Page:Philosophical Review Volume 9.djvu/249

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NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.
[Vol. IX.

who manifests himself in the world of idea; Schopenhauer begins with a will already known in self-consciousness, which accidentally takes on the form of the world; (2) the Pantheists cannot bring the divinity of the world into unison with the suffering ruling in it, while Schopenhauer explains suffering as the result of the affirmation of the will to live. Spinoza's substance is the God-creator, who finds everything very good, while Schopenhauer's will has more resemblance to the crucified Saviour. The ethics of the former belong to the Old Testament, of the latter to the New. Yet, is it true, that Schopenhauer explained, as he supposed, the unknown by the known? In so far as the will is object, it is not free from the forms of intuition of space and of the senses, and so is not thing-in-itself. If, in the inner consciousness, it is free from these, there still remain the forms of time and of being known and knowing. This objection Schopenhauer admitted.

Another criticism that Schopenhauer made upon the Spinozistic substance is that, if the possibility and actuality of the world were one and the same, and if the substance-God were an absolutely necessary being, the human mind would understand everything, and the philosophy of all the ages would never have existed. But in Spinoza's system, one might reply, the questionings that bring about philosophy, are always the result of incomplete knowledge, and disappear as soon as true knowledge has been attained. Again, according to Schopenhauer, Spinoza's deification of the world leaves no place for ethics, that is to say, all pantheism is necessarily optimism. This is true, but the optimism is a necessary result, not only of pantheism, but of all monism. Schopenhauer himself did not escape contradiction in his attempt to solve the origin of evil. How does the all-one come to strive against itself, and so bring about evil? Even if multiplicity is ascribed only to the world as phenomenon, while the will, as thing-in-itself, is untouched by either multiplicity or suffering, still they both have their origin and ground in the thing-in-itself. The whole difficulty arises from Schopenhauer's gratuitous assumption that pessimism is a necessary correlate of monism. Other Schopenhauerian objections to the Spinozistic metaphysics refer to the rejection of all teleology, to the explanation of the will as a form of thought, and to the nature of the Spinozistic substance, which, when deprived of its attributes, Schopenhauer regards as merely an abstraction of the concept of matter.

The second part of Dr. Rappaport's book, though much briefer and less exhaustive than the first, is perhaps more interesting, because it is based partly upon Schopenhauer's unpublished manuscripts. As a result of the study of his university note-books, together with some of his early writings, the author concludes that Schopenhauer received from Spinoza the germ of his monism. From the beginning of his studies he was either mediately or immediately under Spinoza's influence. There is abundant proof that he was acquainted with the Ethics; and even if he had not been, the well-known influence of Bouterweck, a professor at Göttingen, of Fichte, Schel-