Encyclopaedia Britannica > Volume 21, ROT-Siam

SCHOPENHAUER 457
in his successors, from Fichte to Hegel, this axiom of the plain man
is set aside as antiquated. Thought or conception without a sub¬
ject-agent appears as the principle,—thought or thinking in its
universality without any individual substrata in which it is em¬
bodied : to voelv or vbyais is to be substituted for vods. This is the
step of advance which is required alike by Fichte when he asks his
reader to rise from the empirical ego to the ego which is subject-
object {i.e., neither and both), and by Hegel when he tries to sub¬
stitute the Begriff or notion for the Vorstellung or pictorial concep¬
tion. As spiritism asks us to accept such suspension of ordinary
mechanics as permits human bodies to float through the air and
part without injury to their members, so the new philosophy of
Kant’s immediate successors requires from the postulant for initia¬
tion willingness to reverse his customary beliefs in quasi-material
subjects of thought. , , . . . . . , ,
But, besides removing the psychological slag which clung to
Kant’s ideas from their matrix and presenting reason as the active
principle in the formation of a universe, his successors carried out
with far more detail, and far more enthusiasm and historical scope,
his principle that in reason lay the a priori or the anticipation of
the world, moral and physical. Not content with the barren asser¬
tion that the understanding makes nature, and that we can construct
science only on the hypothesis that there is reason in the world,
they proceeded to show how the thing vras actually done. But
to do so they had first to brush away a stone of stumbling which
Kant had left in the way. This was the thing as it is by itself
and apart from our knowledge of it,—the something which we
know, when and as we know it not. This somewdiat is what Kant
calls a limit-concept. It marks only that we feel our knowledge to
be inadequate, and for the reason that there may be another species
of sensation than ours, that other beings may not be tied by the
special laws of our constitution, and may apprehend, as Plato says,
by the soul itself apart from the senses. But this limitation, say
the successors of Kant, rests upon a misconception. The sense of
inadequacy is only a condition of growing knowledge m a being
subject to the laws of space and time; and the very feeling is a
proof of its implicit removal. Look at reason not in its single
temporal manifestations but in its eternal operation, and then this
universal thought, which may be called God, as the sense-condi¬
tioned reason is called man, becomes the very breath and structure
of the world. Thus in the true idea of things there is no irreduc¬
ible residuum of matter: mind is the Alpha and Omega, at once
the initial postulate and the final truth of reality.
In various ways a reaction arose against this absorption of every¬
thing in reason. In Fichte himself the source of being is primeval
activity, the groundless and incomprehensible deed-action (That-
Handlung) of the absolute ego. The innermost character of that
ego is an infinitude in act and effort. ‘1 The will is the, living
principle of reason,” he says again. “In the last resort,” says
Schelling (1809), in his Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom,
“there is no other being but will. Walien ist Ursein (will is
primal being); and to this alone apply the predicates fathomless,
eternal, independent of time, self-affirming.” It is unnecessary
to multiply instances to prove that idealism was never without a
protest that there is a heart of existence, life, will, action, which
is presupposed by all knowledge and is not itself amenable to ex¬
planation. We may, if we like, call this element, which is assumed
as the basis of all scientific method, irrational,—will instead of
reason, feeling rather than knowledge.
It is under the banner of this protest against rationalizing
idealism that Schopenhauer advances. But what marks out his
armament is its pronounced realism. He fights with the weapons
of physical doctrine and on the basis of the material earth.. He
knows no reason but the human, no intelligence save what is ex¬
hibited by the animals. He knows that. both animals and men
have come into existence within assignable limits of time, and. that
there was an anterior age when no eye or ear gathered the.life of
the universe into perceptions. Knowledge, therefore, with its
vehicle, the intellect, is dependent upon the existence of certain
nerve-organs located in an animal system; and its function is
originally only to present an image of the interconnexions of the
manifestations external to the individual organism, and so to give
to the individual in a partial and reflected form that feeling with
other things, or innate sympathy, which it^ loses as organization
becomes more complex and characteristic. Knowledge or intellect,
therefore, is only the surrogate of that more intimate unity of
feeling or will which is the underlying reality—the principle of all
existence, the essence of all manifestations, inorganic and organic.
And the perfection of reason is attained when man has transcended
those limits of individuation in which his .knowledge.at first pre¬
sents him to himself, when by art he has risen from single objects
to universal types, and by suffering and sacrifice has penetrated
Schopen- to that innermost sanctuary where the euthanasia of consciousness
hauer is reached,—the blessedness of eternal repose.
and Her- In substantials the theory of Schopenhauer may be compared
bert with a more prosaic statement of Mr Herbert Spencer (modernizing
Spencer. Hume). All psychical states may, according to him, be treated as
incidents of the correspondence between the organism and its en¬
vironment. In this adjustment the lowest stage is taken.by reflex
action and instinct, where the change of the organs is purely
automatic. As the external complexity increases, this automatic
regularity fails ; there is only an incipient excitation of the neives.
This feeble echo of the full response to stimulus is an idea, which
is thus only another word for imperfect organization or adjustment.
But gradually this imperfect correspondence is improved, and the
idea passes over again into the state of unconscious or organic
memory. Intellect, in short, is only the consequence of insufficient
response between stimulus and action. Where action is entirely
automatic, feeling does not exist. It is when the excitation is
partial only, when it does not inevitably, and immediately appear
as action, that we have the appearance of intellect in the gap. The
chief and fundamental difference between Schopenhauer and Mr
Spencer lies in the refusal of the latter to give this “adjustment
or “automatic action” the name of will. Will according to Mr
Spencer is only another aspect of wdiat is reason, memory, or feel¬
ing,—the difference lying in the fact that as will the nascent ex¬
citation (ideal motion) is conceived as passing into complete or full
motion. But he agrees with Schopenhauer in basing conscious¬
ness, in all its forms of reason, feeling, or will, upon “automatic
movement,—psychical change,” from which consciousness emerges
and in which it disappears.
What Schopenhauer professed, therefore, is to have dispelled Mam
the claims of reason to priority and to demonstrate the relativity tenden-
and limitation of science. Science, he reminds us, is based on final ciesof his
inexplicabilities ; and its attempts by theories of evolution to find system,
an historical origin for humanity in rudimentary matter show, a
misconception of the problem. In the successions of material
states there can nowhere be an absolute first. The true origin of
man, as of all else, is to be sought in an action which is everlasting
and which is ever present: nee te qusesiveris extra. There is a source
of knowledge within us by which vTe know, and more intimately
than we can ever know anything external, that we will and feel.
That is the first and the highest knowledge, the only knowdedge
that can strictly be called immediate ; and to ourselves we. as the
subject of will are truly the “immediate object.” It is in.this
sense of will—of will without motives, but not without conscious¬
ness of some sort—that reality is revealed. Analogy, and experi¬
ence make us assume it to be omnipresent. It is a mistake to say
will means for Schopenhauer only force. It means, a great deal
more ; and it is his contention that what the scientist calls force
is really will. In so doing he is only following the line predicted
by Kant1 and anticipated by Leibnitz. If we wish, said Kant, to
give a real existence to the thing in itself or the noumenon we can
only do so by investing it with the attributes found in our own
internal sense, viz., with thinking or something analogous thereto.
It is thus that Fechner in his “day-view ” of things sees in plants
and planets the same fundamental “soul” as in.us that is, one
simple being which appears to none but itself, in us as elsewhere
wherever it occurs self-luminous, dark for every other eye, at the
least connecting sensations in itself, upon which, as the grade of
soul mounts higher and higher, there is constructed the conscious¬
ness of higher and still higher relations.”2 It is thus that Lotze
declares3 that “behind the tranquil surface of matter, behind its
rigid and regular habits of behaviour, we are forced to seek the
glow of a hidden spiritual activity.” So Schopenhauer, but m a
way all his own, finds the truth of things in a will which is indeed
unaffected by conscious motives and yet cannot be separated from
some faint analogue of non-intellectual consciousness.
In two ways Schopenhauer has influenced the world. He has
shown with unusual lucidity of expression how feeble is the spon¬
taneity of that intellect which is. so. highly lauded, and how over¬
powering the sway of original will in all our action. He thus re¬
asserted realism, whose gospel reads, “ In the beginning was appetite,
passion will,” and has discredited the doctrinaire belief that
ideas have original force of their own. This creed, of natuialism
is dangerous, and it may be true that the pessimism it.implies
often degenerates into cynicism and a.cold-blooded denial that
there is any virtue and any truth. But in the crash of established
creeds and the spread of political indifferentism and social disin¬
tegration it is probably wise, if not always agreeable, to lay bare
the wounds under which humanity suffers, though pride would
prompt their concealment. But Schopenhauer’s theory has another
side. If it is daringly realistic, it is no less audacious m its ideal¬
ism.' The second aspect of his influence is the doctrine of redemp¬
tion of the soul from its sensual bonds, first by the medium of art
and second by the path of renunciation and ascetic life. It may
be difficult in each case to draw the line between social duty and
individual perfection. But Schopenhauer reminds us that the
welfare of society is a temporal and subordinate aim, never to be
allowed to dwarf the full realization of our ideal being. Man s
duty is undoubtedly to join in the common service of sentient
1 Kritik, (Trans. Anal.), bk. ii., Appendix.
2 Pe&er die Seelenfrage, p. 9, Leipsic, 1861.
3 Mikrokosmus, vol. i. p. 408 (2d ed.).
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