ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER (1788-1860) was born in Dantzic (117 Heiligen-Geist Strasse) on 22d February 1788. Doomed for the first thirty years of his career to find his works ignored with galling silence, he came, from the year 1845 onwards, to be looked up to by a scanty but devoted following as, what he himself claimed to be, the founder of the first true philosophy. Historical criticism has done much to dispel his pretensions to originality, and logical examination has demonstrated the incongruities lurking in his system. But the fact of his dominant influ-ence on contemporary thought remains undiminished after every such disparaging analysis. He consoled himself for the neglect of his own generation by the assurance that his would be the philosophy of the future. His ideas, recommended by the mastery of language and brilliance of illustration which entitle him to a first class in literature, have become the burden of much of our current speculation, and have leavened to an unusual extent the view of life and of the universe which animates the average educated world and finds expression in literary art.

His father, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, the youngest of a family to which the mother had brought the germs of mental malady, was a man of strong will and originality, vehement and resolute in the extreme, and so proud of the independence of his native town that when Dantzic in 1793 surrendered to the Prussians he and his whole establishment withdrew to Hamburg. The mother of the future philosopher was Johanna Henriette Trosiener. Both parents belonged to the mercantile aristocracy, the bankers and traders, of Dantzic. Johanna, who at the age of twenty accepted a husband of forty, was as yet undeveloped in character; and perhaps he hoped that her want of love, which she did not conceal, might be com-pensated by the community of tastes and interests which, under his guidance, would grow up between them. But the radical rift in the wedded heart could not be stopped up by a merely intellectual cement. The two children of the marriage, Arthur born in 1788 and Adele in 1796, bore (according to the theory of the formerJ) the penalty of their parents' incompatibilities. While they inherited from their mother a high degree of intelligence and literary style, they were burdened by an abnormal urgency of desire and capacity for suffering, which no doubt took different phases in the man and the woman, but linked them together in a common susceptibility to ideal pain. In the summer of 1787, a year after the marriage, the elder Schopenhauer, whom commercial experiences had made a cosmopolitan in heart, took his young wife on a tour to western Europe. It had been his plan that the expected child should see the light in England, but the intention was frustrated by the state of his wife's health, and they had to beat a hasty retreat homewards in early winter. The name of Arthur, given to the child in St Mary's at Dantzic, was chosen because it remains the same in English, French, and German. The first five years of his life Arthur spent under the care of his mother, chiefly in their country house at Oliva, about 4 miles west of Dantzic. There, at the foot of the prettily wooded sand-hills which look out upon the dim Baltic, the young mother enjoyed a life of leisure, dissipating the long solitary hours with her horses, the gondola on the pond, the foun-tains, and the lambs, or with the French novels her husband put amply at her disposal. It was only on Saturday and Sunday that he would quit his office in town and come down, generally in company with a friend or two, to get a glimpse of his wife and son. The latter was often taken on a visit for weeks to the manor-house, between Dantzic and the sea-coast, where his maternal grandparents lived. After 1793 the father never set foot in his old home; but Johanna was allowed every four years to revisit the scenes of her youth.

During the twelve years they had their home at Ham- Ham-burg (1793-1805) the Schopenhauers made frequent ex-burg cursions. The year after his sister's birth Arthur was Perlod-taken by his father to France, and left for two years (1797-99) as a boarder with M. Gregoire, a merchant of Havre, and friend of the Hamburg house. The boy formed a fast friendship with his host's son, Anthime, and grew so familiar with French that by the end of his sojourn he had almost forgotten his mother-tongue. The youthful friends lost sight of each other for long years; and when the Frenchman sought to renew their corre-spondence in the evening of life they found that they had drifted far asunder; and unworthy suspicions led Schopen-hauer to dismiss his old comrade in abrupt silence. Arthur returned alone by sea to Hamburg, and for the next four years had but indifferent training. When he reached the age of fifteen the scholarly and literary instincts began to awaken, and he became anxious to be initiated into the fraternity of the liberal arts and sciences. But his father, steeped in that cold pride of caste which looks down upon the artist and the writer of books as mere means or instru-ments to decorate and diversify the life of business, was unwilling a son of his should worship knowledge and truth as ends in themselves. Accordingly he 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 1801, 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. Arthur, meanwhile, was left at his desk in Hamburg, cursing his prosaic lot, and smuggling literature under the ledger; 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 Fernow, and offered him a release from the loathed taskwork. 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. Tmrver- In 1809 his mother handed over to him (aged twenty-sity 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 philosophy. 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 themselves 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 misery 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; 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 ; 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. Yet, 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 Nacligelassene 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.

Schopienhauer 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 Charité and study the
evidence it afforded of the interdependence of the moral
and the physical in man. In the early clays 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 Sitter, 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 Wurzei des Satzes SoUz vom
vom zureichenden Grunde, in 148 pages 8vo. zureich-
enden

Schopenhauer's monograph On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason urged that, in discussing the principle of necessary connexion, philosophers had failed to distinguish between reason as ground of belief and reason as cause of a fact. The principle gives expression to the law that nothing singular and unconnected can be an object for us but only as forming part in a system. This law has four main roots, according to the four classes of objects, in each of which a special form of connexion prevails. These objects are—(1) real objects of perception, where the relation of cause and effect requires each state to be dependent on its ante-cedent ; (2) propositions, which are tied together as premises and conclusions ; (3) the formal conditions of perception, viz., space and time, where each part is intuitively seen to be in reciprocal depend-ence on every other ; (4) voluntary agents, where the law of motiva-tion prescribes the dependence of action upon the idea of an object presented to the character of the agent.1 Modifying the Kantian theory, that things are mental projections, he emphasizes the intel-lectual operation which elevates sensation to perception. The feeling of alteration in an organ is taken by the intellect, whose one category is causality, to refer to a real, i.e., material object which generates the change in our body. But the reference is an intuitive interpretation of a felt modification in the organism. Hence the important place assigned to the human body : it is the first of objects, the "immediate object," the means by which all other objects come within consciousness. As a perpetual correlative of external perceptions, the body further serves as an instrument for separating phantasm from fact. To detect and scare away hallucination we have only to realize the presence of our bodies. In dealing with motives Schopenhauer touches upon the relation between volition and cognition. The ego—which is the subject that knows —is a mere correlative to the known object : object perceived and subject perceiving are not two things, but one, perpetually dividing itself into two poles ; and what are called the several faculties of the ego are only an inference or a reflex from the several classes of mental object. The " I " in " I know " is already the implication and virtual presence of knowledge. But the "I will" is a new fact,—the revelation of. another aspect of the world, the first fact of inner and real existence. In this perception there is given us the unity of the volitional self with the knowing subject ; and this identity of the "I" who "will" with the "I" who "know" is in Schopenhauer's words the miracle par excellence [das Wunder KO.T iioxh", § 43).

In November 1813 Schopenhauer returned to Weimar, and for a few months boarded with his mother. But the strain of daily association was too much for their antagon-istic natures. The mother felt herself gênée in the presence of a disputatious and gloomy son ; she missed the ease of her emancipated life ; and her friends found their movements watched by a suspicious eye, which was ready to surmise evil in the open and light-hearted style of housekeeping. In short, his splenetic temper and her Rupture volatility culminated in an open rupture in May 1814. with his From that time till her death in 1838 Schopenhauer never ' saw his mother again. It was during these few months at Weimar, however, that he made some acquaintances de-stined to influence the subsequent course of his thought. Conversations with the Orientalist F. Mayer directed his studies to the philosophical speculations of ancient India. In 1808 Friedrich Schlegel had in his Language and Wis-dom of the Old Hindus brought Brahmanical philosophy within the range of European literature. Still more in-structive for Schopenhauer was the imperfect and obscure Latin translation of the Upanisliads which in 1801-2 Anquetil Duperron had published from a Persian version of the Sanskrit original. Another friendship of the same period had more palpable immediate effect but not so per-manent. This was with Goethe, who succeeded in securing his interest for those investigations on colours on which he was himself engaged. Schopenhauer took up the subject in earnest, and the result of his reflexions (and a few ele-mentary observations) soon after appeared (Easter 1816) as a monograph, Ueber das Sehen und die Farben. The essay, which must be treated as an episode or digression from the direct path of Schopenhauer's development, due to the potent deflecting force of Goethe, was written at Dresden, to which he had transferred his abode after the

rupture with his mother. It had been sent in MS. to Goethe in the autumn of 1815, who, finding in it a trans-formation rather than an expansion of his own ideas, in-clined to regard the author as an opponent rather than an adherent.

This classification Schopenliauersubsequently modified,—substitut-ing for the first and fourth a graduated scale rising from cause proper (in inorganic nature) to stimulus (in vegetative life) and motive (in the animal world), the last again being either intuitive motive, as in the lower animals, or rational motive, as in man.

The pamphlet begins by re-stating with reference to sight the Essay on general theory that perception of an objective world rests upon an Sight instinctive causal postulation, which even wdien it misleads still and remains to haunt us (instead of being, like errors of reason, open Colours to extirpation by evidence), and proceeds to deal with physiological colour, i.e., with colours as felt (not perceived) modifications of the action of the retina. First of all, the distinction of white and black, with their mean point in grey, is referred to the activity or inactivity of the total retina in the graduated presence or absence of full light. Further, the eye is endowed with polarity, by which its activity is divided into two parts qualitatively dis-tinct. It is this circumstance which gives rise to the phenomenon of colour. All colours are complementary, or go in pairs ; each pair makes up the whole activity of the retina, and so is equivalent to white ; and the two partial activities are so connected that when the first is exhausted the other spontaneously succeeds. Such pairs of colour may be regarded as infinite in number ; but there are three pairs which stand out prominently, and admit of easy expres-sion for the ratio in which each contributes to the total action. These are red and green (each = J), orange and blue (2:1), and yellow and violet (3 : l). This theory of complementary colours as due to the polarity in the qualitative action of the retina is followed by some criticism of Newton and the seven colours, by an attempt to explain some facts noted by Goethe, and by some reference to the external stimuli which cause colour.
The grand interest of his life at Dresden was the com-position of a work which should give expression in all its aspects to the idea of man's nature and destiny which had been gradually forming within him. Without cutting himself altogether either from social pleasures or from art, he read and took notes with regularity. More and more he learned from Cabanis and Helvetius to see in the will and the passions the determinants of intellectual life, and in the character and the temper the source of theories and beliefs. The conviction was borne in upon him that scien-tific explanation could never do more than systematize and classify the mass of appearances which to our habit-blinded eyes seem to be the reality. To get at this reality and thus to reach a standpoint higher than that of aetiology was the problem of his as of all philosophy. It is only by such a tower of speculation that an escape is possible from the spectre of materialism, theoretical and practical; and so, says Schopenhauer, " the just and good must all have this creed : I believe in a metaphysic." The mere reasonings of theoretical science leave no room for art, and practical prudence usurps the place of morality. The higher life of aesthetic and ethical activity—the beautiful and the good —can only.be based upon an intuition which penetrates the heart of reality. Towards the spring of 1818 the work was nearing its end, and Brockhaus of Leipsic had agreed to publish it and pay the author one ducat for every sheet of printed matter. But, as the press loitered, Schopen-hauer, suspepting treachery, wrote so rudely and haughtily to the publisher that the latter broke off correspondence with his client. In the end of 1818, however, the book Welt ids appeared (with the date 1819), in 725 pages 8vo, with the wa]e^ title Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, in four books,
und Vorstellung.
with an appendix containing a criticism of the Kantian philosophy.

The first book of The World as Will and Idea resumes the argu- Book i. ment of the earlier work, that all objeets are constituted by intel-lectual relations, describable as forms of the causal principle. As so apprehending a world of objects, man is said to possess in-telligence [Verstand), the perception of individual sequences and coexistences. It is a faculty he shares with the animals, and by its means the world presents itself as an endless number of objects in space and time bound together by necessary laws of causality. But man has also the power of reason (Vernunft), by which he generalizes, the vehicle of this generalization being language. By means of language and reasoning he rises out of the animal immersion in the present and is able to anticipate the future. He forms general ideas and thus can preserve and communicate abstract knowledge. But reason, though its " laws of thought" have a formal truth of their own, has no independent value either as theoretical or as practical. In the former aspect it gives rise to scientific knowledge —the knowledge of facts and sequences not in their single occurrences but as instances of a general law. By means of the general truths thus arrived at we can deduce or prove. But a proof is, after all, only a means of showing the disputatious that something which they deny is inseparably bound up with something they admit. It is a mistake, therefore to substitute for the ocular demonstration of which geometry is susceptible a syllogistic reasoning which may compel assent but cannot inspire insight. Singular experiences are the true workers which support the luxury of general ideas, and reasoning cannot claim to be more than a re-arrangement of pro-ducts from other fields.

Reason is equally important and equally limited as a factor in conduct. It enables us, as it were, to lead a second life, guided by general principles and not by single appetitions. Such a life is what is called a life according to reason, typified in the ideal of the Stoic sage. The wise man carries out the items of conduct accord-ing to a general plan and is superior to the impulses of the moment. But here too the general rests upon the particular ; a systematic happiness takes the place of single and conflicting pleasures, but still can only justify itself by procuring pleasure. Thus, unless there be a new perception of life's meaning, reasoning cannot make a man virtuous, it can only make him prudent; it tells him how to reckon with his natural character, but it cannot show him how to amend it.
Book ii. Book ii. is an attempt to name that residual reality which is pre-supposed but not explained in every scientific explanation, whether retiological or morphological. The key is found in the conscious-ness of ourselves as exerting will. What to the inner conscious-ness is volition is to the outer perception a bodily movement. And as each act of volition is perceived in a bodily motion, so will as a whole is by us perceived as body. This consciousness that my body is my will objectified—my will translated into terms of scien-tific apprehension—is the "philosophical truth" of truths. And, generalizing this truth, we conclude that, as our corporeal frame is the visibility of our mode of will, so everj'thing is some grade in the objectification of the will. While the aetiology of science accounts for the familiar complex by a simpler and more abstract phase, philosophy uses the clearer and more conspicuous instance to explain the more rudimentary. The law of motivation is taken as a key to open the incomprehensibility of mere causation, and in the stone we presume a feeble analogue of what we know as will. The will as such, apart from its objectification in animals, knows nothing of motives, which, though they explain the special circum-stances, presuppose the underlying and originative force. No doubt a false idea of simplicity has often led theorists to reduce all sciences in the last resort to applied mathematics, in which the mysterious something called force was eliminated and only the forms of space and time and motion left. But, though it is doubtless possible to reduce the list of original forces, we cannot get rid of an inexplic-able activity. Hence the original force or will is beyond the range of causality; every cause is only an "occasional cause," and but states the temporal conditions of operation of the eternal energy. While each several act has an aim, the collective will has none.

The numerical differences of objects do not touch the underlying activity. It is felt in one oak as much as in a million, for time and space are only semblance for (animal) intelligence. And there-fore, instead of wondering at the uniformity pervading the in-stances of any objectification of will, we should remember that the will-force operating in all is the same, and reveals its inner identity in the common law. For the same reason the adaptations of the parts of an organic body or of one organic body to another are only the consequences of the unity of will. Just as the series of actions throughout a life are only the utterances of one original character, and so intrinsically interdependent, so the grades of objectification in nature are the expression of one identical will, which forms the conditions of existence as well as the living creatures accommodating themselves to them. Will, which appears in its lowest grade of objectification as the physical forces of inorganic nature, rises in the vegetative world to a peculiar sympathetic response to the stimulation by external circumstances, and in the animal world produces for itself a special organ, the brain, which possesses the power of presenting under the forms of sense and in-tellect that objective manifestation of will which we call the world of our experience. With the existence of the animal brain, the world emerged into time and space. It was a step necessitated by the growing complexity of type in the will-products, which could neither exist nor preserve their kind without this new instrument which substituted conscious adaptation for unconscious teleology. In this strange mythology by which Schopenhauer replaces the mystery of creation we see the magic world of will, weaving ever higher complexities of material existence, brought at length by stress of circumstances to forge a material organ which shows the sense-world as the objectification of the will. In this one material organ the will has come to see itself expanded into a complicated order of time and place. But at first the brain and its function, knowledge, are solely employed in the service of the will.

Book iii. shows how the intellect is emancipated from this bond- Book iii age to the will. When we contemplate an object simply for its own sake, forgetting everything and ourselves even in the vision, then what we have before us is no longer one thing among many but a type, not one of a class but an ultimate individuality, not a particular but an adequate embodiment of the universal. Instead of the general concept or class-notion we have the Platonic "idea"— one image into which all the essential life of the object has been concentrated. To realize this individual which has not entered into the bonds of individuation, this universal which is not a mere genus but the eternal truth of the individual, is the province of genius. The man of genius, neglecting the search for relationships between things—unpractical and to practical judgment sometimes seeming to have a touch of madness—instead of seeking to classify a thing or find out what it is for, looks at it for its own sake and sees the one type or ideal which is seeking for expression in its various and contingent manifestations. Such genius begets art. Yet so much at least of genius is in all men that they can follow where the artist leads and see through his eyes. Everything as thus contemplated disinterestedly for its own sake and in its per-manent significance is beautiful. Yet one thing is more beautiful than another. For there are objects which more than others facili- o tate the quiescence of desire and present to us their permanent character without suggesting or stimulating appetite. The senser of sight is more independent than others of associations of desire, the past and distant purer from self-interest than the present. Those objects are specially beautiful where the significant idea is most clearly presented in the individual form. Indeed, when a certain effort is required to keep out of sight the general bearing of the object on the will, then the object, where the perception of genius still sees the perfect type in the single form, is called sublime.

The several arts fall naturally into an order which rises from the passive enjoyment in the contemplation of inorganic forces to the active perception of will in its most complex types. Architecture seeks in works dedicated to human use to give expression to the fundamental features of physical force, e.g., cohesion, weight, &c, and to that end it intensifies the appearance of strain by refusing the forces an easy and immediate lapse into their natural tendency. In short, it seeks to show resistance visible. Sculpture presents the beauty and grace of the human form, i.e.', the " idea" of that form as a whole and in the single movements. Here the "idea" is not derived by comparison and abstraction of observed forms ; but we, as ourselves the will seeking manifestation, anticipate by our ideal the meaning of the imperfect phases and lay down an a priori canon of beauty. While sculpture gives expression to the more generic type in figure and motion, painting aims at repre-senting action. But even historical pictures seek in a given scene to present not the historical importance of the action but its per-manent meaning. Poetry, which uses an arrangement of general concepts to convey an "idea," or moulds reality out of abstractions, gives us the central and abiding truth which history usually dis-sipates in a host of particulars and relations. In lyric poetry the individual subject of will presents himself as the subject of artistic perception: his own experience is displayed as typical and universal. In tragedy the truth shown is the inner conflict at the very root of the will. The hero is exhibited as brought to see the aimlessness of all will; and by suffering he learns resignation. Music, unlike the other arts, is an image of the movement of will not yet ob-jectified ; and in its elements and harmonies we have a parallel to the stages and complexities of the actual world. Hence the ex-planation of music would be a philosophy of the world.

But art, though it affords an interval of rest from the drudgery Book iv, of will-service, cannot claim to be more than a transient consola-tion. Book iv. indicates a surer way of release. It reminds us that our life is the phenomenon of the will,—a phenomenon which begins at birth and ends at death, and of which every instant is a partial birth and a partial death. But the cessation of the indi-vidual life is not an annihilation of the will; our essential being is indestructible. The manifestation of the will in human life is spread out and disposed in an endless multitude of actions. Experience sums up these in a single formula,—the maxim of our empirical character ; and that result itself is the type" or idea which reveals_the one unalterable utterance of will, which is the intel-ligible character. It is this immemorial act which fixes our empirical character, which gives the consistency and regularity of our acts. Velle non diseitur. Character is given (by an ante-phenomenal act); it is not acquired. If in one sense we can speak of an "acquired character," we mean thereby that we now under-stand what manner of men we are, that we have learned the best and worst of ourselves. But, though the character is given once for all in the 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 tpm or the blind lust of life (seen at its strongest in sexual appetite), he has learned, by means of self-knowledge, that dyairi'i 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 be 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 Rome, 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 Passtum. On his way homewards 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, men*at or Berlin, he finally chose the last-mentioned. In his ex- Berlin-animation 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 decisions, the final issue was in 1826 to award the complainant compensation (with five-sixths of costs and a small sum for medical expenses) to the amount of a quarterly aliment of fifteen thalers, which sum she received till her death, fifteen years afterwards.

The six years (1825-31) at Berlin were a dismal period in the life of Schopenhauer. In vain did he watch for any sign of recognition of his philosophic genius. Hegelianism reigned in the schools and in literature and basked in the sunshine of authority. It was a bad time for an inde-pendent thinker who ignored the state and the yearlong alliance between philosophy and theology. Thus driven back upon himself, Schopenhauer fell into morbid medita-tions, and the world which he saw, if it was stripped naked of its disguises, lost its proportions in the distorting light. The sexual passion had a strong attraction for him at all times, and, according to his biographers, the notes he set down in English, when he was turned thirty, on marriage and kindred topics are unfit for publication. He had in opening manhood been so fascinated by a Weimar actress that he declared he would take her to his home though he found her breaking stones on the roadside. Later years had nipped the freshness of his enthusiasm, and casual experiences generated an overweening misogyny, which, while allowing woman her place in the natural economy, regarded the lady as the invention of a false civilization. Yet in the loneliness of life at Berlin the idea of a wife as the comfort of gathering age sometimes rose before his mind,—only to be driven away by cautious hesitations as to the capacity of his means, and by the shrinking from the loss of familiar liberties. He continued his bachelor-dom, and found consolation in less onerous associations. At home he tuned his flute; he dined, and it might be conversed, with his fellow-guests at the Hotel de Russie; he read for hours at the royal library, and gave his even-ings to the theatres. But he wrote nothing material. In 1828 he made inquiries about a chair at Heidelberg; and in 1830 he got a shortened Latin version of his physio-logical theory of colours inserted in the third volume of the Scriplores Ophthalmologic^ Minores (edited by Radius).

Another pathway to reputation was suggested by some remarks he saw in the seventh number of the Foreign Review, in an article on Damiron's French Philosophy in the 19th Century. With reference to some statements in the article on the importance of Kant, he sent in very fair English a letter to the writer, offering to translate Kant's principal works into English. He named his wages and enclosed a specimen of his work. His corre-spondent, Francis Haywood, made a counter-proposal which so disgusted Schopenhauer that he addressed his next letter to the publishers of the review. When they again referred him to Haywood, he applied to Thomas Campbell, then chairman of a company formed for buy-ing up the copyright of meritorious but rejected works. Nothing came of this application. A translation of selec-tions from the works of Balthazar Gracian, which was published by Frauenstadt in 1862, seems to have been made about this time.2 3ettle- In the summer of 1831 cholera raged at Berlin, and ^ntkat Schopenhauer fled to Frankfort. About a year later he jort " adjourned to Mannheim. But after eleven months' experience of the latter he decided, from a carefully weighed list of comparative advantages, in favour of Frankfort. And there, accordingly, for the rest of his life he remained. He resumed correspondence with his sister, who was liv-ing with her mother in straitened circumstances at Bonn.

At first the good people of Frankfort knew him, not as the celebrated philosopher, but as the son of the famous Johanna Schopenhauer, and as the companion of a familiar poodle. The day had not yet risen when, as he had pro-phesied to his mother (who joked at his book on "four-fold root " as smelling of the apothecary), his works would be read of all, and hers only be used by the grocer to wrap his goods in. The sense of unappreciated work, aggravated by ill health and by pecuniary worry about his Dantzic property, sank deep into a heart that was yearn-ing for outward recognition. He seemed to see around him none but enemies, a world mainly filled with knaves and fools, where a true man was rarer than an honest woman, and where the very touch of society was so perilous that irony and reserve were imposed on every one who re-tained his self-respect. In solitude he devoured his own soul. At the hotel table a stranger might occasionally be drawn into listening to his vigorous monologue ; but it was seldom he was thus encouraged to discourse. Ground-less fears of hidden dangers made him see himself and every other independent genius the aim of a conspiracy of vulgar charlatans. He would never entrust his neck to the barber's hand; and he succeeded in secreting his valuables so thoroughly that some of them were after his death recovered only after much search.

Ever since the publication of The World as Will and Idea he had silently waited for some response to his message. He had uttered the word he felt himself charged to utter. As the years passed he noted down every confirmation he found of his own opinions in the writings of others, and every instance in which his views appeared to be illustrated by new researches. Full of the conviction of his idea, he saw everything in the light of it, and gave each aperçu a place in his alphabetically arranged note-book. Everything he published in later life may be called a commentary, an excursus, or a scholium to his main book ; and many of them are decidedly of the nature of commonplace books or collec-tanea of notes. But along with the accumulation of his illustrative and corroborative materials grew the bitter-ness of heart which found its utterances neglected and other names the oracles of the reading world. The gathered ill-humour of many years, aggravated by the confident assurance of the Hegelians, found vent at length in the introduction to his next book, where Hegel's works are described as three-quarters utter absurdity and one-quarter mere paradox,—a specimen of the language in which during his subsequent career he used to advert to his three predecessors Fichte, Schelling, but above all Hegel. This work, with its wild outcry against the philo-sophy of the professoriate, was entitled Ueber' den Willen in der Natur, and was published in 1836.

The eight essays which go under the title of The Will in Nature Will in seek to show that his theory has the unique distinction of finding Nature. in physical science testimony to its metaphysical doctrines that will is the primary basis of all nature and intellect a derivative phenomenon. Often a trivial similarity of phrases serves to establish in his judgment an agreement of radical view. In the second essay he argues for the origin of animal organization from will, pointing out how in growing creatures the tendency to use an organ appears before the organ itself is formed, and maintaining that, instead of seeking the protoplasm of the animal kingdom in a mere lump of vitalized matter, to be moulded by external conditions, we should look for it in tlie immemorial act of will which is the timeless origin of living beings. The third essay represents the intellect— or "the world as idea "—as having its origin in the narrow partition which in men and animals is interposed between the stimulation of a cause and the reaction which supervenes. From this realistic standpoint intellect seems an interloper in nature, an accident associated with the fortunes of man, and made victorious in the genius which can behold the world " in maiden meditation, fancy-free." The fourth essay traces the grades of disproportion between cause and effect from inorganic to organic nature. Where there is causality there is will; but for us the more obviously the one shows itself the less is the other remarked. Another paper seeks to connect animal magnetism (mesmerism, hypnotism) and magic with the doctrine that in each of us the whole undivided will retains its miraculous potency.

In 1837 Schopenhauer sent to the committee entrusted
with the execution of the proposed monument to Goethe
at Frankfort a long and deliberate expression of his views,
in general and particular, on the best mode of carrying
out the design. But his fellow-citizens passed by the
remarks of the mere writer of books. More weight was
naturally attached to the opinion he had advocated in
his early criticism of Kant as to the importance, if not
the superiority, of the first edition of the Kritik ; in the col-
lected issue of Kant's works by Bosenkranz and Schubert
in 1838 that edition was put as the substantive text, with
supplementary exhibition of the differences of the second.
Two In 1841 he published under the title Die beiden Grund-
Main probleme der Ethik two essays which he had sent in Ums'of 1838-39 in competition for prizes offered. The first was Ethics. *n answer to the question " Whether man's free will can be proved from self-consciousness," proposed by the Nor-wegian Academy of Sciences at Drontheim. His essay was awarded the prize, and the author elected a member of the society. But proportionate to his exultation in this first recognition of his merit was the depth of his mortification and the height of his indignation at the result of the second competition. He had sent to the Danish Academy at Copenhagen in 1839 an essay "On the Foundations of Morality" in answer to a vaguely worded subject of discussion to which they had invited candidates. His essay, though it was the only one in competition, was refused the prize on the grounds that he had failed to examine the chief problem (i.e., whether the basis of morality was to be sought in an intuitive idea of right), that his explanation was inadequate, and that he had been wanting in due respect to the summi philosophi of the age that was just passing. This last reason, while probably most effective with the judges, only stirred up more furiously the fury in Schopenhauer's breast, and his preface is one long fulmination against the ineptitudes and the charlatanry of his bete noire, Hegel.

In the essay on the freedom of the will Schopenhauer shows that the deliverance of self-consciousness, " I can do what I will," is a mere statement of our physical freedom, or the sequence of outward act upon inner resolve, in the absence of physical restraint. "The statement of self-consciousness concerns the will merely a parte post, the question of freedom, on the contrary, a parte ante." Self-consciousness throws no light on the relation of volition to its antecedents. If, on the other hand, we turn to the objects of the outer senses, we find-that it is part and parcel of their very nature to be not free but necessitated, governed, in short, by the principle of causation. But in the ascending scale of causation cause and effect become more and more heterogeneous, their connexion more unintelligible. This is seen in motivation, especially where the motives are not immediate perceptions but general abstract ideas. It is in the possibility of a conflict of motives that man's freedom of choice consists. But, because we can by a feat of abstraction keep an image of one course of action before us and neglect the other concrete conditions of behaviour, there grows up an illusion that the mere initial solicitation or velleity might, if we pleased, become actual will. Hence the delusion that we are free to will and not to will. Still the necessitating cause or motive is only the rule under which the real force or radical will operates. In this radical will consists our being, and on it action is consequent: operari sequitur esse. By our original character acting in certain circumstances of motive our actions are inevitably determined. But the sense of responsibility for our conduct is not altogether a delusion. It is really a responsibility for our character, which we have gradually learned experimentally to know, and which so known serves as a court of appeal against single actions, or, in other words, becomes a conscience. That character is the supra-temporal action of that will wdiich we and all things are. Thus this question of the freedom of the will, which is " a touchstone for distinguishing the profound from the superficial thinker," is solved by the Kantian distinction of empirical and transcendental world. In the words of Malebranche, " La liberté est un mystère."

The essay on the foundation of morality is an attempt to present the fundamental fact of the moral consciousness and to show its metaphysical bearings. It includes a lengthy criticism of Kant's system of ethics as only the old theological morality under a disguise of logical formulée. Kant, according to his critic, though he struck a severe blow at eudœmonism, made the mistake of founding ethics on ideas of obligation and respect, which are meaningless apart from a positive sanction. His categorical im-perative is attributed to reason,—a power which we only know as human, but which Kant regards as more than human and borrows from the "rational psychology," which itself had received it from theology. The moral spring should be a reality and a fact of nature, whereas Kant seeks it in the subtilties of general ideas, forgetting that reasoning is one thing and virtue another. And, when Kant has to illustrate the application of his rule for discover-ing the categorical imperative, he is forced to have recourse to con-siderations of self-interest.
After this examination, Schopenhauer preludes his exposition by the sceptical survey of so-called virtuous actions as due in the vast majority of instances to other than moral motives, and by a dis-integration of the average conscience into equal parts of fear of man, superstition, prejudice, vanity, and custom. The mainspring of human action (as of animal) is egoism, supplemented by the hatred or the malice which arises through egoistic conflicts. But, though these are the predominant springs of conduct, there are cases of unselfish kindness. It is in sympathy, or in our as it were substituting ourselves for another who is in pain, that we find the impulse which gives an action a truly moral value. The influence of sympathy has two degrees : either it keeps me back from doing wrong to others, and in this sense leads to justice as a moral virtue (whereas civil justice prevents from suffering wrong) ; or sympathy may carry me on to positive kindness, to philanthropy or love of the human kind. It is on sympathy—the feeling of one identical nature under all the appearance of multiplicity—that the two cardinal virtues of justice and benevolence are based. Schopenhauer notes especially that his principle extends to the relation between man and animals, and that a mistaken conception of human dignity has been allowed, to hide the fundamental community of animal nature.

In 1844 appeared the second edition of The World as Will and Idea, in two volumes. The first volume was a slightly altered reprint of the earlier issue ; the second consisted of a series of chapters forming a commentary parallel to those into which the original work was now first divided. The longest of these new chapters deal with the primacy of the will, with death, and with the metaphysics of sexual love. But, though only a small edition was struck off (500 copies of vol. i. and 750 of vol. ii.), the report of sales which Brockhaus rendered in 1846 was unfavourable, and the price had afterwards to be reduced. Yet there were faint indications of coming Dawning fame, and the eagerness with which each new tribute recog-from critic and admirer was welcomed is both touching J^j" and amusing. From 1843 onwards a jurist named F. genms, Dorguth had trumpeted abroad Schopenhauer's name. In 1844 a letter from a Darmstadt lawyer, Joh. August Becker, asking for explanation of some difficulties, began an intimate correspondence which went on for some time (and which was published by Becker's son in 1883). But the chief evangelist (so Schopenhauer styled his literary followers as distinct from the apostles who published not) was Frauenstàdt, who made his personal acquaintance in 1846. It was Frauenstàdt who succeeded in finding a publisher for the Parerga und Paralipomena, which appeared at Berlin in 1851 (2 vols., pp. 465, 531). Yet for this bulky collection of essays, philosophical and others, Schopenhauer received as honorarium only ten free copies of the work. Soon afterwards, Dr E. O. Lindner, assistant editor of the Vossische Zeitung, began a series of Schopenhauerite articles. Amongst them may be reckoned 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.
mistic asceticism.

Conven- In these later years Schopenhauer had at length realized tional that peace which can be given in the world; he had monism beoome comparatively master of himself. His passions and his had slackened their strain, and he was no longer the pessi- victim of unavailing regrets. As a youth he had known none of those ties which give the individual an esprit de corps, a sense of community which he never quite loses. 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 ordinary 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 eudssmonism of civilization, with aspirations towards perfecting our homes and bodies, so that in all things comfort may be established, and the pessimistic asceticism of Schopen-hauer, which sees the perfection of life not in the abundance 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 in 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 conventional civilization and enlio'htenment which has gained him some of those ardent followers who find in his doctrine that 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 religion, 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 the circumstances of the philosopher. The remark finds ample Pni}°" application in the case of Schopenhauer. The conditions to nis 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 'iptas 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 stress on the theory who is most conscious of defects in the practice. It need not therefore surprise us that the man who formulated the sum of virtue in justice and bene-volence was unable to be just to his own kinsfolk and reserved his compassion largely for the brutes, and that the delineator of asceticism was more than moderately sensible of the comforts and enjoyments of life. Habits of Having renounced what he would call the superstitions ^ of duty to country, to kindred, and to associates, except in so far as these duties were founded on contract (and that, according to him, all duties imply), it was natural that he should take steps to minimize that friction which he so easily excited, and which had induced his voluntary exile from the arena. His regular habits of life and care-ful regard to his own health remind us of the conduct of the bachelor Kant. He would rise between seven and eight both summer and winter, sponge himself, bathing his eyes carefully, sit down to coffee prepared by his own hands, and soon get to work. He was a slow reader. The classics were old friends, always revisited with pleasure. He only read original works—the classics of pure literature—avoid-ing all books about books, and especially eschewed the more modern philosophers. Hume in English and Helvétius and Chamfort in French he found to his mind in their sceptical estimates of ordinary virtue. Mystical and ascetic writ-ings, from Buddhism and the Upanishads to Eckhart and the Deutsche Théologie, commended themselves by their in-sistence on the reality of the higher life. Their example of will-force drew his favourable notice to the phenomena of mesmerism, just as his sympathy with the lower brethren of man made him an interested observer of a young orang-outang shown at Frankfort in 1834. He was familiar with several literatures, English certainly not the least. The names of Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, Calderon, Petrarch, Dante, are frequent in his pages. "What he read he tried to read in the original,—or anywhere but in a German trans-lation. Even the Old Testament he found more impress-ive in the Septuagint version than in Luther's rendering. The hour of noon brought cessation from his contempla-tions, and for half an hour he solaced himself on the flute. At one o'clock he sat down to dinner in his inn, and after dinner came home for an hour's siesta. After some light reading he went out for a stroll, alone, if possible country-wards, with cane in hand, cigar lit, and poodle following. Occasionally he would stop abruptly, turn round or look back, mutter something to himself, so as to leave on the passer-by the impression that he was either crack-brained or angry. Like Kant, he kept his lips closed on principle. His walk over, he retired to the reading-room and studied the Times,—for he had been always somewhat of an Anglo-maniac, and had learnt this habit of English life from his father. In winter he would sometimes attend the opera. Between eight and nine he took supper, with a half-bottle of light wine (he avoided his country's beer), at a table by himself.

With his low estimate of the average human being, his sympathies were aristocratic. He left the bulk of his fortune to an institution at Berlin for the benefit of those who had suffered on the side of order during the revolu-tionary struggles of 1848-49. But in so doing it was not his sympathy with kings but his recognition of the merits of public security which gave the motive to his actions. With all his eulogy of voluntary poverty, he did not agree to being deprived of his property by the malice or cupidity of others, and fears of the loss of his means haunted him not less keenly than other imaginary terrors,—the fancied evils distracting him no less perhaps than would have done those domestic and civil obligations from which he endeavoured to hold himself free. The Nemesis of his social lâcheté fell upon him ; and, like all solitaries, he gave an exaggerated importance to trifles, which the sweep of business and customary duty clear away from the ordinary man's memory.
It was not till he was fifty years of age that he set up rersonal rooms and furniture of his own. These abodes he changed details, at Frankfort about four times, living latterly on the street which runs along the Main. On the mat in his chamber lay his poodle,—latterly a brown dog, which had succeeded the original white one, named Atma (the World-Soul), of which he had been especially fond. These dogs had more than once brought him into trouble with his landlord. In a corner of the room was placed a gilt statuette of Buddha, and on a table not far off lay Duperron's Latin translation of the Upanishads, which served as the pjrayer-book from which Schopenhauer read his devotions. On the desk stood a bust of Kant, and a few portraits hung on the walls. The philosopher's person was under middle size, strongly built and broad-chested, with small hands. His voice was loud and clear; his eyes blue and somewhat wide apart; the mouth full and sensuous, latterly becoming broad as his teeth gave way. The high brow and heavy under-jaw were the evidence of his contrasted nature of ample intellect and vigorous im-pulses. In youth he had light curly hair, whereas his beard in manhood was of a slightly reddish tint. He always dressed carefully as a gentleman, in black dress-coat and white necktie, and wore shoes. In his later years his portrait was taken more than once, and by several artists, and his bust was modelled somewhat to his own mind in 1859. Reproductions of these likenesses have made familiar his characteristic but unamiable features.

In 1854 Richard Wagner sent him a copy of the Ring of the Nibelung, with some words of thanks for a theory of music which had fallen in with his own conceptions. Three years later he received a visit from his old college friend Bunsen, who was then staying in Heidelberg. On his seventieth birthday congratulations flowed in from many quarters. In April 1860 he began to be affected by occasional difficulty in breathing and by palpitation of the heart. Another attack came on in autumn (9th September), and again a week later. On the evening of the 18th his friend and subsequent biographer, Dr Gwinner, sat with him and conversed. On the morning of the 21st September he rose and sat down alone to breakfast; shortly afterwards his doctor called and found him dead in his chair. By his will, made in 1852, with a codicil dated February 1859, his property, with the ex-ception of some small bequests, was devised to the above-mentioned institution at Berlin. Gwinner was named executor, and Frauenstadt was entrusted with the care of his manuscripts and other literary remains.

The philosophy of Schopenhauer, like almost every system of the Philo-19th century, can hardly be understood without reference to the sophy ideas of Kant. Anterior to Kant the gradual advance of idealism from had been the most conspicuous feature in philosophic speculation. Kant to That the direct objects of knowledge, the realities of experience, Schopen-were after all only our ideas or perceptions was the lesson of every hauer. thinker from Descartes to Hume. And this doctrine was generally understood to mean that human thought, limited as it was by its own weakness and acquired habits, could hardly hope to cope suc-cessfully with the problem of apprehending the real things. The idealist position Kant seemed at first sight to retain with an even stronger force than ever. But it is darkest just before the dawn ; and Kant, the Copernicus of philosophy, had really altered the aspects of the doctrine of ideas. It was his purpose to show that the forms of thought (which he sought to isolate from the peculi-arities incident to the organic body) were not merely customary means for licking into convenient shape the data of perception, but entered as underlying elements into the constitution of objects, making experience possible and determining the fundamental struc-ture of nature. In other words, the forms of knowledge were the main factor in making objects. By Kant, however, these forms are generally treated psychologically as the action of the several faculties of a mind. Behind thinking there is the thinker. But 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 voeiv or vb-nais is to be substituted for vovs. 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 conception. 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 was 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 somewhat 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 in 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-conditioned 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. '' 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. Wollen 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 t>ert 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 nerves. 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 what 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 Main 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 queesiveris extra. There is a source of knowledge within us by which we 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 knowledge 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 in 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 naturalism 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 in 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 ease 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 beings ; but his final goal is to rise above the toils and comforts of the visible creature into the vast bosom of a peaceful Nirvana.

Bibliography.— The works of Schopenhauer were published after his death by J. Frauenstadt in 6 volumes (Leipsic, 1874). Besides these, several papers and aphorisms appeared in 1834, Aus Schopenhauer's handschriftlichem Nachlass, by the same editor. The best biography of Schopenhauer is that by Gwinner ; second and much enlarged edition in 1878. See also Frauenstadt and Lindner, Arthur Schopenhauer ; von ihin; uber ihn (1863); O. Busch, A. Schopenhauer (1878) ; k. Peters, Schopenhauer als Philosoph (1880), and Willensivelt und Welt-wille (1883); and Koeber, Schopenhauer's Erlosungslehre (1SS1). A list of works on Schopenhauer is given by Balan, Schopenhauer-Literatur (1880). See also PESSIMISM. (W. W.)



Footnotes

1 Die Welt als Wille, il c. 43

In this doctrine, so far as the facts go, Schopenhauer is indebted to a paper by R. Waring Darwin in vol. lxxvi. of the Transactions of the Philosophical Society.

The terms are "borrowed from Kant.

It was not till 1841 that a translation of Kant's Kritik in English appeared.
'2 He also projected a translation of Hume's Essays and wrote a preface for it.
Johanna Schopenhauer (1766-1838) was in her day an authoress of some reputation. Besides editing the memoirs of Fernovv, she published Notes on Travels in England, Scotland, and Southern France (1813-17) ; Johann van Eyck and his Successors (1823); three romances, Gabriele (1819-20), Die Tante (1823), and Sidonia (1828), besides some shorter tales. These novels teach the moral of renunciation (Entsagung). Her daughter Adele (1796-1849) seems to have had a brave, tender, and unsatisfied heart, and lavished on her brother an affection he sorely tried. She also was an authoress, publishing in 1844 a volume of Hatis-, Wald-, und Feld-Mahrchen, full of quaint ' poetical conceits, and in 1S45 Anna, a novel, in two vols.

1 Kritik (Trans. Anal.), bk. ii., Appendix.
2 Ueber die Seelenfrage, p. 9, Leipsic, 1861.
3 Milcrokosmus, vol. i. p. 408 (2d ed.).