For my part, I deeply respect both doctrines. Both are essentially modern views of life, modern in their universality of expression, in their keen diagnosis of human nature, in their merciless criticism of our consciousness, in their thorough familiarity with the waywardness of the inner life. The century of nerves and of spiritual sorrows has philosophized with characteristic ingenuity in the persons of these thinkers, — the one the inexorable and fairly Mephistophelian critic of the paradoxes of passion, the other the nervous invalid of brilliant insight. We are here speaking only of this one side of their doctrines, namely, their diagnosis of the heart and of the issues of life. How much of the truth there is in both, every knowing man ought to see. Capricious is the will of man, thinks Schopenhauer, and therefore endlessly paradoxical and irrational. Paradoxical is the very consciousness, and therefore the very reason, of man, finds Hegel; and therefore, where there is this paradox, there is not unreason, but the manifestation of a part of the true spiritual life, — a life which could not be spiritual were it not full of conflict. Hegel thus absorbs, as it were, the pessimism of Schopenhauer; while Schopenhauer illustrates the paradox of Hegel.
But if both doctrines stand as significant expressions of the modern spirit, a glance at our more recent literature — at the despairing resignation of Tolstoi, with its flavor of mysticism, and at the triumphant joy in the paradoxes of passion which Browning kept to the end — will show us how far our romancers and poets still are from having made an end of the inquiry as to which doctrine is the right one. My own notion about the matter, such as it is, would indeed need for its full development the context of just such a philosophical argument as I have declined to introduce at the present stage of this course. As constructive idealist, regarding the absolute as indeed a spirit, I am in sympathy with Hegel’s sense
