Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/280

the essence of the will as the contemplative intelligence sees it. And to art Schopenhauer devotes his third book. The will has certain ultimate fashions of expressing itself, certain stages of self-objectification, as Schopenhauer calls them. These, in so far as contemplation can seize them, are the ultimate types, the Platonic ideas, of things, all endlessly exemplified in space and time by individual objects, but, as types, eternal, time-transcending, immortal. They are the ultimate embodiments of passion, the eternal forms of longing that exist in our world. Art grasps these types and exhibits them. Architecture, for instance, portrays the blind nature-forces, or longings, of weight and resistance. Art is, then, the universal appreciation of the essence of the will from the point of view of a contemplative onlooker. Art is, therefore, disinterested, embodying passion, but itself not the victim of passion. Of all the arts, according to Schopenhauer, Music most universally and many-sidedly portrays the very essence of the will, the very soul of passion, the very heart of this capricious, world-making, and incomprehensible inner nature of ours. Hence music is in some respects Schopenhauer’s favorite art. Music shows us just what the will is, — eternally moving, striving, changing, flying, struggling, wandering, returning to itself, and then beginning afresh, — all with no deeper purpose than just life in all its endlessness, motion, onward-flying, conflict, fullness of power, even though that shall mean fullness of sorrow and anguish. Music never rests, never is content; repeats its conflicts and wanderings over and over; leads them up, indeed, to mighty climaxes, but is great and strong never by virtue of abstract ideas, but only by the might of the will that it embodies. Listen to these cries and strivings, to this infinite wealth of flowing passion, to this infinite restlessness, and then reflect, — That art Thou; just that unreposing vigor, longing, majesty, and — caprice.