He was active to the end of his life, though the first fine rapture of his passionate love for all that is best in art was dimmed inevitably with the passing years. There is a pathetic reference in a letter to this dulling of his power of vision. "In the time," he writes, "when my spirit was at its zenith, whatever object my eye rested upon made revelations to me. Now that I am old, it may happen that I stand in front of Raphael's Madonna, and she says nothing to me."
He died suddenly, in 1860, at the age of seventy-two. The stone which marks his grave bears as inscription the sole words "Arthur Schopenhauer."
CHAPTER II
PESSIMISM
Schopenhauer's system is set forth in all its fulness in his great work, The World as Will and Idea. All that he wrote after the appearance of this book was confirmation and expansion of the theories already laid down. It differs from his earlier books in method. He no longer follows academic lines. He looks upon the work as a revelation of the meaning of life, based on a clear and direct intuition into life, and the style shapes itself accordingly. Metaphor frequently takes the place of argument, and his theories are developed in a flow of passionate eloquence, contrasting remarkably with the severer methods of the ordinary metaphysician.
Schopenhauer takes as his starting-point certain theories from the philosophies of Plato and Kant. Things, as we know them in experience, said Kant, are made up partly of forms or moulds, which are in the mind, and partly of something outside the mind. That which we know, our actual experience, is a combination of the two elements, the subjective and the objective element. That part of experience which lies outside the mind, the reality, the thing-in-itself or the noumenon in philosophical language, we can never know. For in order to be known by us, it has to run into the forms or moulds supplied by the mind, and in this transition its nature has been changed. To know it as it is, before it enters into contact with our minds, is impossible. That we appear to have objective knowledge is therefore a deception and an illusion.
Schopenhauer accepts Kant's analysis of experience, but denies that the thing-in-itself is unknowable. For that which is real in our experience is not outside us altogether, as in Kant's theory. It lies within ourselves; it is the only real and essential part of our nature, and we have a direct knowledge of it. This reality Schopenhauer finds in the will. Now the will is fully known to us through internal perception, through intuition. It is the real, inner nature of everything in the world. It affords the key to the knowledge of the inmost being of the whole of nature. It is the kernel of every individual thing, and also of the whole universe.
It is important to note, that Schopenhauer's use of the word "will" is far wider than that of common usage. It includes not only conscious desire, but also unconscious instinct, and the forces of inorganic nature. He recognises will not only in the existences which resemble our own, in men and animals, but also in the force which germinates and vegetates in the plant, the force through which the crystal is formed, that by which the magnet turns to the north pole, the force which appears in the elective affinities of matter as repulsion and attraction, decomposition and combination, and lastly even as gravitation, which draws the stone to the earth and the earth to the sun. All these in their inner nature are identical. It is the same force in every manifestation of nature, as in each preconsidered action of man. The difference is merely one of degree.