attempted account of the world in terms of the universal reason therefore remains so far a mere programme, a postulate, almost a dogma. And yet dogmas were just what our philosophy had all along been trying to reduce and to rationalize.
In view of this common perplexity of all the idealistic systems, there were certain to arise, upon the historical basis of the Kantian theory, philosophies that not only accepted the perplexity, but that magnified it, that referred it to the very nature of the quasi-mental reality behind the world of sense, and that declared: “Deeper than reason, in this world of the ideal existence, is the caprice which once for all expresses itself in the wealth of nature’s facts.” Of such systebas Schopenhauer’s philosophy is the classic representative. Not that Schopenhauer was in this general tendency alone. Windelband very properly classes under the same head Schelling’s later theologico-philosophical speculations (not studied in these lectures) along with two or three other doctrines. Windelband calls them all by the common name Irrationalismus, A doctrine of this sort, upon a Kantian basis, must run somewhat as follows: The world as we see it exists only in our ideas. We all have a common outer show-world because we all possess a common deeper nature, wherein we are one. You are essentially the same ultimate being that I am. Otherwise we should not have in common this outer projected world of seeming sea waves, star clusters, and city streets. For, as ideas, those things have no outer basis. As common to us all, they must have a deep inner basis. Yet this their basis can’t be anything ultimately and universally rational. For in so far as we actually have reason in common, we think necessary, clearly coherent, exactly interrelated groups of ideas, such, for instance, as the multiplication table. But about the star clusters and the sea waves there is no such ultimate rational unity and coherency.
