as ever the most naive and unreflectively superficial realism made them. As against such realism our doctrine possesses depth, philosophical keenness of analysis, idealistic insight. As against the romantic idealism, our doctrine has the advantage of objectivity and fixity. Just because our common temporal existence is part of the caprice of the World-Will, this temporal existence itself has for us individuals reality and fixity.
So much for the theoretical side of our author’s doctrine. On the practical side, in respect, namely, of his pessimism, we shall find Schopenhauer in a very interesting historical relation to Hegel. In fact, as we shall learn, our author’s pessimism is but another aspect of the same insight into the paradoxical logic of passion which we have discovered at the heart of Hegel’s doctrine. It is true that Schopenhauer’s World-Will, this blind power that, according to him, embodies itself in our universe, appears in his account, at first, as something that might be said to possess passion without logic. Yet this first view of the World-Will soon turns out to be inadequate. The very caprice of the terrible principle is seen, as we go on, to involve a sort of secondary rationality, a logic, fatal and gloomy, as well as deeply paradoxical, but still none the less truly rational for all that. Schopenhauer’s world is, in fact, tragic in much the same sense as Hegel’s. Only, for Schopenhauer the tragedy is hopeless, blind, undivine; while for Hegel it is the divine tragedy of the much-tried Logos, whose joy is above all the sorrows of his world. Were this difference between these two thinkers merely one of personal and speculative opinion, it might have little significance. But since it involves, as we shall find, one of the most truly vital problems of our modern life, one which meets us at every step in our literature and in our ethical controversies, we shall find it well worth our while to study the contrast more closely. First, then, here, let us see something of the man Schopenhauer, and afterwards we may estimate the doctrine.
