ling and Fichte thought they had forever banished from philosophy, a thing-in-itself.

With this identity philosophy, the teaching by which Schelling influenced contemporaries and successors ceased. From this time onward, his writings are so desultory, often so eclectic in their teaching, and in the end so mystical, that they have been reckoned among the works of German literature rather than as products of strictly metaphysical thought. German philosophy and German literature have indeed always stood to each other in a peculiarly direct and vital relation: many of the German poets, notably Lessing and Schiller, have been, in a way, philosophers also; and Schelling, in his later life, is most often looked upon as a philosopher turned poeta representative rather of romanticism in literature than of idealism in philosophy. This charge of mysticism and this neglect of Schelling's voluminous later writing may, it is true, be unjust. Certainly Schelling himself protested vehemently when he was accused by Hegel of Schwärmerei, and he stoutly defended against Jacobi the advantages of reasoned thought. But the reader of the "Denkmal gegen Jacobi" feels that Schelling is more concerned to defend reasoning in general than to offer any rigorously reasoned argument for his own conclusions. And these conclusions, different as they seem at first reading from the outcome of the identity philosophy, are at bottom grounded in the same principle. Schelling's later teaching is in brief the following: he conceives what he names the Absolute as personal God; but he teaches that God has developed, in time, from the prepersonal to the higher, personal phase. In such a doctrine, it is evident, personality is still a subordinate category; the Absolute, as absolute, is still an unknown reality manifested in the personal, but not itself essentially and completely personal.1

1 On the later period of Schelling, cf. especially the appropriate chapters of Kuno Fischer's "Geschichte der neueren Philosophie."

C. THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCHOPENHAUER

Schopenhauer's philosophy, like Fichte's and Schelling's, is closely related to the teachings of Spinoza and of Kant, though it must be added that Schopenhauer does not himself recognize the affiliation to Spinoza. Like Hegel, he conceives the ultimate reality as an absolute self — though he never uses, and even repudiates, this term. His great advance upon Fichte and Schelling consists in his implicit recognition of the personality of the absolute self. But because he inadequately conceives this personality, tending constantly, indeed, to identify it with impersonal force, and because he fails to demonstrate its absoluteness, he falls short of an idealistic monism; the conception of an absolute and personal self, whose conscious activity is self-limitation. Because Schopenhauer does not fully grasp this conception, his philosophy is properly studied before that of Hegel, though Schopenhauer, born in 1788, is eighteen years Hegel's junior, and though he died in 1860, nearly thirty years after Hegel's death. Yet this order of study does little violence to chronology, for Schopenhauer's philosophic genius, like Schelling's, blossomed early, whereas Hegel's books were published relatively late in his life. Schopenhauer's first work, his doctor thesis, the brilliant "Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason," was published in 1813, only a year after the first volume of Hegel's "Logic"; yet it contains all the essential features of Schopenhauer's system. The complete exposition of the system, the first volume of "The World as Will and Idea," followed in 1818, only a year later than the first edition of Hegel's "Encyclopedia," and two years after the second volume of Hegel's "Logic."

The pitiful story of Arthur Schopenhauer's life of the

1 "Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde "("On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason," cited as "Fourfold Root "), § 20.

boyhood of travel, the brief period of mercantile pursuits, the petty squabbles with his mother, the envious scorn of academic philosophy, the vain struggle for professional recognition, the long, lonely middle age filled with trivial interests and deep-dyed with lonely cynicism — all this belongs, in its details, to literary biography rather than to metaphysical discussion. Yet the combined influences of disposition and environment are evident in the pessimism of his system; and his cosmopolitan training-in particular, his study of English - had a marked effect on the form of his metaphysical works. The lucidity and brilliancy of Schopenhauer's style make it utterly unlike that of any other German philosopher of the period. The reader is, indeed, almost inclined to sympathize with Schopenhauer's fretful remark that he failed of an academic hearing because the German public did not believe that sound metaphysics could be expressed in unambiguous terms. Oliver Herford's famous rhyme is, therefore, singularly unjust to Schopenhauer. It applies fairly well to other German philosophers, but the metaphysically minded goose-girl could hardly have failed to comprehend "What Schopenhauer's driving at." The succeeding summary of Schopenhauer's teaching mainly follows the order of "The World as Will and Idea," but takes into account also the doctrine of the "Fourfold Root."

I. THE TEACHING OF SCHOPENHAUER

a. The world of phenomena: 'the world as idea'

"The world," so Schopenhauer begins, "is my idea."1 In other words, like Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, Schopenhauer fully accepts the results of Berkeley's idealism, though,

1“Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung."-"Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung," 1. (Cited, after this, by the title of the English translation, "The World as Will and Idea.") Cf. "Fourfold Root," § 21. References in both cases are ordinarily to sections and their paragraphs. The student may well

unlike them, he explicitly credits Berkeley with the doctrine. "One knows no sun," Schopenhauer continues, in the passage just cited, "and no earth, but always only an eye which sees a sun, a hand which feels the earth." In other words, "every object is object only in relation to the subject":1 so-called external things are, after all, facts of consciousness. With great skill, Schopenhauer next proceeds to analyze these objects of knowledge. Such an object consists, he points out, of sensations, ordered by underived and a priori forms of thought. This, of course, is Kant's doctrine. But Schopenhauer maintains that these forms are not- -as Kant had taught of four distinct sorts. Rather, there is but one form, or principle of unity. This is the "principle of sufficient reason"; it consists in the necessary relation of every imaginable object or event to every other: every object or event, in other words, determines and is also determined by every other. "By virtue of this relation," Schopenhauer says, "nothing can become object for us which exists for itself and is independent, nothing which is single and detached."

The relatedness of phenomena is thus, Schopenhauer rightly teaches, the fundamental category. There are, however, several sorts of relatedness: time and space, causality, and two other categories, which as will immediately appear

Schopenhauer incorrectly includes with these. His discussion of these forms of unity is brilliant and suggestive, especially in its criticism of Kant, yet it is both inadequate and positively defective. It makes only incidental reference to the relations of comparison identity, difference, and

read both works entire. He should not fail to read Bk. I., §§ 1-4; Bk. II., §§ 17-23, 27, 29; Bk. IV., §§ 53-54, 56–58, 61, 66–68, 71, of "The World as Will and Idea."

1 "Fourfold Root," § 41.

'Cf. Appendix, pp. 527, 554.

"The World as Will and Idea," § 2.

"Fourfold Root," § 161.

the like; it denies the close likeness of time and causality; it counts motivation as a distinct category, instead of describing it as causal connection of psychic facts; it denies reciprocal relation, though definitely recognizing one form of it, the spatial; finally, it includes among these categories the causa cognoscendi, or ground of knowledge, a manifest confusion of epistemology with metaphysics.1

But the object, constituted as it is by our sensations and by our forms of thought, has empirical, but not ultimate, reality. Rather, as Kant had taught, it is mere appearance, and absolute reality must be elsewhere sought. In the words of Schopenhauer: "The whole objective world is and remains idea . . in fact, a series of ideas whose common bond is the law of sufficient reason."? And since ultimate reality is not to be found in objects, clearly it must be sought in the subject, or self. It is evident, as Kant had argued, that the forms of knowing, ways of unifying, presuppose and require the existence of a knowing subject, a permanent reality underlying the succession of phenomena. Herein, then, we are likely to find ultimate reality. But a difficulty at once presents itself. This subject, as knower, is not so, in common with Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, Schopenhauer teaches itself known. He defines it as "that which knows all and is known of none," and says distinctly, “We never know it, but it is precisely that which knows." This inability to know the subject follows from the alleged impossibility that the one knower should be both subject and object. "There is no such thing," he says, "as a knowing of knowing; for to that end, it would be necessary that the subject should separate itself from knowing, and yet at the same time should know the knowing which is impossible."

1 On all these points, cf. Chapter 7, pp. 204 seq.; Chapter 10, pp. 369 seq.; and Appendix, p. 554.

II.,

2"The World as Will and Idea," § 5'; Translation, I., p. 18 (Werke, p. 17).

3 Ibid., § 21.

"Fourfold Root," Chapter 7, § 413.