possess. I will what I have not yet, but hope to get, as a poor man wills wealth, but a rich man more wealth. I will the future, the distant, the unpossessed, the victory that I have not yet won, the defeat of the enemy who still faces me in arms, the cessation of the tedium or of the pain that besets me. Do I attain my desire, my will ceases, or, which is the same thing, turns elsewhere for food. Curiously enough, this, which is precisely the thought that led Hegel to the conception of the absolutely active and triumphant spirit, appears to Schopenhauer the proof of the totally evil nature of things. Striving might be bearable were there a highest good, to which, by willing, I could attain, and if, when I once attained that good, I could rest. But if will makes the world and is the whole life and essence of it, then there is nothing in the world deeper than the longing, the unrest, which is the very heart of all willing. Doesn’t this unrest seem tragic? Is there to be no end of longing in the world? If not, how can mere striving, mere willing, come to seem bearable? Here is the question which leads Schopenhauer to his pessimism. Precisely the same problem made Hegel, with all his appreciation of the tragedy of life, an optimist. Hegel’s Absolute, namely, is dissatisfied everywhere in his finite world, but is triumphantly content with the whole of it, just because his wealth is complete.
An historical lecture like the present one has not to decide between the metaphysical claims and rights of the Schopenhauerian immediate intuition of the Universal and the Hegelian logic. As theories of the absolute, these two doctrines represent conflicting philosophical interests whose discussion would belong elsewhere. Our present concern is the more directly human one. Of the two attitudes towards the great spiritual interests of man which these systems embody, which is the deeper? To be sure, even this question cannot be answered without making a confession of philosophical faith, but that I must here do in merely dogmatic form.
