ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

(1788-1860)

BY WILLIAM MORTON PAYNE

CHOPENHAUER enjoys a unique distinction among the great philosophers of the modern world. Apart from the extraordinary powers of analysis that make him so important a factor in the development of philosophical thought, he possesses the literary faculty in a degree quite unexampled among the metaphysical writers of modern times, and must be reckoned with as a man of letters no less than as a thinker. The world of his thought lies before the reader as a fair sunlit meadow; and offers an enticing prospect to the traveler who has been toiling through the rugged. ways of the Kantian categories, or the barren morass of the Hegelian logic. He not only has a definite set of ideas, deeply conceived and organically united, to present to his students, but he has clothed them in a verbal garb that makes metaphysics, for once, easy reading, and is perhaps too alluring to do the best possible service to exact thought. His clear, rich, and allusive style makes him one of the greatest masters of German prose; while of his chief philosophical work it is hardly too much to say, with Professor Royce, that it "is in form the most artistic philosophical treatise in existence," unless we hark back to Plato himself. When we add to these considerations the breadth of his culture, which touched upon so many human concerns, and so adorned whatever it touched that a close acquaintance with the whole of his work is almost a liberal education in itself, we may understand why his figure is the most interesting, if not the most significant, in the history of nineteenth-century thought; and why his influence, instead of becoming a matter of merely historical interest, or declining into the cult of a coterie, is now steadily growing nearly forty years after his death.

Arthur Schopenhauer was born in Danzig, February 22d (Washington's and Lowell's birthday), 1788. His father was a merchant in prosperous circumstances; his mother was a brilliant woman, who afterwards became a novelist of some repute and a leader in the social life of Weimar. In 1793 Danzig lost its rank as a free city, being absorbed by Prussia; whereupon the Schopenhauers removed to Hamburg. At the age of nine Arthur was sent to France for two

years, and at the age of fifteen started upon two years of traveling with his family, although for a part of the time he was placed in an English school. He tried to follow the parental wishes in adopting a mercantile life; but the death of his father in 1805 changed these plans. The boy then determined to study the classics and work for a degree. He prepared himself at Gotha and Weimar, and entered the University of Göttingen in 1809. Here he studied for two years, then at Berlin; and then, in 1813, seeking to escape from the turmoil of warfare, he went first to Dresden, and afterwards to Rudolstadt, where he worked upon the dissertation which obtained for him, in the autumn of 1813, his degree at the University of Jena. This dissertation - which occupies an important place among his writings, because it contains the germ of his subsequent thinking-was entitled 'Ueber die Vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom Zureichenden Grunde' (The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason). The mind is constantly asking, Why is this or that thing so? Why does that stone fall to the earth? Why must a given judgment be either true or not true? Why are equilateral triangles equiangular? Why do I raise my hand when threatened by a blow? For each of these things there is a sufficient reason; but the reasons are not of the same sort. In the first case there is a physical cause, in the second a logical consequence, in the third the datum of the problem necessitates the conclusion, while in the fourth the will offers the immediate explanation. These cases are perhaps but four aspects of one general principle; but as Schopenhauer pointed out, much confusion may result from a failure to distinguish clearly between them, and a cause may be a very different thing from a "because."

After obtaining his degree, our philosopher in embryo lived with his mother for a winter in Weimar; but they were separated the following year by incompatibility of temperament, and never met again. The four years 1814-18 were spent in Dresden, devoted chiefly to the composition of the philosopher's magnum opus. A pamphlet 'Ueber das Sehen und die Farben' (Sight and Color), published during this period, is of historical but hardly of scientific interest. What value it still has, depends upon the acuteness of many of its observations, and upon the emphasis which it places upon the subjective aspect of color perception; but as an attempt to vindicate Goethe's fantastic Farbenlehre' as against Newton's, it was foredoomed to failure. Schopenhauer's great work, 'Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung' (The World as Will and Idea), was turned over to his publisher in the spring of 1818, and without waiting for its appearance the author hastened to Italy, carrying with him the conviction that he had given to the world its first true and all-embracing system of philosophy; that he, and he alone, at the age of thirty, had unraveled "the master-knot of human