gossip? I need not dwell upon them further; nor need I repeat how Schopenhauer had only to die to acquire general fame, until now his name is everywhere a symbol for all that is most dark and deep and sad and dangerous about the philosophy of our time. Of the pettier incidents of his life, of his quarrels, of his one or two outbursts of temper which led to public scandals, of his other eccentricities numberless, I have no time to speak further.
IV.
Schopenhauer’s principal work, “Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,” is in form the most artistic philosophical treatise in existence, if one excepts the best of Plato’s “Dialogues.” In its first edition it was divided into four books; a later edition added in a second volume comments upon all four. Of these books, the first summarizes the Kantian basis of Schopenhauer’s own doctrine. The world is, first of all, for each and for all of us, just our Vorstellung, our Idea. It is there because and while we see it; it consists in its detail of facts of experience. These, however, are, for our consciousness, always interpreted facts, seen in the sense forms of space and of time, and within these forms, perceived through and by virtue of our universal form of comprehension, namely, the principle of causation. When I experience anything, I inevitably seek for a cause in space and in time for this experience. When I find such a cause, I localize the experience as an event manifesting some change in something there in space and in time; but these forms of space and of time, as well as this principle of causation, are all alike simply formal ideas in me. Kant’s great service lay, in fact, in his proving the subjectivity, the purely mental nature, of such forms. The space and time worlds, with all that they contain, exist accordingly for the knowing subject. No subject without an object, and no object without a subject. I know in so far as there is a
