fate," and given their final solution to the problems that had been attempted by all the long line of philosophers from "Plato the Divine» to "Kant the Astounding." Before attempting a characterization of this masterpiece of philosophical thought, the history of the forty or more years remaining to him may be briefly set forth. The Italian journey filled two years. In 1820 he returned to Germany, lectured at Berlin, and waited in vain for the recognition that he felt to be his due. Another Italian journey followed; then a period of several years passed mainly in Berlin, until that city was threatened with cholera in 1831, and Schopenhauer fled to a safer place. He finally settled upon Frankfort, where the remainder of his life was spent; where his temper gradually mellowed as time brought to him his long-delayed desert of fame; and where he died September 20th, 1860. His body lies in the Friedhof of the old city on the Main, beneath a simple block of dark granite, upon which his name alone is engraved.

'Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung' is, as the preface declares, the expression of a single thought; and it may be added that all of Schopenhauer's subsequent writings are but further illustrations and amplifications of that thought. The work is divided into four books. The first, accepting as irrefragable the essential conclusions of the Kantian analysis of consciousness, discusses the world as Idea or Representation (Vorstellung). It fuses into one transparent whole the body of ideas that trace their lineage through Hobbes, Locke, and Berkeley to Kant; and shows how this so real world that we know, as presented to our senses, and built up into a self-consistent and harmonious structure by the acts of perception, conception, and reflection, must be viewed by the philosophical mind, after all, as but the Object with which the individual Subject is correlated, and can have no independent existence of its own in any way resembling the existence which it appears to have in our consciousness. For it is a world which lies in space and time, and is bound by the law of causality; and these things, as Kant once for all demonstrated, are but the forms of the intellect, the conditions which the Subject imposes upon whatever existence per se may turn out to be. It will thus be seen that there is nothing particularly novel in the first book; it is in the second that Schopenhauer makes his own most significant contribution to philosophy. For in this second book the question becomes, What is the "Ding an Sich" (Thing In-Itself) before which the Kantian analysis halted? What is the world, not as it appears to us, but in its innermost essence? It cannot be a world of space and time and causality, since they are only the forms of thought in which the Subject clothes the Object. The answer to this deepest of all problems must be sought by an interrogation of the consciousness. What is, apart from my sensation and my thinking, the very kernel of my being?

Schopenhauer triumphantly replies, "The Will." Not the will in the narrow sense, the mere culmination of the conscious process which begins with sensation and ends with rational action,- but the will in the broader sense of a blind striving for existence; the power one and indivisible which asserts itself in our activity as a whole rather than in our separate acts, and not only in us, where it is in a measure lighted up by conscious intelligence, but in all the inanimate world, made one with ourselves by this transcendental synthesis. The stone that falls to earth, the crystal that grows from its solution, the flower that turns toward the sun, and the man who leads an army to victory, are all manifestations of the world-will; separate manifestations they seem to us, but in reality the same thing, for the Will knows nothing of space or time.

In the third book, we return to the World as Idea, led this time by the guiding hand of Plato. The Will, in its creation of the World as Idea, objectifies itself in a succession of archetypal forms, ranging from the lowest, the forms of crude matter, to the highest, man. · Plato discerned this truth, and set it forth in his doctrine of ideas. If Schopenhauer had lived ten years longer, he would have seen the new light of Darwin's 'Origin of Species,' and have recognized that the objectification of the will takes place by a gradual process rather than by a series of leaps. This doctrine of archetypal forms leads the way to a philosophy of art, which is indeed the chief subjectmatter of the third book. The artist is the one who perceives the idea that nature stammers in trying to express, and who holds it up for the admiration of mankind. Thus art is necessarily ideal in a literal sense, and an improvement upon nature. Moreover, in man's contemplation of the eternal idea as revealed by art he finds a temporary escape from the world of will, and knows now and then an hour of happiness. In the passionless calm of contemplation he forgets the miseries to which he is bound as the objectification of will, and is in a measure freed from the bondage of self. It is the object of the fourth book to show how this temporary freedom may become a final release. For the will, unconscious in its lower manifestations, has provided for itself in man the lamp of intelligence, whereby it may come to discern its own nature and the hopelessness of its strivings. In man alone the will, having risen to the full height of conscious power, is confronted with a momentous choice: it may affirm itself, may will to go on with the hopeless endeavor to pluck happiness from the tree of life; or it may, recognizing the futility of all such endeavor, deny itself, as with the Indian ascetic, and sink into Nirvana. Here we have manifest the powerful influence which the sacred books of India had upon Schopenhauer's thinking, an influence as great as that of either Plato or Kant. And allied with this

doctrine is his theory of ethics, which bases all right conduct upon the individual's recognition, dim or clear in various degrees, of the essential oneness of things; which finds in the illusive veil of Maya a figurative foreshadowing of the Kantian transcendentalism; and which discovers the deepest word of human wisdom in the reiterated formula, "Tat twam asi," "This art thou," of the Upanishads.'

A second edition of 'Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung' was called for in 1844, a third in 1859. In these editions the original work grew to more than double its earlier dimensions; but the added matter did not mar the symmetrical structure of the treatise first published, since it was relegated to a stout supplementary volume. Schopenhauer's other works, all of which may be regarded as ancillary to this one, include 'Ueber den Willen in der Natur' (The Will in Nature: 1836); 'Die Beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik' (The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics: 1841); and the two volumes of miscellaneous papers pedantically entitled 'Parerga und Paralipomena' (1851). The publication of the latter work marked the turning of the tide in the author's fame, and occasioned an accession of the popularity which he had so long in vain awaited. The public, which had fought shy of the systematic exposition of his philosophy, was attracted by these miscellaneous papers, so piquant, so suggestive, so reflective of a strong literary personality; and through the side-lights which the 'Parerga' cast upon the philosopher's more solid works, were led to take up the latter, and discover what a treasure it was that had so long been neglected. This tardy recognition was grateful to Schopenhauer, who had never lost faith in the enduring character of his work, and in the devotion of whose laborious days there had been mingled not a little of "the last infirmity of noble mind.” It is pleasant to think of this Indian Summer of fame that came to the Sage of Frankfort during the last ten years of his life; pleasant also, to know that when at last his work was finished, he passed painlessly away, assured that the world would not forget what he had done.

TH

FROM THE WORLD AS WILL AND IDEA'

HE final demand I have to make on the reader might indeed be tacitly assumed, for it is nothing but an acquaintance with the most important phenomenon that has appeared in philosophy for two thousand years, and that lies so near to us: I mean the principal writings of Kant. It seems to me, in fact,as indeed has already been said by others,- that the effect these writings produce in the mind to which they truly speak is very like that of the operation for cataract on a blind man; and if we wish to pursue the simile further, the aim of my own work may be described by saying that I have sought to put into the hands of those upon whom that operation has been successfully performed a pair of spectacles suitable to eyes that have recovered their sight,-spectacles of whose use that operation is the absolutely necessary condition. Starting then, as I do to a large extent, from what has been accomplished by the great Kant, I have yet been enabled, just on account of my earnest study of his writings, to discover important errors in them. These I have been obliged to separate from the rest and prove to be false, in order that I might be able to presuppose and apply what is true and excellent in his doctrine, pure and freed from error. But not to interrupt and complicate my own exposition by a constant polemic against Kant, I have relegated this to a special appendix.

The philosophy of Kant, then, is the only philosophy with which a thorough acquaintance is directly presupposed in what we have to say here. But if, besides this, the reader has lingered in the school of the divine Plato, he will be so much the better prepared to hear me, and susceptible to what I say. And if, indeed, in addition to this he is a partaker of the benefit conferred by the Vedas (the access to which, opened to us through the Upanishads, is in my eyes the greatest advantage which this still young century enjoys over previous ones, because I believe that the influence of the Sanskrit literature will penetrate not less deeply than did the revival of Greek literature in the fifteenth century), if, I say, the reader has already received and assimilated the sacred, primitive Indian wisdom, then is he best of all prepared to hear what I have to say to him. My work will not speak to him, as to many others, in a strange and even hostile tongue; for if it does not sound too vain, I might express the

opinion that each one of the individual and disconnected aphorisms which make up the Upanishads may be deduced as a consequence from the thought I am going to impart; though the converse- that my thought is to be found in the Upanishads is by no means the case.

"The world is my idea." This is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i. e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness which is in himself. If any truth can be asserted a priori, it is this, for it is the expression of the most general form of all possible and thinkable experience,—a form which is more general than time, or space, or causality, for they all presuppose it; and each of these, which we have seen to be just so many modes of the principle of sufficient reason, is valid only for a particular class of ideas: whereas the antithesis of object and subject is the common form of all these classes; is that form under which alone any idea, of whatever kind it may be,-abstract or intuitive, pure or empirical,- is possible and thinkable.

No truth therefore is more certain, more independent of all others, and less in need of proof, than this: that all that exists for knowledge, and therefore this whole world, is only object in relation to subject, perception of a perceiver,- in a word, idea. This is obviously true of the past and the future, as well as of the present; of what is farthest off, as of what is near: for it is true of time and space themselves, in which alone these distinctions arise. All that in any way belongs or can belong to the world is inevitably thus conditioned through the subject, and exists only for the subject. The world is idea.

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Of all systems of philosophy which start from the object, the most consistent, and that which may be carried furthest, is simple materialism. It regards matter-and with it time and spaceas existing absolutely; and ignores the relation to the subject in which alone all this really exists. It then lays hold of the law of causality as a guiding principle or clue, regarding it as a selfexistent order or arrangement of things, veritas æterna; and so fails to take account of the understanding, in which and for which XXII-809