until after an adequate examination of its philosophical implications.[1] Here the object is merely to indicate the way in which Schopenhauer adapts Kant's doctrines of freedom and of the empirical and the intelligible character to his own purposes, so as to justify his own sharp distinction between the will-impelled egoistic conduct, and the self-renunciation of the ethical hero free from the bonds of will. Schopenhauer's moral genius, like Kant's, has transcended the limits of phenomena. Only Kant believes he has found morality in the austere adherence to the demands of the moral law; Schopenhauer, in the self-denying love characterizing all truly sympathetic conduct. This, then, is the real difference between Kant's conception of morality and Schopenhauer's. Kant's is the ethics of imperative reason; Schopenhauer's, the ethics of compassionate feeling.[2] Each, in its own way, illustrates tendencies normally present in human nature. Kant's morality is the morality of the Hebraic spirit which deified law; Schopenhauer's, the morality of oriental meditation, the ethics of Jesus of Nazareth. [3]
Now, morality concerns all of human nature, and any attempt to exhaust its significance by deifying any one of its aspects is doomed to failure. Schopenhauer readily sees the narrowness of Kant's conception of morality, and it is a sorry picture that he draws of Kant's moral hero: "If, by a strong effort of the imagination, we try to picture to ourselves a man, possessed, as it were, by a dæmon, in the form of an absolute Ought, that speaks
- ↑ The writer hopes to attempt some such examination in a separate article.
- ↑ Cf. Volkelt, op. cit.; p. 307: "Fasse ich alles zusammen, so kann ich Schopenhauers Moralphilosophie als eine metaphysisch gegründete einseitige Gefühlsethik bezeichnen. Die einzige Quelle des moralischen Handelns liegt in dem irrationalen Gefiihle des Mitleids."
- ↑ "That παντα καλα λιαν of the Old Testament is really foreign to true Christianity; for in the New Testament the world is always spoken of as something to which one does not belong, which one does not love, nay, whose lord is the devil.… There is nothing from which one has to distinguish the kernel so carefully from the shell as in Christianity. Just because I prize this kernel highly I sometimes treat the shell with little ceremony; it is, however, thicker than is generally supposed." G., II, pp. 735, 736; HK., III, p. 447. Cf. G., II, p. 745 ff; HK., III, p. 457ff. Paulsen maintains a similar view of the ethics of primitive Christianity (Cf. his System der Ethik, Berlin, 1891, pp. 48 ff; Engl. tr. by Professor Frank Thilly, New York, 1903, pp. 65 ff). Cf. also Volkelt, op. cit., p. 308.
