[In the following excerpt, Caldwell outlines Schopenhauer's unique metaphilosophy.]

What is significant for philosophy in Schopenhauer is not so much the mere principle of will, which he sought to substitute for the idea of rationalistic metaphysic, as the simple fact of the attempted substitution. Strictly speaking, life cannot be grasped by thought as reducible, in the way of the old ontology, to some one or two entities. Whenever Schopenhauer talks of the will as if it were a thing in itself, we become distrustful of him. The chief safeguard of the will as a principle in philosophy lies in the fact of its being an impulse or an attempt, a fusion of all actual and imaginable entities into one grand effort to become all reality. The mind, in trying to grasp reality, must grasp it expansively and broadly and freely as something that is continually changing and evolving—must grasp it, in short, as an effort after a fuller and richer life. In doing so, it will become conscious of the fact that the very effort to attain to a philosophical synthesis of things is nothing that possesses an absolute significance in itself, nothing in connection with which we should look for definite returns or results, but is rather itself to be construed as part of the effort put forth by the human personality to attain to a more stable and permanent position in the fabric of reality than is apparently possessed by material things and by the lower animals. We think things in order that we may act better and preserve our individuality in the system of things. Just as we cannot understand art without cultivating in ourselves the artistic impulse, and just as we cannot know the moral ideal without (as Aristotle suggested) cultivating in ourselves the habits and the insight of the good man, so we cannot understand philosophy without cultivating the philosophical impulse, without appreciating philosophy as itself a supreme effort of man to make more sure of his existence in a world where everything seems to have the mark of finitude upon it. Philosophy represents the highest effort of man to find and to secure for himself an established place in the cosmic process of change and development. The philosopher should be a man who has the emotional and volitional capacity to appreciate every side of life, and along with that the power of thought to reduce the varied forms of his experience and the different aspects of the cosmos to their simplest terms. In this way he will be enabled to think reality and to think himself and to trace the roots of his action in his own organism and in the organisms that preceded his own. As soon as we see that the world is one will, we can relate ourselves to the whole universe and make our "dead self in unconscious nature a "stepping-stone" to higher things.

Schopenhauer's suggestiveness, in short, extends as far as the dynamic or volitional philosophy of life will carry us. His quietism in art and ethics and religion cannot be taken to be the last phase of his thought. It has a meaning undoubtedly, the great meaning, in fact, that in art and religious aspiration we already see the world spiritualised or made subservient to the purposes of intelligent human beings. For [as Goethe wrote]

Was im Leben uns verdriesst
Man im Bilde gern geniesst.

Indeed, the outcome of quietism, as of religious faith in general, is that we must have the courage to proclaim as real what we experience in art and in religion, and must deliberately place our artistic and religious intuitions, the world of beauty and of goodness, above the world of the senses and of the scientific understanding, although we may not have the knowledge and the critical ability to justify this procedure with our understanding.