BOOKS.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER.*
Miss ZIMMERN has written a very interesting life of the great German Buddhist and pessimist, without having at her disposal what would seem at first sight to be very prepossessing materials. It is true that Schopenhauer was in the highest degree a person of unique and strongly-marked character,—that he had cultivated what he himself called en grand soi-ndme. He was a solitary among philosophers,—he stood alone in a considerable number of different ways. First, he detested the mystical jargon of metaphysics, and made a laughing-stock of Hegel ; indeed, he tried to introduce the living world, with all its concrete experiences, into the very heart of philosophy, and thus he became odious to the philosophic caste. Yet he was not a man of the world in any sense, except that in which it is the characteristic of the man of the world to make himself perfectly familiar with all the details of any transaction concerning the success of which he is anxious. Schopenhauer was quite able to do this. When the firm in which his fortune was embarked was on the verge of bank- ruptcy, he rescued the greater part of his own property from the ruins with the sagacity and promptness of a true man of busi- ness. When he was anxious about the correct printing of his books, he took the steps for careful printing and accurate correc- tion with the minuteness and elaborateness of a man who gives a good deal of thought to detail. He ordered his studies, too, with a precision and clearness of purpose which showed the practical man. And he knew well what the ordinary qualities of the world were. There was nothing of the dreamer about him, yet no one would think of calling him a man of the world. Many a man of the world despises the world in his heart, but no true man of the world rails at it openly as Schopenhauer did. He was boastful and scorn- ful, which are the last qualities to smooth a man's path through the world ; and more than this, he was gloomy and suspicious. " ' It's safer trusting fear than faith,' was one of his favourite quotations," says Miss Zimmern. He kept pistols ready loaded near him at night ; would never trust himself under the hand of a barber ; was liable to the most wonderful panics on the outbreak of epi- demics; carried a little leather drinking-cup about with him to the table d'hôte, to guard against the danger of possible infection from drinking out of the cup used by any one who had had an infectious disease ; and always wrote his accounts and notes on the investment of his property in some foreign language. He hid his valuables like a miser in out-of-the-way places, and labelled his bonds and coupons Arcana Medics,' to divert suspicion. He cultivated, too, strange caprices, such as putting down a gold piece by his plate at the table d'hiite, which he told inquirers was "to go to the poor, whenever he heard the officers [of the Army] discuss anything more serious than women, dogs, and horses." And by way of curing his own melancholy, he used to try to persuade himself that in feeling it he was mistaking himself for somebody else who had real ground for melancholy, like a tutor (Privat-docent) who wanted to become a professor and could not get the appointment, or the like. All these quaint little tricks of personality show that Miss Zimmem had a figure with plenty of individual expression to paint. And yet her materials may have seemed very unpromising. For Schopenhauer had few friends and carried on hardly any available correspond- ence, nor did he keep any diaries or notes of a personal kind. His voluminous note-books were all on the subjects of his philosophy, and he entertained, it seems, a strong dislike to the practice of giving publicity to private letters or the publication of personal reminiscences. Fortunately, however, as a compensation for this great dearth of personal incident in Schopenhauer's life, his philosophy itself is full of concrete character and literary and scientific illustration. And of these features in his writings Miss Zimmern has known how to make good use, so that with apparently meagre materials for a graphic portrait, she has given us a picture of the morose thinker of Frankfort which is full of liveliness and character.
Schopenhauer, like most of the German thinkers, never realised properly the ultimate distinction between will and impulse. .All
• Arthur Schopenhaner: his Life and Philosophy. By Helen Zimmer,,. London : Longman
the active characteristics were to him forms of 'will,' no matter how involuntary, in the true sense," they might be. The identity and unity of the originating power, whose manifestation constitutes Creation, with the force which underlies all forms of existence and life, was not so much the result at which he arrived, as the assumption with which he began. He found the universe full of life-producing force, and he inferred at once that the true reality behind the world was an infinite sea of blind impulse striving to gain external form and manifestation, and only occasionally, and as it
were, accidentally, relehing the stage of consciousness, intelligence, and reason. If intelligence were at the origin of Will, said' Schopenhauer, then where there was great intelligence there ought to be much will, whereas intelligence is often an antidote to active power, and as intelligence increases, impulsive force
decreases. On the other hand, if impulse is the working force of creation, and intelligence only one of its accidental phenomena, we can understand how it is that in all the lower forms of being we get so much impulse, so much instinct, without any intelligence.
Desire,—which, according to Schopenhauer, is identical with Will, —is the great motive-power of life. In all living things there is desire, but it is blind, not knowing its own goal or its destined
method ; and only in a few very highly, and in a sense, accident- ally refined organisms does this desire get intellectual instru- ments placed at its disposal which enable it in some measure to estimate its own worth and calculate its own path. For the most part, the Universe is the product of a blind force which seems to crave manifestation in the physical world of space and time,—a blind force which finds expression in all the various modes of being and suffering called life, and of
which so very few are in any high degree rational. This is Schopenhauer's first peculiarity of creed. The creative force is at bottom Will, or desire, or impulse, —not rational, but blind. Intel- ligence is not essential to it. Only when it stumbles, as it were, on consciousness and intelligence, does it light upon the means of gauging and correcting its own procedure. It is not very easy to make out on what pretence it was that Schopenhauer assumed that this desire for a manifestation in the physical world which, in his view, is always being evinced by the living impulse behind Crea- tion, is an evil one. Apparently it was because this restless impulse, this great tide of desire, interfere e so much with pure, rational con- templation, that he held it evil by virtue of the very fact of that interference. Though to him an impulse towards manifestation (or "will," as he miscalled it) was the origin of all things, and intelli- gence but an accident of some of the later stages of its development, yet this intelligence has in it all the marks of nobility, while the eagerness to be, is in itself a sort of selfish egotism, so to speak, —a vulgar craving for separateness of existence, which involves competition and strife. "The Will recognised by Schopenhauer as the basis of Being must be a Will to Live, and the question immediately arises whether this Will bq a good one or a bad one.
Schopenhauer's answer is apparent from what we have already told in his biography. He holds, with the Indian and Singhalese schools of Buddhism (northern Buddhism seems to teach other- wise), that desire is the root of all evil, and thaVall desire may be reduced to the affirmation (Bejahung) of the Will to Live. By suppressing desire we suppress evil, but we suppress existence also.
The whole world, therefore, lieth in wickedness ;' it is a world that ought never to have been." Thus Soh openhauer makes it the essence of goodness to be able to identify yourself with the whole of Creation, and to divest yourself of the self -a.ssertingness which is the source of division, and it is because the Artist can do this to some extent in mere contemplative vision that he rates the artist high ; while the man who has ceased to struggle for his own happiness altogether, and has left the angry ripple of private hopes and fears far behind him, has attained the true Nirvana, the self-identification with the All which makes him quite indif- ferent whether it be his own private little department of the uni- verse, or some other part, which is required back for the good of the All.
"Schopenhauer lays it down that no action not wholly disinterested can be regarded as n_eritorious. He strives by an acute analysis to show that an action performed on the principle of behaving as one would wish one's neighbour to behave, has contracted a taint of im- purity, inasmuch as it is remotely biassed by the calculation that this will in the long-run prove for the interest of the agent himself. No action has any moral value in his eyes, unless it is prompted by pure compassion. This theory, of course, is strictly Buddhistic, and is a natural corollary from that view of the essential evil of all existence which he shared with Buddha. In the latter part of the essay ho analyses the nature of meritorious deeds and emotions, to show how they may bo deduced from his cardinal principle of action."
It is very curious to compare this theory of evil with the char- acter of the man who promulgated and apparently believed it. If ever there was a man who appeared to aim at exhibiting a "grand soi-meme," it was Schopenhauer. His pride and egotism were vast. His scorn for everything which had no part in him was trenchant. He never admitted, even in thought perhaps, the- existence of a superior. He was one of those in whom the power- to consort with equals did not exist. To inferiors, to disciples, he. could be gracious. Towards the lower animals he indulged some- thing like real affection. His mother he despised and disliked. His housekeeper once, for a trifling fault, he threw from him, and so maimed that he as adjudged to pay her a pension for the rest of his life ; his. dog was his dearest friend. Yet this man of proud, well-marked individuality, who never had a courteous word to say- for his rivals—the philosophers of his own time—and who justified' his preference for monarchy as a political system only by his con- tempt for the mob,—' a King,' he remarked, should say, instead of, we, by the grace of God,' we, the least of two evils,'—really believed, it seems, in the Buddhist doctrine that it is the highest of all states to cease altogether from desire, that life and evil are- almost synonymous terms, that it is the highest virtue of the in- dividual to merge his interests in those of the species, and that to sink action in contemplation is the nearest approach to true- virtue which human genius can make. In short, the life of Schopenhauer was in the most marked manner the contradiction of his own theories. He taught that to dissolve again the island of individuality in the ocean of the power from which nature proceeded, is the highest virtue ; but he built away like a cora? insect at the island of his own individuality, and made it as hard' and solid as a rock ; and when he was about to die, he might well say, as he did, that he feared Death held for him no prospect like- " Nirvana." Certainly not. It would take an agent very muck stronger than Death to dissolve such a personality as Schopenhauer's into the vague abstraction of a transcendental substratum of the universe, such as that the existence of which he assumed,—even though it were imbued, as he supposed it to be, with a restless and blameworthy desire to find for itself a material manifestation,.
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