vitality and work with keen reflection. But for men of Schopenhauer’s type there is a profound contrast between their contemplative and their passionate life, precisely the same contrast that the ascetic mystics, with whom, once more, like Spinoza, Schopenhauer as philosopher had many things in common, have always loved to dwell upon and to exaggerate. Do you give yourself over to passion? Then, as they will have it, you may be clever, well informed, ingenious; in short, as all the ascetic mystics would say, you may be as wily as you are worldly; but through it all you will be essentially ignorant, thoughtless, irrational. Do you attain the true enlightenment, even for a moment? Then you stand aside from passion; its whirlwind goes by, and you remain undisturbed; your thought, to use an old comparison that was a favorite of Schopenhauer’s, pierces through passion as the sunlight through the wind. You see it all, but it moves you not.
Such mysticism is essentially pessimistic; we find it so even in Spinoza, or in the “Imitation of Christ;” only, in the “Imitation,” contemplation has the glory of God to turn to above and beyond the storm of sense and of vanity. A formula for Schopenhauer is that his pessimism is simply the doctrine of the “Imitation” with the glory of God omitted; but as the glory of God in the latter book is described in purely abstract, mystical, and essentially unreal terms, one may see at once that the road from the mediæval mystic to Schopenhauer’s outcome is not so long as some people imagine. “I saw in my dream,” says Bunyan, at the end of his “Pilgrim’s Progress,” when the angels carry off poor Ignorance to the pit, — “I saw in my dream that there was a way to the bottomless pit from the very gate of Heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction.” Now, Schopenhauer’s mission it was to explore this highly interesting way with considerable speculative skill. The mystic who forsakes the world because of its vanity finds his comfort in a
