines of philosophical and general thought, and with some few broad principles of human nature. This method of treatment is suitable in the case of Schopenhauer, in whose writings one seeks in vain for a complete and consistent philosophy. He is a brilliant essayist, French rather than German in spirit, from whom we receive strangely luminous glimpses of certain aspects of human nature. The tardiness of the recognition of Schopenhauer by his fellow-countrymen was in part due to his personal character ; for they found it hard to believe that the selfish and self-indulgent recluse of Frankfort was the bearer of a profound message regarding the gravest problems of ethics and religion.

It was likewise due to the almost unquestioned supremacy of Hegel and his school. Hegel had not only captivated all the young and ardent spirits of the time by his splendid generalisations in the world of thought ; he had conciliated the ruling authorities in Church and State by his cautious, and conservative treatment of political and social questions. To be an opponent of Hegel, therefore—and Schopenhauer was an uncompromising and even rude opponent—meant philosophical ostracism. A philosophy of optimism, however, even when sustained by splendid speculative gifts, as in ths case of Hegel, has seldom a long life in a world where there is so much to disturb its pleasing dreams. And Hegel's philosophy, fruitful as it was in thoughts of abiding value, especially to the student of history, was in its main pretensions something of an imposture. The objective dialectic, as Mr. Caldwell truly says, which Hegel represented as an unfolding of God, was no genuine interpretation of objective reality, but a description of the categories which the human mind has to use in in- terpreting reality. The reaction against Hegelianism had something of the character of an angry revolt against ad leader who had deceived his followers by false promises and it found in the neglected philosophy of Schopenhauer $ weapon ready forged. To men suffering from a surfeit of a priori systems, a philosophy was welcome which professed to return to Kant, and confined itself to the facts of inner and outer experience without seeking to fathom the ultimate causes of things. The prominence given to the Will in Sehopenha,uer's system was another welcome feature in it ; for Hegel had neglected the will and the emotions and given merely intellectual answers to ethical questions. What we observe in the world and in man, according to

Schopenhauer, is not an unfolding of ideas, but the struggle of the Will to live. His doctrine, that the Will is the central essence, was a real correction of the current philosophies ; and modern science has brought confirmation to not a little of his teaching. But with a perversity which was more moral than intellectual, he insisted on considering the Will almost solely in its lowest forms and manifestations, as a blind, irrational instinct. From his view of the Will was derived his famous doctrine of Pessimism. Whether we read history,

he said, or observe human life as it is, what we see is a hideous struggle of selfishness,—homo homini lupus. And as there is no hope of improvement, all that remains for the wise man is to regret that the world ever came into existence,

and to long for its speedy extinction. This dismal view of human nature was largely due to the entire absence in the philosopher himself of those kindly instincts which would have opened his eyes to perceive the good that mingles with evil in the turmoil and struggle of ordinary life. For certain forms of exalted virtue he had at least an msthetic admiration, but for virtue in homespun he had no appreciation. Mr.

Caldwell writes :—

"Schopenhauer has very little sense for the midway region in morals, the plain broad highway of life on which ordinary ethical actions are exhibited. The ethical man is neither a beast nor a god, but a plain being exhibiting rarely the extremes of 'excess' and defect.' It was mainly the ' excess ' and the 'defect' in life that Schopenhauer saw, and consequently he had not the first prerequisites of the dispassionate and unprejudiced and apprecia- tive ethical observer. Like Machiavelli, he could not see the guiding and restraining power of the media aziomata of life; he could only figure to himself the workings of perfect goodness or perfect bad- ness He was incapable of appreciating the contentment that comes to ordinary people from the simple discharge of duty and from simple participation in the ordinary delights of life. He would have scorned as utterly beneath his notice such blissful contentment as Jean Paul represents in his schoolmaster 'Wuz ' or in hM Fixlein.' He had no real inward feeling for the ethical value of the Greek idea of the 'limit' in things, or of their maxim iivay, or of Aristotle's idea of virtue as a 'mean' between two extremes. Nor had he any sympathy for the insignificant pursuits of insignificant people or the innocent satisfaction of humble wants. He saw only the extremes in life, like Nero having Seneca for a tutor, or the stupid Germans trying to shake a man like Napoleon off their shoulders, or the fact that the French, although the most gay and most superficial and the most con- summately mundane of all peoples, have yet given birth to the strictest and the severest religious order, the La Trappe monks. It is astounding to think how he could, although by his own profession a man of the world' who pretended to know men as they are, maintain all human actions to be the outcome of simply three motives,—selfishness, wickedness, and benevolence. There is the mere student, and the hardened bachelor, and the soured observer of human life in a great deal that he writes about ethics."

It is a clear proof that it is impossible to maintain a con- sistent pessimism, that its philosopher propounded a doctrine of redemption for an unredeemable world, or at all events for certain elect spirits among its dwellers. The world cannot be improved, he said, nor is positive happiness within the reach of man ; but a certain negative happiness may be

gained by those who renounce the Will to live, and who bestow sympathy upon the victims of the penal servitude of Will. This sympathy is to be reached through a perception of the identity of all willing beings. Mr. Caldwell says, we think with justice, that Schopenhauer's doctrine of sympathy is something of a logical tour de force,.—an attempt to save an extreme view of human nature by having recourse to a highly abstract metaphysical conception.

Schopenhauer was accustomed to say that both Buddhism and Christianity are pessimistic in their teaching. Judaism, he admitted, was not so, and he spoke of the Jews as the most

immoral people on the earth, because of their unconquerable desire to live. The resemblance between the teaching of the New Testament and Schopenhauer's doctrine is very super- ficial. The New Testament, it is true, teaches a renunciation of the present world, but it is a renunciation based upon hope, and not upon despair, and is most intimately connected with a faith in a living God,—a faith emphatically repudiated by Schopenhauer. The missionary spirit of Christianity is called forth by a doctrine the very opposite of pessimism,—

Sanabiles fedi Deus nationes munde. Schopenhauer, at best, only taught mankind how to fall with dignity, how to renounce all high hopes without that querulousness which would only deepen their distress. His teaching was a return

to Stoicism rather than to Christianity. Mr. Caldwell's chapter on Schopenhauer's philosophy of art contains some

acute and just criticisms. Schopenhauer ascribed to art a

certain redeeming power, for it too lifted men out of the con- dition of the penal servitude of willing. But as Mr. Caldwell remarks with truth, it is difficult to see how art can further the final renunciation of the world after which Schopenhauer longs; for it is the outcome of a sense for Nature and life, and ends in taking us more deeply into both.

Schopenhauer will continue to be read, for he saw many things with almost preternatural clearness, and the style of his writing is a continual feast to some readers. His system, however, will hardly maintain the ascendency which for a time it enjoyed. There is in it a wholly unnatural union of ascetic piety, although a piety without God, with a despair of any favourable issues for human life either in this world or in another state of existence. Nietzsche's teachings, with their denial of all ethical obligations, seem to be a legitimate, and even inevitable, reaction against the more than cloistral gloom of Schopenhauer's comfortless faith.