Encyclopaedia Britannica > Volume 21, ROT-Siam

449
SCHOPENHAUER
as ends in tliemselves. Accordingly lie offered his son the
choice between the classical school and an excursion to
England. A boy of fifteen could scarcely hesitate. In
1803 the Schopenhauers and their son set out on a
lengthened tour, of which Johanna has given an account,
to Holland, England, France, and Austria. Six months
were spent in England, and Arthur, while his parents
proceeded as far as Scotland, was left for a few weeks as
a boarder with a Rev. Mr Lancaster at Wimbledon.. . He
found English ways dull and precise and the religious
observances exacting; and his mother had—not for the
last time—to talk seriously with him on his unsocial and
wilful character. Perhaps the part of the tour which gave
him most pleasure was the last,—a solitary pedestrian
stroll along the ridge of the Riesengebirge, just before he
joined his mother at Dantzic, September 1804, where he
was confirmed.
At Hamburg in the beginning of 1805 he was placed
in the office of a merchant called Jenisch. He had only
been there for three months when his father, who had shown
symptoms of mental alienation, fell or threw himself from
an elevated opening of his warehouse into the canal. After
his death the young widow (still under forty) got affairs
wound up, and, leaving Arthur at Hamburg, proceeded
with her daughter Adele in the middle of 1806 to Weimar,
where she arrived only a fortnight before the tribulation
which followed the victory of Napoleon at Jena. At
Weimar her talents, hitherto held in check, found an atmo¬
sphere to stimulate and foster them ; her aesthetic and
literary tastes formed themselves under the influence of
Goethe and his circle, and her little salon gained a certain
celebrity. -A-rtliur, Hie&nwhile, W&S left cit his desk in
Hamburg, cursing his prosaic lot, and smuggling literature
under the ledger j the hot blood of youth was turning his
thoughts to morbid cynicism, and his easy-minded mother,
alarmed at his discontent, adopted the advice of her friend
IEernow, and offered him a release from the loathed task¬
work. He hastened to make up lost ground, and at the
age of nineteen began to decline mensa with Doering at
Gotha. But the wantonness and restiveness which he
had grown familiar with in the lax schooling of the world
•would not let him alone : he allowed his satirical pen to
play on one of the teachers of the grammar-school, and pro¬
fessional etiquette required Doering to dismiss his pupil.
After a plain but gentle rebuke for his folly, his mother
settled him at Weimar—not in her own house, for, as she
told him, she was content to know that he was well and
could dispense with his company—but with the Greek
scholar Passow, who superintended his classical studies.
This time he made so much progress that in the course of
two years he became a tolerable scholar, and read Greek
and Latin with fluency and interest.
CJniver- In 1809 his mother handed over to him (aged twenty-
dty one) the third part of the paternal estate, a sum of 19,000
career, thalers, which, being invested in good securities, yielded
him from the first a yearly income of more than 1000
thalers = £150. Possessed of this fair patrimony, Schopen¬
hauer in October 1809 entered the university of Gottingen,
with a clear plan of acquiring all that machinery of know¬
ledge which schools can give. The direction of his philo¬
sophical reading was fixed by the advice of Professor G.
E. Schulze to study, especially, Plato and Kant. For the
former he soon found himself full of reverence, and from
the latter he acquired the standpoint of modern philo¬
sophy. The names of “ Plato the divine and the marvel¬
lous Kant ” are conjunctly invoked at the beginning of his
earliest work. But neither the formal exercises of the
class-room nor the social and hygienic recreations which
he did not fail to combine with them filled his hours to
the exclusion of the ideas which began to formulate them¬
selves in him. Contempt for the superficiality of human
life settled itself more and more deeply in his heart, with
the sense of a bitterness tainting the very source of being,
and the perception that the egoism of individuals seeks
for nothing better than to push on the load of miseiy
from one to another, instead of making an effort. to re¬
duce the burden. These pessimistic reflexions (which his
mother found eminently unsocial) were naturally concomi¬
tant with groundless nervous terrors j sudden panics would
dash over his mind, and even in those days he had begun
to keep loaded weapons always ready at his bedside. As
a philosopher has said, “the sort of philosophy we choose
depends on the sort of people we are 3 for a philosophical
system is not a dead bit of furniture: it draws its life
from the soul of the man who has it.” He was a man of
few acquaintances, amongst the few being Bunsen, the
subsequent scholar-diplomatist, and Bunsen s pupil, W. C.
Astor, the son of Washington Irving’s millionaire hero.
Even then he found his trustiest mate in a poodle, and its
bearskin was an institution in his lodging. 4 et, precisely
because he met the world so seldom in easy dialogue, he
was unnecessarily dogmatic in controversy and many a
bottle of wine went to pay for lost wagers. But he had
made up his mind to be not an actor but an onlooker and
critic in the battle of life; and, when Wieland, whom he
met on one of his excursions, suggested doubts as to the
wisdom of his choice, Schopenhauer replied, “ Life is a
ticklish business; I have resolved to spend it in reflecting
upon it.”
After two years at Gottingen, he took two years at
Berlin, where the university had been founded only four
years before. Here also he dipped into divers stores of
learning, notably classics under Wolf. In philosophy he
heard Fichte and Schleiermacher. Between 1811 and
1813 the lectures of Fichte (subsequently published from
his notes in his Nachgelassene Werke) dealt with what he
called the “facts of consciousness” and the “theory of
science,” and struggled to present his final conception of
philosophy. These lectures Schopenhauer attended,-—at
first, it is allowed, with interest, but afterwards with a spirit
of opposition which is said to have degenerated into con¬
tempt, and which in after years never permitted him to re¬
fer to Fichte without contumely. Yet the words Schopen¬
hauer then listened to, often with baffled curiosity, certainly
helped to give direction to the current of his speculation.
Schopenhauer did not find the city of intellect at all to
his mind, and was lonely and unhappy. _ One of his inter¬
ests was to visit the hospital La Charite and study the
evidence it afforded of the interdependence of the moral
and the physical in man. In the early days of 1813 sym¬
pathy with the national enthusiasm against the French
carried him so far as to buy a set of arms; but he stopped
short of volunteering for active service, reflecting that
Napoleon gave after all only concentrated and untram¬
melled utterance to that self-assertion and lust for more
life which weaker mortals feel but must perforce disguise.
Leaving the nation and its statesmen to fight out their
freedom, he hurried away to Weimar, and thence to the
quiet Thuringian town of Rudolstadt, where in the inn
Zum Ritter, out of sight of soldier and sound of drum, he
wrote, helped by books from the Weimar library, his essay
for the degree of doctor in philosophy. On the 2d of
October 1813 he received his diploma from Jena; and in
the same year from the press at Rudolstadt there was
published—without winning notice or readers—his first
book, under the title Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes Satz voin
vom zureichenden Grunde, in 148 pages 8vo. ^ndm'
Schopenhauer’s monograph On the Fourfold Root of the Prin- Grunde.
civle of Sufficient Reason urged that, in discussing the principle ot
necessary connexion, pliilosopliers liad failed to distinguish between