Encyclopaedia Britannica > Volume 21, ROT-Siam

SCHOPENHAUER 455
of those ardent followers who find in his doctrine that
a translation by Mrs Lindner of an article by John Oxen-
ford which appeared in the Westminster Review for April
1853, entitled “ Iconoclasm in German Philosophy,” being
an outline of Schopenhauer’s system. In 1854 Frauen-
stadt’s Letters on the Schopenhauerean Philosophy showed
that the new doctrines were become a subject of discus¬
sion, a state of things made still more obvious by the
university of Leipsic offering a prize for the best exposi¬
tion and examination of the principles of Schopenhauer’s
system. Besides this, the response his ideas gave to
popular needs and feelings was evinced by the numerous
correspondents who sought his advice in their difficulties.
And for the same reason new editions of his works were
called for,—a second edition of his degree dissertation in
1847, of his Essay on Colours and of The Will in Nature
in 1854, a third edition of The World as Will and Idea in
1859, and in 1860 a second edition of The Main Problems
of Ethics.
Conven- In these later years Schopenhauer had at length realized
tional that peace which can be given in the world j he had
eucUe' become comparatively master of himself. His passions
andhxA had slackened their strain, and he was no longer the
pessi- victim of unavailing regrets. As a. youth he had known
mistic none of those ties which give the individual &n esprit de
asceti- corps^ a sense 0f community which he never quite loses.
clsm- Wandering about from place to place throughout Europe,
with no permanent home sweetened by the different
phases of family affection, with no reminiscences of com¬
radeship in schoolboy days, with no sentiment of the
dues of nationality, Schopenhauer is the fitter interpreter
of that modern cosmopolitanism which disdains the more
special ties of common life and mutual obligation as being
obstacles to free development. In exaggerated self-con¬
sciousness, he looks down upon the common herd who
live the life of convention and compromise, and puts the
supreme value on that higher intellectual life which leisure
and means permit him to enjoy. A subtler egoism, which
emancipates itself from the lusts and the duties of the
world, takes the place of the vulgar self-seeking of the
multitude and of the self-devotion of the patriot or
philanthropist. To such a mind the friction of professional
duties seems irksome: the bonds of matrimony and the
duties incumbent on social membership are so many
checks on freedom of thought and resolution. The indi¬
vidualist recognizes none of those minor morals and
parochial or provincial duties which appropriate three-
fourths of our conduct. In the wide universe he sees
himself and others, none more akin to him than another,
beings not bound by external ties, and united only in the
fundamental sameness of their inner nature. To oi dinary
mortals, absorbed in “ the trivial round, the common task,”
the links that bind individuals are forged by the petty
ordinances and observances of society. But to those
whom temper and circumstances have denied local and
partial associationship, the craving for totality is so keen
that it makes them seek their higher country in that far-
off world (strangely called “ intelligible ”) where their per¬
sonality disappears in the one being of the universe.
Thus wide is the antagonism between the eudsemomsm
of civilization, with aspirations towards perfecting our
homes and bodies, so that in all things comfort maybe
established, and the pessimistic asceticism of Schopen¬
hauer, which sees the perfection of life not in the abun¬
dance of those things which we eat and drink and where¬
with we are clothed but in a deadening of passion, a
negation of the would-live-and-enjoy, and an existence m
a calm ecstasy of beatific vision, of knowledge not abstract
but lively intuition. It is this protest of Schopenhauer
against the vanity of the aims prescribed by conventiona
civilization and enlightenment which has gained him some
religion of which they stand in need.
It is a religion which owns no connexion with theism His
or pantheism. Unlike Spinoza and Hegel and the other reliS10n-
leaders of modern speculation, Schopenhauer disdains the
shelter of the old theology. His religion is cosmic and
secular; it finds its saints in Buddhist and Christian
monasticism, in Indian devotees and 19th-century “beau¬
tiful souls,” and holds the one to be no nearer or more
impressive as an example than the other. Of Judaism
he has no good to say : its influence on Christianity has
been pernicious. The new faith is a ministry of art and
of high thinking, which may be rendered by all those who
by plain living and unselfish absorption in the great mean¬
ing and typal forms of the world have slain the root of
bitterness that constantly seeks to spring up within them.
It is far from being a worship of the blind force which lies
at the back of phenomena : it is a “ re-implication ” of the
individual into the absolute from which life has separated
him. Each seeker after this reunion is himself (when he
has learnt wisdom by experience and self-restraint) the very
being who has become all things ; and if the “ cosmic will ”
may be termed God (an impossible identification) then he
knows God more intimately than he knows anything else.
And here if anywhere it may be said, “ He serveth best
who loveth best all things both great and small.” Yet
love in this creed is second to knowledge; the odi pro-
fanum vulgus of the misanthrope is heard from the soli¬
tary’s shrine, and instead of the service of humanity we
have the contemplation of the eternal forms, and the ele¬
vation to that world where self ceases to be separated from
other selves, and where, in the ultimate ecstasy of know¬
ledge, all things positive and definite disappear and there
is a being which the sensuous soul of man fails to dis¬
tinguish from non-being.
It is often said that a philosophic system cannot be Relation
rightly understood without reference to the character and °f ^
circumstances of the philosopher. The remark finds ample g0pher
application in the case of Schopenhauer. The conditions
of his training, which brought him in contact with the system,
realities of life before he learned the phrases of scholastic
language, give to his words the stamp of self-seen truth
and the clearness of original conviction. They explain at
the same time the naivete which set a high price on the
products his own energies had turned out, and could not
see that what was so original to himself might seem less
unique to other judges. Pre-occupied with his own ideas,
he chafed under the indifference of thinkers who had grown
blase in speculation and fancied himself persecuted by a
conspiracy of professors of philosophy. It is not so easy
to demonstrate the connexion between a man’s life and
doctrine. But it is at least plain that in the case of any
philosopher, what makes him such is the faculty he has,
more than other men, to get a clear idea of what he himself
is and does. More than others he leads a second life in
the spirit or intellect alongside of his life in the flesh,—
the life of knowledge beside the life of will. It is. inevi¬
table that he should be especially struck by the points, in
which the sensible and temporal life comes in conflict with
the intellectual and eternal. It was thus that Schopenhauer
by his own experience saw in the primacy of the will the
fundamental fact of his philosophy, and found in.the en¬
grossing interests of the selfish epws the perennial hin¬
drances of the higher life. For his absolute individualism,
which recognizes in the state, the church, the family only
so many superficial and incidental provisions of human
craft, the means of relief was absorption in the intellectual
and purely ideal aims which prepare the way for the cessa¬
tion of temporal individuality altogether. But theory is
one thing and practice another ; and he will often lay most