SOURCE: "Schopenhauer as a Critic of Religion," in The Andover Review, Vol. X, No. LV, July, 1888, pp. 1-23.

[In the following essay, Gardiner outlines and evaluates Schopenhauer's objections to religion and explores his life to suggest some factors that may have sparked his anti-religious fervor.]

[In James Martineau's A Study of Religion (1888),] the story is told of an eminent English Positivist, that, listening to an account of the argument in Mr. Fiske's Destiny of Man, he gave silent attention until the inference was being drawn of personal immortality, when he brake in with the exclamation: "What! John Fiske say that? Well; it only proves what I have always maintained, that you cannot make the slightest concession to metaphysics without ending in a theology!"

Whatever truth there may be in the opinion thus expressed that metaphysics culminates, by a logical necessity, in theology, it is certain that every system of metaphysics is bound, by the very nature of its pretensions, to assume some definite attitude towards religion. For religion and metaphysics both concern themselves, in the last resort, with essentially the same objects, having both alike to do with ultimate reality and human destiny, on which profoundest of themes each, in its own way, professes to give to man the profoundest views attainable. Rightly, therefore, will the question be put to metaphysics which Marguerite put to the philosophic Faust, "What thinkest thou of God?" and rightly, too, will metaphysics pronounce judgment on religion, and declare its views of things to be true or false or uncertain.

A comparison of religious ideas with the results of a given philosophy not only makes clear the spirit and temper of the latter, but may also be of no small advantage to religion; for whether the views in question substantially agree or widely differ, in any case, the serious consideration of the free criticisms and subtler apprehensions of philosophy can hardly fail to clarify and deepen faith, or at least to stimulate to a more thorough investigation of its grounds. It is in view of these advantages that I have attempted, in what follows, an examination of some "religious aspects" of the philosophy of Schopenhauer. No system of modern times assumes a more definite or hostile attitude towards religion than this brilliantly expounded metaphysics, half pantheistic, half atheistic, of the great German pessimist. The reason for this lies in the intensely practical outcome of the whole speculation, which was clearly designed as a philosophy of redemption to take the place, at any rate among the educated, of the fast disappearing beliefs of religion. The matter is not without a timely interest. Just a hundred years after the birth of its author, the philosophy of the World as Will and Idea celebrates its triumphs as probably the most influential system of German metaphysics since the breaking up of Hegelianism. Such a system the friends of religion cannot well afford to ignore.

I shall confine myself chiefly to the opinions "On Religion" collected together in the fifteenth chapter of the second volume of Parerga and Paralipomena. The first and most important section of this chapter contains, in the form of a dialogue, a general examination and criticism of religion much after the manner of Hume. One of the speakers, Demopheles, undertakes to defend religion for the masses on practical grounds. His principle is utility, and the ends which religion attains in the practical sphere completely outbalance, he urges, any theoretical exceptions which might be taken to the means. These ends are: first, the satisfaction of man's metaphysical need, the need "which arises from the pressing problem of our existence, and from the consciousness that there must be, beyond the physical of the world, somehow a metaphysical, an unchangeable, serving as the basis for continual change." Religion meets this need, bringing to men truth, yes, the deepest truth, in a form adapted to the common apprehension, allegorical, mysterious, overawing, therefore, and with an authority secured by antiquity and tradition, as is necessary to its practical effectiveness. In the second place, it appeals to the ever-present moral consciousness of men, affording to it that external support and confirmation, "without which it could not easily maintain itself in the struggle with so many temptations." In thus restraining violence, and wisely controlling conduct generally, religion forms the very bulwark of the social order, while Christianity in particular holds forth ideals which reveal the true ethical import of human life in all its depth and seriousness. Finally, religion brings to man, amid great and innumerable sorrows, comfort and consolation, in death especially unfolding to him the whole of its beneficent power. Accordingly, it "is like one who takes a blind man by the hand and leads him, .. . the great thing is, not that he himself should see everything, but that he should reach his destination."

These points are developed, with repetitions and varying emphasis, now here, now there, according to the occasions presented by the free movement of the dialogue.

Philalethes, the other speaker, represents the theoretical and philosophical consciousness. His motto is: "Vigeat Veritas et pereat mundus." He objects to religion as a popular metaphysics, because, while presenting the truth allegorically, everything has to be taken (as Demopheles also allows) sensu proprio. But sensu proprio the doctrines are false. The friend of truth, therefore, must reject and condemn them. But the naked truth, stripped of its allegorical dressing up, would be philosophy, and no longer religion. If the principle simplex sigillum veri is here unavailing, and the common people cannot be made to understand the profound truths of philosophy, they can at least be brought to so much better insight as to see that what they now regard as true is false, and so be saved from error; and this gain fully justifies the attacks which philosophers and men of science are constantly making on the popular creeds. In regard to the second point, the influence of religion on morals, it is admitted that, in some respects, such influence is both powerful and good. It is not, however, by any means, as has been claimed, the bulwark of civil order, which is much more dependent on the law and the magistrate than on motives of religion. "Suppose," says Philalethes, "that now suddenly, by public proclamation, all criminal laws were declared null and void: I think that neither you nor I would have the courage, under the protection of religious motives, to go home alone only from here. But if, in like manner, all religion were declared to be untrue, we should continue to live as before, without any particular increase of our cares and precautions, under the protection of the laws only." Moreover, the principle contended for is false. It is not true that the end justifies the means. From the standpoint of truth, the fraus is to be reprobated, no matter how pia. Nor, surely, does moral worth ever belong to deeds, whose source is really and purely superstition. As to Christianity, the ethical import of life which it teaches is, indeed, great, and belongs to it alone—that is to say, in the Occident; but it is never to be forgotten, on the other hand, that, being a monotheistic religion, it is necessarily intolerant, since a single God is, from his very nature, a jealous God, that allows life to no other. Its history, therefore, is a history of bigotry and persecution, of hypocrisy and deceit, of torture and the stake, and of crimes unmentionable, justifying, in part at least, the Spanish proverb, "Behind the cross stands the devil." As regards morality, therefore, the service of religion is largely problematical, while its disadvantages, or even the deeds of violence which have followed it, are manifest. Granted, finally, that the consolations of religion constitute, as they do, its greatest glory, what, it must be urged, can that comfort be worth over which forever hangs the Damocles-sword of disillusioning?

"Religion," says Demopheles at the end, "like Janus, or, better, like Yama, the Brahman's god of death, has two faces, and indeed, like this, one very friendly, the other very forbidding; we have each been looking at one of them." To this Philalethes assents, and the dialogue closes.

In considering this discussion, one cannot but be struck by the fact that Schopenhauer throughout appears able to apprehend religion in no other way than as folk-metaphysics, and that he judges it entirely from the standpoint of his own metaphysics, to which it is, in almost every particular, opposed. It seems to be assumed that religion is and can be only an affair of the uneducated. Much is said of the opposition between religion and philosophy, but the long line of thinkers whose philosophy has culminated in a religious philosophy are simply ignored. Emphasis is laid on the conflict between religion and science, but the many eminent men of science who, not satisfied to regard blind physical force as ultimate, have turned with reverent hearts to the personal God, are silently passed over. Science is simply set over against faith, reasoned metaphysics against folk-metaphysics, with which religion is straightway identified. The abuses which have been practiced in the name or under the cloak of religion, even those which were without or even against its sanction, these are all heaped together as a reproach upon "religion." No attempt whatever is made to grasp religion in its idea or essence; it is taken up in a purely empirical way as a complex of phenomena, chiefly sociological. The endeavor to make religion appear rational is treated by Schopenhauer in other of his writings as a piece of sophism, for which professors of philosophy receive pay from the government. All religion is necessarily allegorical, and therefore false. Even Demopheles in the dialogue knows of no better defense of it than as a metaphysical theory adapted to the capacities of the common people and to be respected for its practical effectiveness.

It might be objected, perhaps, at this point that religion is not adequately characterized as metaphysics at all, since the system of beliefs, which constitute what may be called the cognitive part of it, does not of itself constitute its essence. The very belief in God, we are told, need not be religious; for "God" may be simply a scientific hypothesis having no more religious value than a mathematical symbol or a formula like Taylor's theorem. In order to be religious, the belief must determine the life, and a manifold of sentiments and activities must be unfolded, whose peculiar character is derived from relation to a supreme object at once of thought and of veneration.

This is true; and it is also true that religious beliefs do not exist primarily in the form in which they are taken up in the reflective consciousness. But whether in this abstract consciousness or imbedded in the medium of feeling and inwrought into the activities of will, they nevertheless do exist and involve, implicitly or otherwise, a metaphysical theory which challenges comparison with the views of philosophy obtained in other ways. In the end, therefore, nothing is gained if, as Schopenhauer claims, the ideas which determine life religiously are without foundation. If this were true, then the history of religion would be simply a history of folly. Here, then, if at all, is the point where Schopenhauer must be met. Are the ideas of religion capable of justification? Is the folk-metaphysics also good metaphysics? Or is there and can there be a good metaphysics which is also available for purposes of religion? It is noteworthy that Schopenhauer at least recognizes that religion is not to be treated merely as an artificial appendage to human life, but as having its immovable foundation in the "ineradicable metaphysical need" of our nature. This, doubtless, is not enough. The permanent foundation of religion lies not alone in this theoretical requirement, but also in the equally ineradicable feeling of individual dependence on unseen reality and in the coö rdinate impulse to realize personal life in union with it. But what specially concerns us here is the metaphysical element in religion, and the question whether that element is susceptible of rational development.

Viewing the matter thus, we shall have no difficulty in finding in these caustic criticisms of Schopenhauer much that is profitable and pertinent. I refer especially to his characterization of religious doctrines as allegorical. That they are necessarily so, as Schopenhauer maintains, is not to be conceded, but that they are largely so in the form which religion assumes as "folk-metaphysics" can hardly, I think, be questioned. For not only have the exigencies of language, built up, in the first instance, in relation to sensible phenomena, made all allusions to the supersensible doubly symbolical, but there is here a constant tendency for symbol and idea to run together. The larger part of the metaphysical conceptions connected with the religious life of mankind has ever been and is still mythological. How difficult it is to eliminate the myth when we attempt to grasp the facts and forces of a world transcending the sense-world is illustrated by the practice of even so great a genius as Plato, who used it repeatedly as an artistic form in which to set forth doctrines too sublime, apparently, for treatment in terms of abstract thinking. Nor would it be difficult to discover a similar spirit in the professed metaphysics of later times. Small wonder, therefore, if even the more spiritual religions, especially in the popular apprehension of them, have not been able wholly to escape it. This is true, among others, of Christianity. The Bible is full of symbolical expressions and figurative descriptions, especially concerning God and the processes and results of human redemption, which, taken literally, must be judged, from the standpoint of the modern consciousness, to be pure fiction. In the Middle Ages, the dogmas of religion were apprehended in accordance with the prevalent cosmography; the divine drama was adapted to the physical theatre. The opposition of the Church to scientific speculations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was, from it own point of view, most logical. The Copernican theory not only contradicted a literal interpretation of the Bible, it necessitated at the same time a revolution in the manner of holding the faith. The heaven above the crystalline sphere, which Aristotle had posited as the outer limit of the material world and which the schoolmen believed in, disappeared. It was no longer possible seriously to think of a throne of God above the stars whence Christ had come down to the earth to redeem it, and where He now sits in glorified body, the effulgent centre of angelic hierarchies. The earth itself, far from being the centre of a universe created especially for its benefit, was discovered to occupy only a secondary place among the planets, and transformed itself into a mere star-speck floating in the infinitude of space. With such a conception, even the most fundamental of the Church's assumptions, the assumption, namely, that God had taken upon Himself human form and for man's salvation had suffered and died, constituting the Church a treasury of supernatural grace and investing it with a pleroma of miraculous powers, appeared highly questionable—little did the earth seem fitted for such superlative distinction. And as heaven vanished above, so hell disappeared beneath, and the doctrines of future retribution and personal immortality, in the old form of holding them, became impossible. That the old drama is not adapted to the new theatre is evident. Nevertheless, the literal materialism of mediæval conceptions still continues to leaven much of our popular theology. If, influenced by the fact of the human birth, the number of those who think of the coming of Christ to the earth in a spatial fashion is fewer than formerly, the number of those is still great who think in this manner of his ascension to heaven. From the same point of view, the great majority of Christians, apparently, still look forward to the second advent as a coming of Christ in the clouds with cohorts of angels, and verily believe that this sublime spectacle will be seen by every human eye (Rev. i. 7)—in contravention of all the laws of optics and of his own express declaration that the event predicted was to take place in the lifetime of some of his immediate followers (Mark ix. 1; cf. Mt. xxiv. 34). The same literalism prevails in popular conceptions of the resurrection, whence the horror with which cremation is regarded among the uneducated; while in respect to the final judgment, scarcely a doubt seems yet to have been stirred among orthodox believers that it will take place on a day appointed in the assembled presence of men and angels, and that each will hear the very words of Christ which will solemnly declare the world's drama to be ended and separate out for different localities the good and the bad forever. These doctrines, held in this way, simply contradict the views which necessarily connect themselves with our enlarged conceptions of the physical universe. But there are others which to a trained moral consciousness are even more abhorrent. Such, for example, is the popular misconception of the doctrine of the Atonement. As a "plan" of salvation "devised" in the council chambers of the Eternal, an "arrangement agreed upon" between Father and Son, it is an utter artificiality; as a "scheme" by which the guilty might escape through the infliction of the precise equivalent of their just penalty on the innocent, it is the worst sort of legal fiction. Matthew Arnold is undoubtedly right in characterizing such a supposed transaction "as sheer mythology, at bottom, as Saturn's devouring his children or Pallas springing from the head of Zeus." Assuredly all of these doctrines have meaning, but the form of presenting them is, as Schopenhauer says, allegorical; and every truthful man must desire to penetrate as far as possible into the meaning of the allegory, to think truly and to feel as he thinks.

We live in an age of change. No one who is sympathetic to the spiritual forces which control the intellectual movement of our times carries with him into mature life the beliefs of his childhood unaltered. The change may be a gradual transformation or an outspoken revolt. The poetry of youth may merge imperceptibly into "the light of common day," which, however "common," is at least capable of dispelling illusions; or the present may prove a rupture with the past attended with unutterable anguish and pathos. If the latter be the case, there is at any rate one consolation which earnest seekers after truth have in all ages of the world experienced, the consciousness of at least being on the right road.

Ein guter Mensch, in seinem dunkeln Drange
Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst.
(Faust. Prolog im Himmel. Der Herr.)

This process, now, cannot be arrested. It is idle to attempt to permanently allay doubt with palliatives; it can only be met satisfactorily with reasons. Just as, in the age of the Sophists, when skeptical inquiry was undermining the foundations of all religion and morality derived from tradition and authority, the great and pious Socrates sought, not to deny the right of skepticism, but to so far affirm it as to make it skeptical of itself, and by a still deeper investigation to bring explicitly into consciousness the inherent rationality of the accepted order,—so the leaders of religious thought to-day must recognize every serious doubt of a dogma not seen to be rational, and every hesitancy to accept as true what does not seem to the doubter to rest upon sufficient evidence, as legitimate, in reliance on the scriptural prihciple, "the spirit searcheth all things, even the deep things of God," and must seek to present the essential truth of religious conceptions in a form harmonious with our growing knowledge of the world. This, happily, is what a goodly number of some of the best and wisest of our religious teachers are trying to do. They are trying to make the content of the faith, in the best sense of the word, rational; to substitute for the letter, spirit, for mechanical conceptions, vital, for artificialities, reality. This is why their appeal to the freshest minds of to-day is so powerful; they speak as having authority, and not as the scribes, for their authority is the internal one of essential reasonableness, and not the merely external one of constituted custom. Such men hold in their spirit the keys of the future. The preacher or teacher professing to declare the counsels of the Almighty with no other evidence of his claim than his bare assertion, or the assertions of those who have preceded him, may flourish for a time, possibly for a long time, but his authority is doomed as soon as it becomes recognized, as in the end it must, that every man, by the inherent rationality of his nature, is justified in rejecting it.

No one, probably, will claim, without evident self-deception, that he has succeeded in realizing in his own consciousness a system of religious beliefs which is in all respects rational, one, that is, whose inner conformity to the nature of things is in all respects manifest. The nature of things is itself altogether too vast for our comprehension; its very rationality, apart from certain broad and general principles, is a postulate, which we are bound indeed to make, if we will have any comprehension of it at all, but which is only within comparatively narrow limits verified. Much, therefore, necessarily remains matter of conjecture, hypothesis, belief. And much, doubtless, will ever remain so. We see many things only as in a mirror, darkly. The very imperfections of our knowledge suggest that there are many things in the objective order of the world, of the full bearings and relations of which we have as yet but the most inadequate insight. Nevertheless, it is a great thing to be clearly conscious of the goal; the further consciousness that the intelligence which seeks to attain it is no fixed mathematical quantum, but a developing rational life, may serve perhaps as a salutary check upon our impatience that it is not attained sooner. The next thing is to clearly apprehend the right method of approach. This, if I mistake not, must be, in the main, strictly philosophical, the attempt to realize the truth of things in its completeness. No part of experience must be treated as though it were the whole. It will not do, for example, to follow here the abstract method of the natural sciences, which, while disclosing many important things about the world as an object known, necessarily ignore the most wonderful fact of all, the knowing of this object. The subject must also come to its rights, not only the cognitive, but the feeling and willing subject,—the subject of joys and sorrows, of needs and aspirations; the subject whose inspirations flash meteor-like upon the dark enigmas of existence, and whose ideals of science, art, conduct, and, among others, somehow to be accounted for, of religion, mark its intrinsic excellence. Nor is this all. The individual subject is, on its part, as truly an abstraction as the known object we call nature. Each individual, besides having relations through the body with the whole of external nature, stands, through the medium of language and social institutions, in relation to other individuals, in the family, in society, in the state, and is what he is, and becomes what he becomes, only in and through such relations. But they, though we commonly speak of them as our "environment," are anything but an environment in the sense in which the sea environs an island or the atmosphere the earth. They are spiritual and unique, and all merely mechanical analogies utterly fail to comprehend them. In some way, the individual life becomes a sharer in a more universal life, and is this individual only as it thus participates. There is an interpenetration of the universal in the individual, and an intussusception on the part of the individual of the universal. And not only so. Not only does each individual here and now stand in relation to other individuals here and now, but the whole life of the present is indissolubly connected with both the past and the future. It is only in the abstract science of mathematics that the world bears a purely static aspect; everywhere else it is a world of movement, of history. Particularly is this true in the affairs of men. The men and institutions of to-day are the product, in a sense, of the men and institutions of yesterday, of all past generations of men, of a long line of generations of organisms lower than man, of long ages of geological changes connected with chemical and physical processes lower still, of the primeval star-dust, and of what was before the star-dust; and not only the product, but, in some sense, the bearers, incorporating into their own life all other life; mirroring, as Leibniz, from another standpoint, figuratively expressed it, the entire universe; in one aspect most particular, in another most universal. This truth, if it be a truth, is important; for connecting man with man in society and with humanity in history, and uniting man with nature in a present which assimilates the past and gives birth to the future, it presents to us the world as an ordered system, each part of which involves the whole, and this without any loss of individuality, but rather as a necessary condition of individuality. The world thus appears as a concrete organism, vital, and, since we can assign no limits to its content, infinite. But to conceive the world so would seem necessarily to involve the conception of Theism, since the principle of unity for such a world cannot be anything mechanical like the partes extra partes of figurate space, but must be ideal, like the life of the plant or the unity of consciousness; it must be Intelligence, since no lesser principle can constitute the required unity of real and ideal, nor connect into a series the succession of temporal phenomena; and it must be Power, and if Intelligence, intelligent Power, that is, Will, since the whole world-order, in its continued on-going, is the evident manifestation of energy. But however this may be, however we may be compelled to think of our Highest Principle, the point to be insisted on is this, that religion, which grew originally out of a conscious relation of the individual life to the deepest reality apprehended in the universe in the feeling of dependence, must mould its conceptions of that reality, and of all that connects itself with our relations to it in accordance with the principles which increasing intelligence finds more and more clearly revealed, not only in one department of being abstracted from the rest, but in the organic structure of the universe. Only so will it be possible to repel the bitter taunt of Schopenhauer [in Parerga and Paralipomena] that knowledge and faith are "like wolf and sheep caged together, and knowledge is the wolf which threatens to eat up its neighbor."

Schopenhauer's views of Christianity are highly paradoxical, interesting, therefore, but not very important. The historical Christ he regarded, with Reimarus, as originally a demagogue, who, failing in the attempt to make himself king of the Jews, succeeded in getting himself transformed, after he was dead, from an earthly king into a heavenly. The details of the gospel narratives are mythical. Christian doctrine is a great allegory, which, having grown up on occasion of external and contingent circumstances, was finally put into shape by the systematizing genius of Augustine. Augustinianism, therefore, and not "primitive Christianity," is Christianity in its completeness. The doctrines themselves are derived principally from two heterogeneous sources, optimistic Judaaism and pessimistic Buddhism; but their centre of gravity is decidedly in the latter. The devil is here a highly important personage. He is "the prince of this world" (John xii. 32), and a much-needed counterpoise to the all-goodness, all-wisdom, and all-power of God. So thoroughly is Schopenhauer convinced of the Indian origin of the essential doctrines of Christianity, that he not only appeals in proof to "its thoroughly Indian ethics leading to asceticism, to its pessimism, and its avatar," but finds his theory especially confirmed by the expression "the wheel of generation," which he compares with the wheel of the transmigration of souls, frequently referred to in the writings of Buddhism. He even goes so far as to suggest that the name John may be derived from "Saniassi,"—"from his Saniassilife in the wilderness!" To account for the connection, he is inclined to attribute an element of truth to the story of the flight into Egypt, where Jesus, he thinks, might have become acquainted with Hinduism through intercourse with Egyptian priests.

These dict are, at the best, but bold and stimulating suggestions; they certainly do not present themselves as reasoned conclusions on the broad basis of historical investigation. The point most worth considering, perhaps, is the oft-repeated assertion of the connection of Christianity and Buddhism. That the two religions present in many particulars striking similarities, cannot be questioned. So obvious, indeed, are these resemblances that missionaries have been led, at times, to look on Buddhism as a counterfeit of Christianity invented by the devil in order to obstruct the progress of the gospel. It is quite possible, of course, perhaps even probable, that each religion may have developed similarly under similar conditions in entire independence. But it is also possible that there may have been at some period a historical connection. This is a matter which can only be settled by investigations considerably more elaborate than those we find in Schopenhauer, but it is, after all, one purely historical, and any serious attempt to make out the connection will at all times meet with ready welcome among candid scholars, whatever may be their judgment as to its success. But granting all this, granting even that the dependence is on the side of Christianity and that we may be obliged to recognize, in the end, along with Jewish and Hellenic also Buddhistic influences in its formation, it would still be a long way from this to the identification of the inner spirit of Christianity with that of Buddhism. Schopenhauer's procedure here is anything but judicious. Having first assumed that Christianity is Augustinian dogmatics, he then expounds the latter as an allegorical setting forth of the essential doctrimes of Buddhism. "At bottom," he says, "and apart from mythologies on both sides, Buddha's Sansara and Nirwana are identical with the two civitates of Augustine, . . . the civitas terrena and cœlestis,"—which is about as reasonable as if one should say that, since each narrates the story of a theft, there is no essential difference between Pope's Rape of the Lock and the Greek Iliad. Christianity is, in fact, no more identical with Augustinianism that it is with Pelagianism or any other -ism. Its forms are as variable as the forms of nature: one of its most eminent characteristics is that it can adapt itself to the ever-changing conditions and ever-growing capacities of humanity. Its spirit is its only really essential element—the spirit of Christ, which is the spirit of divine love in human hearts redeeming man from sin unto holiness and unto God. This spirit is world-wide different from that of Buddhism. True, Christianity has its pessimistic aspect. The world, as it conceives it, is no play-ground. There is evil enough in it—lust and avarice, pride and prejudice, hypocrisy and envy, malice and convetousness, evils of the heart more terrible far than physical sufferings. No danger of overlooking the natural corruption of human nature. And in accordance with this, a morality is demanded, the very first condition of which is self-abnegation. It is true, Christianity has for its symbol an instrument of torture and proclaims unweariedly, as the profoundest law of the moral universe, that salvation is only possible through sacrifice. But this is only one aspect of it. For if the keynote of Christian morality is the paradox, "Whoso loseth his life shall find it," the emphasis is before all else on the finding. The identification with Buddhism is thoroughly superficial. Buddhism is essentially a religion of negation; the "will-to-be," as Schopenhauer expressed it, must be denied, all desire suppressed, the flesh crucified, that at the last, after numberless transmigrations, the soul may lose itself, merged, unconscious as in a swoon, in the unruffled, changeless essence of the All. Christianity, on the contrary, is emphatically a religion of affirmation. Its negative element involves an even more characteristic positive. It not only asserts, with Buddhism, that the individual life is, as such, of evil, but it teaches that, in negating this partial, isolated, false life of self, which is alienation from God and therefore sinful, the true self is not lost but realized. If it demands, as the indispensable prerequisite to the attainment of blessedness, unqualified surrender of the self to God, it is only that God may implete the poverty of the life apart from Him with divine fullness. If it enjoins renunciation of the world, it is in the sense of a moral attitude unconditionally necessary to a being destined for immortality, whose ends, therefore, cannot be realized in the fleeting phenomena of time. The world that is negated is the world of sense, of the things that perish with the using; and the form of negation is not absolute, for while denied as ends, the service which they render is in no way underestimated as means. The spirit of Christianity, therefore, is not the asceticism of the body,—"the Son of Man came eating and drinking,"—but the asceticism of the spirit, which turns away from the world as the unsatisfying source of delusions and misery when it is regarded as ultimate, and turns to God as the true Fountain of Happiness and the Giver of Eternal Life. Stated philosophically, both religions agree that the individual can only find the end of his being in union with the universal; but with Buddhism this union destroys individuality, while with Christianity it perfects it. Nor is the ground of this difference far to seek. It lies in the essential difference in the mode in which the universal is apprehended. With Buddhism, it is abstract; with Christianity, it is concrete. With Buddhism, the ultimate Principle is indeterminate Being; with Christianity, it is the Personal God. Buddhism, in a word, is Pantheistic; Christianity, Theistic. Hence union with the universal is in Buddhism absorption, loss of identity; in Christianity, it is full preservation of the individual life in a kingdom of free spirits, a realm of persons above whom and in whom rules forevermore the Spirit of personal, Eternal Love.

But it is precisely this theistic conception which which Schopenhaner in the strongest terms repudiates as the source of all error and confusion. His account of it, however, is anything but satisfactory. He regards monotheism, for example, as the mere personification of nature,—an opinion neither historically deduced nor philosophically grounded, and false in both regards. No one, he says, has done so much harm to Theism as Copernicus. Astronomy, having taken away heaven, has taken away God also, since "a personal being, as every God necessarily is, that has no place, but is everywhere and nowhere, . . . cannot be imagined, and therefore cannot be believed in."

He even goes so far as to say that all worship of a personal Being is idolatrous, as much so as the worship of fashioned wood, and that whether a man sacrifices his sheep, or his inclinations, is, at bottom, not so very different. What in all this is not pure arbitrariness rests obviously on a misunderstanding. Theism is confounded with Deism, the God who is Spirit, whom all space manifests but none contains, with the local deity who sits above the clouds on a great white throne, and finally appears upon the pictures as an old man with a beard.

We see, then, in Schopenhauer, a critic who rejects all religion as superstition; who regards Christianity, so far as it is true at all, as merely a disguised Buddhism; who looks on Theism as puerile and all worship of a personal God as idolatry; and who pronounces the conflict between Science and Faith to be a bellum ad internecionem. Add to this his denial of personal immortality and his bitter repudiation of supernatural revelation as a claim made by the cunning of priests, taking advantage of the ineradicable metaphysical need of men, combined with their ignorance, to the ends of ecclesiastical and civil power, and we have in outline a position than which none would seem to be more radically in conflict with the current religious conceptions of our time.

As, now, the attitude towards religion generally, like that towards theories in speculation, depends no less, and in most cases rather more, on subjective disposition and contingent circumstances than on strictly objective insight, so, if we should inquire into the causes which led to this determined opposition to religion on the part of Schopenhauer, we should doubtless find them as well in the personal traits and surroundings of the philosopher as in the professedly objective considerations of his philosophy. I can here only refer to one or two salient points which appear to me not a little instructive.

And, first, while it would be odious and is far from my intention to suggest insanity, there can be no doubt, I think, that Schopenhauer inherited from both sides of his family an unbalanced nature which frequently led to an unbalanced judgment both of men and of tilings. His grandmother on his father's side was crazy, and after the death of her husband under legal guardianship; his uncle Andreas, her eldest son, was half-witted from his youth; her second son became so through excesses, and gave to a melancholy life, lived in separation from his family in the company of vulgar clowns, a somewhat merry ending by leaving behind to his brothers and sisters "their rightful portion," and to other persons many thousands—all on paper. The grandfather on the mother's side was, in spite of many excellent qualities, a man of uncontrollable temper. "Just at the time when least expected," so writes his daughter, "the most trifling occasion could rouse him to a wild passion of anger, which, to be sure, was quickly over. At such times, the whole house trembled before his voice of thunder, and the entire household, even to dog and cat, ran frightened out of his way." Yes, even the philosopher's own father, whose intelligence and farseeing industry, combined with extraordinary energy of will, marked a character of no common strength and independence, suffered at times from mental aberration, particularly towards the latter part of this life, when increasing deafness had made him moody and suspicious. It was generally supposed at the time that he committed suicide: all that is certainly known is that he fell from an opening in the warehouse into the canal and was drowned. But Schopenhauer's biographer [Wilhelm Gwinner], who narrates the circumstance, says that he knows a number of things told by the widow and son, which leave little doubt that the rumor was well founded.

This taint in the blood made itself painfully evident in the conduct and opinions of Schopenhauer. He was a born misanthrope. A lively imagination excited a naturally suspicious nature almost to the pitch of madness, so that the evil which he feared, he seemed at times to see bodily before him. One evening, when he was only six years old, his parents, on returning home from a walk, found him in the greatest despair, having imagined himself suddenly abandoned by them forever. A student in Berlin, he believed himself for a long time to be consumptive. At the breaking out of the war of 1813, he imagined that he had been pressed into the service. In Verons he was seized with the idea that he had taken poisoned snuff. When in 1833 he was about to leave Mannheim, he was overcome, without any external occasion whatever, with an unspeakable feeling of dread. For years he was plagued with fear of a criminal process; and if any noise arose in the night, he would jump out of bed and seize dagger and pistols, which he kept constantly loaded. His valuables were concealed in all sorts of out-of-the-way places about his rooms; some could only be found with difficulty in spite of the Latin indications of their whereabouts in his will. And as he had lived in constant dread of being cheated, so that he might not be cheated at the last he gave orders that his body should be allowed to lie longer than was customary, to make the reality of his death perfectly sure.

It was a favorite doctrine with Schopenhauer that genius is allied to madness, and he regarded himself, not wholly without reason, as a genius of the very first rank. He also considered a certain amount of misanthropy as a necessary ingredient of every more talented nature, and held with Chamfort that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of man. From the solitary heights of genius, in the proud consciousness of superiority, he looked down no less with scorn than with pity on the great herd of the uncultivated, the "pack of humanity," the "bipeds," the "Philistines," "nature's wares," as he was wont to term them, and more and more, without perhaps intending it, grew into the habit of judging all things by reference to himself. This isolation he felt very keenly when he found his philosophy, which he describes as "a superb edifice destined for the centuries," completely neglected for over thirty years. This neglect was the source of great embitterment. He could find no other way to account for it than that of a formal conspiracy on the part of the university professors to prevent him a hearing. Hence his outbursts against the paid professors, who, having to earn their living by their teaching, naturally, he thought, prefer position to truth; especially his attacks on the "three great Sophists," Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and more especially on Hegel, whom he could regard in no other light than that of a common charlatan. These invectives are marked by anything but Attic urbanity; on the contrary, they are at times right coarse and vulgar. And when he saw Hegelian philosophy trapped out with the accoutrements of religious phraseology and vaunting itself as the champion of religions orthodoxy, a man of Schopenhauer's volcanic temperament would hardly be likely to find his feelings towards the latter very strongly conciliated.

Another circumstance which contributed, I think, to Schopenhauer's alienation from religion was the absence of anything like what we should call religious training in his own family. The father's ambitions appear to have been wholly secular: Arthur was to become a merchant of position and an accomplished man of the world. True, the remark in a letter that it was quite good that Arthur should be confirmed and attend the morning lectures in Theology from a man whose favorite author was Voltaire shows a character singularly free from prejudice; but there is no evidence that he ever gave to religion any very hearty support. Naturally we might look for more positive influence from the mother; but between mother and son was altogether too little sympathy, and hers was a nature far too shallow. At Weimar, where after the death of her husband she held a sort of literary court, she would not have him, then a youth of twenty, live in the same house with her. An impartial critic would probably not lay all the blame to the charge of the mother. "So long as thou art what thou art," she writes him, "I would make any sacrifice rather than agree to this. I am not blind to thy good qualities, and what repels me lies not in thy disposition, thy inner being, but in thy outer, thy views, thy judgments, thy habits,—in short, as concerning the external world, I can agree with thee in nothing. Thy melancholy, too, oppresses me and puts me out of humor, without helping thee at all. See, dear Arthur, thou wert only with me a few days on a visit, and every day there were violent scenes about nothing, and again about nothing, and each time I breathed free again only after thou wert gone, because thy presence, thy complaints about unavoidable things, thy gloomy looks, thy bizarre judgments, which were spoken by thee like oracles allowing of no objection, oppressed me, and still more the everlasting struggle within with which I violently repressed everything that I might say in reply in order not to give occasion to fresh contention. I am living now very quietly; for years I have not had an unpleasant moment which I do not owe to thee." Evidently Schopenhauer's was not a character finely calculated to promote peace and happiness. But here was just the trouble: Johanna Schopenhauer was ready to sacrifice everything to the maintenance of her personal even though cultivated pleasure. Her strange and gifted son she did not understand; she made no effort to understand him. On reading the title of his first work, On the Fourfold Root of the Law of Sufficient Reason, she said to him contemptuously that that, she supposed, was a work for apothecaries! Anselm Feuerbach, who met her in the year 1815, has preserved the following notice: "Hofräthin Schopenhauer, a rich widow. Makes a profession of learning. Authoress. Talks much and well; intelligent; without heart or soul. Self-satisfied, courting applause and constantly smiling at herself. God preserve us from women whose spirit has run to mere intellect. The seat of true womanly culture is alone in the woman's heart." This characteristic, according to Schopenhauer, who read it many years afterwards, hits the mark only too accurately. A woman with intellect but without heart, self-complacent and delighting in flattery, could hardly be regarded as an instrument fitted by nature for the spiritual guidance of a young pessimist. When he writes her, as a boy, from his boarding-school in England of the misery to which the compulsory inactivity of an English Sunday subjected him, she only laughs at him, recollecting the many struggles she had had to get him to do anything on Sundays and feast-days, because they were to him "days of rest," "and now thou hast of Sunday rest sufficient and enough;" while the wish, which this bitter personal experience occasioned, that "truth with its torch might burn through the Egyptian darkness in England," she only takes note of to criticise as a form of expression: "How canst thou expect truth to do any such thing? A darkness can be illumined, but burn it truly cannot. This is what in English is called bombast."

This experience in England was, without doubt, no insignificant factor in Schopenhauer's anti-religious education. He was then fifteen. He had just come from France, where the movement and freedom of a warm-blooded people had exercised all the fascination of which a nature such as his, and especially at that period of his life, would be susceptible. He now found himself in a totally different atmosphere, thrown, as never before, upon his own resources, and bound down to the rigid discipline of a clergyman's boarding-school, governed in accordance with the strictest principles of orthodoxy, theoretical as well as practical. Against all this he vigorously rebelled. Violent outbursts of indignation reach from time to time his parents, who are traveling for six months in the North, but the only response they meet with is such as that already spoken of from his mother, together with sundry exhortations, perhaps, to make himself more agreeable, and diligently to practice himself in the English language. But the stiff formality of English society never ceased to be repulsive to him, and the whole English religious life, as he saw it, wore to him no other aspect than, in the language of Carlyle, "dead, damnable, putrescent cant." To a school-friend he writes that his stay in England has made him hate the whole nation. This hatred, however, was by no means as universal as the expression might lead one to suppose. There was, in fact, no people to whom he felt himself, on the whole, so spiritually allied as the English. He prided himself on his knowledge of their language, conducted his accounts in it, read regularly the London Times, preferred Englishmen to all others as traveling companions, and in many ways affected English style, even to matters of dress and the cut of his beard. But his embitterment against English bigotry and priestcraft, which dated from the experience at the Wimbledon boarding-school, remained unabated to the very last. "If you will see," he writes [in Parerga and Paralipomena], "with your own eyes and near at hand what the early infection of belief can do, look at the English. See this nation, favored by nature above all others and furnished more than all others with intelligence, spirit, judgment and strength of character, see it, sunk deep beneath all others, nay, made absolutely contemptible by its stupid superstition about the Church, which, along with its other endowments, seems actually like a chronic illusion, a monomania. For this they have simply to thank the fact that education is in the hands of the clergy, who take care so to indoctrinate them in earliest youth with all the articles of faith, that there veritably results a partial atrophy of the brain, which then manifests itself all through life in that silly bigotry with which even people, in other respects highly intelligent and talented, among them degrade themselves, and leave us wholly at a loss to know what to make of them." In another passage he illustrates his contention that religion tends frequently to regard supposed duties towards God as a surrogate for duties towards man by English views of the Sabbath. "Look at England," he exclaims, "where audacious priestly cunning lyingly identifies the Christian Sunday, which was established in opposition to the Jewish Sabbath, by Constatine the Great, with the latter; and it does this in order to transfer Jehovah's ordinances for the Sabbath, that is, the day when Omnipotence, wearied with six days' work, was obliged to rest—whence it is really the last day of the week—over to the Christian's Sunday, the dies solis, this first day which gloriously opens the week, this day of pious meditation and rejoicing. As a consequence of this fraud, "Sabbath-breaking," or "the desecration of the Sabbath," that is, every employment, even the slightest, that is useful or pleasant, all play, all music, all knitting, every worldly book on Sunday, is regarded in England as a grievous sin. Must not the common man there believe that, if he only keeps up "a strict observance of the holy Sabbath and a regular attendance on divine worship," as his spiritual guides tell him, if, that is, he is only inviolately and right thoroughly lazy on Sunday and does not fail to sit two hours in church to listen for the thousandth time to the "same Litany and join a tempo in mumbling the responses—he may well reckon elsewhere on indulgence for this or that license which he may occasionally allow himself? Many other passages to the like effect could be quoted, in which the judgment might appear as harsh and unsympathetic, and to pious ears, perhaps, as shocking as in those just given, but which none the less seize upon and forcibly present an aspect of truth, blindness to which would be utter folly. Enough, however, has been cited to convey the very distinct impression of the perversion to religious influences which a stupid and rigid formalism can effect when violently thrust ab extra upon a nature incorrigibly rebellious at the start against all control merely external. What would have been the result if, early in life, Schopenhauer had met with a presentation of religion more simple and sympathetic, we can but conjecture. Certainly, he was not wanting in those deeper mystical elements to which such a presentation is wont most strongly to appeal. As it was, he found religion everywhere, and in England more especially, identified with creed and ceremony, and went his way to wage a life-long warfare against what seemed to him, and no doubt to some extent was, superstition and bigotry, worthy only of ridicule and contempt.

I cannot bring these personal allusions to a close without refering, finally, to one other circumstance, which seems to me of no slight importance to a proper understanding of Schopenhauer's position: I mean the moral self-contradiction which he realized in his own spirit. There can be no question that Schopenhauer's is the most paradoxical philosophy of modern times; indeed, it may be doubted if in the whole history of thought there has ever appeared a system which not only ran so completely counter to natural instincts and the current views of things, but involved so many obvious internal contradictions. The inconsistencies within the system itself have been so frequently pointed out that to repeat them here, even if space allowed, would be but to slay the slain. Nor have unfriendly critics failed to call attention to the glaring inconsistency between the doctrine and the life, the self-renunciation and asceticism demanded by the former and the irascibility, self-overestimation, and very comfortable habits of Schopenhauer himself. But what has not been so often noticed is Schopenhauer's own consciousness of this contradiction, his deep sense of the inner conflict in his own spirit. Between the intellect and the will, which no one has so sharply distinguished, nor, with such fatal consequences, divided, existed in him an internecine warfare which allowed of no peace, a conflict all the more violent because of the surpassing strength of both contestants as they were brought together on the filed of consciousness of one such man of genius. By the insight of the intellect, it was declared to be necessary, in order to escape the terrible evils of existence, that the will-to-be, which is the source of existence, and, with existence, of evil, should be completely negated: it must be given its quietus, and must altogether cease; but the will-to-be was in Schopenhauer peculiarly potent: he was a man of strong passions and of a self-asserting individuality altogether remarkable. He found in himself no means of bringing this conflict to an issue. It was a burden upon his spirit, a source of fresh conflict and of a deepened sense of isolation. "Never," writes [Gwinner],—"never shall I forget my friend as he once saw at my house Rancé's picture of the abbot of La Trappe, and, turning away with a gesture of pain, said: That is matter of grace!" And he himself tells of similar emotions experienced in the presence of the picture of St. Jerome in the Dresden Gallery. Who does not know something of what these experiences mean? Schopenhauer has but more intensely realized, because more richly endowed than most men, the universal moral struggle of humanity and the universal longing for redemption. Inevitably do his experiences suggest those of another, who centuries earlier also discovered in himself a double nature, the flesh warring against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh, and amid the desire for good evil ever present. This man too found no power in himself strong enough to decide the issue, but, looking upon it as "matter of grace," cried out in anguish of soul, "Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" How like the experiences, and how world-wide different the conclusions! For while Schopenhauer, seeking salvation only as cessation of the conflict, and recognizing no redeeming efficacy but that of his own will to negate will, confessedly fails utterly in that, St. Paul, yielding himself to the inspiration of a Divine Love, finds strength made perfect in his weakness and, in "the spirit of life which is in Christ Jesus," unfailing in its joyousness, goes forth, clothed with power, as with the sun, to a life of heroic and successful service. Schopenhauer knows nothing of this heroism; life is to him either a tragedy to weep over or a comedy to laugh at. He knows nothing of the experience which produced it; had he known it, he would not have proclaimed so superficially as he did that willing existence is necessarily painful, nor have declared happiness to be merely absence of pain, and therefore capable of full realization only as a state of apathy. And his criticisms of religion, no longer wholly from without, would have gained through intimate acquaintance infinitely in justness, while losing the characteristics which they share in common with his philosophy generally of contradiction and excess.