Encyclopaedia Britannica > Volume 21, ROT-Siam

452 S C H O P E
for all in tire beginning, knowledge is not useless. We can learn
to adopt new means though the end of will remains unaltered. It
is this new knowledge which causes repentance, when we see we
have adopted undue methods to attain our aim. The survey of the
phenomena of life in the light of their principle shows that all life
is a ceaseless battle for existence between individuals, that happi¬
ness is only negative, viz., a relief from pain, that life is a tragedy.
But the natural man, immersed in the sense of life, plays the egoist
as if he were the centre of existence and the will to life spoke
in him alone. In such a spirit he not merely acts as if affirming
his own will to life, but as if he denied that of others. He com¬
mits injustice. The sense of wrong-doing, he may feel, is the wit¬
ness of consciousness to the identity between himself and others ;
it is the appearance of moral law and gives rise to that sense of
right which is the beginning of ethics. But for the most part
practical reflexions note only the evils caused by egoism, and induce
the sufferers to form a law to produce by repression the same results
as morality attains by stimulation. Thus penal law, as opposed to
moral law, aims only at checking intrusions upon the rights of
others, and the whole political organization is only an instrument
for checking egoism by egoism, for making each seek the welfare
of all because it includes his own. Its justice is temporal; it adds
an additional pain by legislative machinery, with a view to the
welfare of the greater number.
But there is another and an eternal justice. Here there is no
separation of time and place between the wrongdoer and the
sufferer. This eternal justice reveals itself to him who, having
seen through ‘ ‘ the veil of Maya, ” has found that in the world of
truth the divisions between individuals fall away, and that he who
does wrong to another has done the wrong to his own self. The
persuasion of this doctrine of eternal justice is so ingrained in
human nature that we welcome the punishment that overtakes the
victorious evildoer. Similar lessons are hidden in the myths of
transmigration of souls. The secret sense that the pains of others
are in reality not alien constitutes the torments of remorse which
visit the wicked. The good man, on the contrary, who has been
brought to see through the veil of individuality into the unity of
all being, will not merely practise justice,—he will be animated by
a universal benevolence. Instead of epws or the blind lust of life
(seen at its strongest in sexual appetite), he has learned, by means
of self-knowledge, that ayamf) which is pitying love, or caritas
generis humani.
Such benevolence only alleviates the misery of others. It culmi¬
nates in self-sacrifice, which is carried out by voluntary and com¬
plete chastity, by utter poverty, by mortification, by fasting, and
last of all by death. Such a course of life, however, is seldom
taught by instruction alone, and the broken will generally comes
only where a mighty shock of grief reveals the inevitable pain of
existence and brings a quietive to the lust of life. Yet the victory
over the will to life is not attained once for all; the supremacy
must l ie retained by a career of asceticism. Such ascetics, in whom
the will to life was deadened and the body remained as a mere
empty semblance, were the saints and mystical devotees of all ages.
They had crucified the flesh with its affections and lusts. Their
will had been emancipated from the bondage to which in life it was
subject, had been released from the objectification in corporeity and
restored to its original infinity. In such saints alone has the essen¬
tial freedom of the will appeared on the temporal scene, but appeared
only to destroy the old Adam and bring in the new birth. By the
lively knowledge of the truth of things the will has denied itself,
has passed into a stage where the objective world is as if it were
not,—the stage which was when will as yet had not gone forth to
objectify itself in a world and when knowledge had not yet mirrored
the reality in an idea, when, in short, nothing was.
Visit to Long before the work had come to the hands of the
Italy. public, Schopenhauer had rushed off to Italy and ex¬
changed the labours of giving the gospel of renunciation
a metaphysical basis for the gaiety of southern life and
the influences of classic art. At Venice, where he first
lingered for a while, he found himself a fellow-denizen
with Lord Byron; but, except for a solitary chance when
his jealousy was stirred by the outspoken admiration of
his fair Venetian companion for the handsome Briton who
rode past them on the Lido, the two insurgent apostles of
the Weltschmerz never came across each other’s path. At
Borne, where he passed the depth of winter, he saw the
first copies of his book. It found him in assiduous attend¬
ance on the art galleries, the opera, and theatre,—turning
from the uncongenial companionship of his romantic coun¬
trymen and gladly seizing every chance of conversing in
English with Englishmen. In March 1819 he had gone
as far as Naples and Psestum. On his way homewards
N H A U E R
he was startled by receiving at Milan a letter from his
sister announcing that in consequence of the failure of the
Dantzic house a large part of his own and his mother’s
and nearly the whole of his sister’s fortune were endangered.
This change of circumstances was a heavy blow to the
ladies, and he himself was almost induced by the mischance
to qualify himself to teach in the university at Heidelberg
in July 1819. But he sternly refused the compromise of
seventy per cent, offered by the insolvent firm, and was so
angrily suspicious with his sister who accepted it that he
ceased to correspond with her for about fourteen years.
Fortunately his determined and skilful assertion of his
rights was crowned, after a long dispute, with success.
He recovered the whole debt, receiving in principal and
interest the sum of 9400 thalers.
After some stay at Dresden, hesitating between fixing Appoint-
himself as university teacher at Gottingen, Heidelberg, ment at
or Berlin, he finally chose the last-mentioned. In his ex- Berlm-
amination before the faculty (disputatio pro venia legendi)
he enjoyed what he reckoned the satisfaction of catching
up Hegel (who had just been appointed professor) in a lax
use of a technical term (“animal” for “organic” functions).
And in his first and only course of lectures he had the
further satisfaction of selecting as his hours the same times
(12 to 1 on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) as Hegel
had taken for his principal class. This course on the first
principles of philosophy or knowledge in general, given in
the summer of 1820, was not a success,—indeed did not
reach its natural end, and, though the notice of lecture was
repeated during his stay in Berlin up to 1831, the lecture-
room knew him no more. Brilliant as he was in powers of
luminous illustration and characteristic as is his style, he
was wanting in the patient exposition of a subject for its
own sake and not as the field for exemplifying a favourite
thesis. The result of his experiences in 1820-21, which
he attributed to Hegelian intrigues, was to intensify his
suspicions of his colleagues, one of whom, F. E. Beneke
(another alleged victim to Hegel’s jealousies), he accused of
garbled quotations in his review of The World as Will and
Idea. Except for some attention to physiology, the first
two years at Berlin were wasted. In May 1822 he set
out by way of Switzerland for Italy. After spending the
winter at Florence and Borne, he left in the spring of 1823
for Munich, where he stayed for nearly a year, the prey
of illness and isolation. When at the end of this wretched
time he left for Gastein, in May 1824, he had almost en¬
tirely lost the hearing of his right ear. Dresden, which he
reached in August, no longer presented the same hospitable
aspect as of old, and he was reluctantly drawn onwards to
Berlin in May 1825. '
The place had unpleasant associations of many kinds,
but one disagreeable incident of his former stay now re¬
turned to him in a judicial award of pains and penalties.
One day, about a year after his first settlement in Berlin,
on 12th August 1821, on returning to his lodging he found
three women standing in the passage in front of his room
door. The event had annoyed him before, and his land¬
lady had promised it should not occur again. On this
occasion accordingly Schopenhauer ordered them out of
what he held to be his own “stair-head,” walked into his
room, and emerged in a few minutes with hat and stick as
he had entered. One of the women was still on the spot,
—a semptress, forty-seven years old, a friend of the land¬
lady, and occupant of a small chamber adjacent to that of
Schopenhauer. This person he ejected; and when she
returned to pick up a piece of cloth (there stood a chest of
drawers belonging to her in the passage) he put her forcibly
out again, upon which she fell with a shriek that alarmed
the house. Next day she lodged an action against him
for personal injuries; and, after a variety of opposing deci-