the report of sales which Brockhaus rendered in 1846 was unfavourable, and the price had afterwards to be reduced. Yet there were faint indications of coming fame, and the eagerness with which each new tribute from critic and admirer was welcomed is both touching and amusing. From 1843 onwards a jurist named F. Dorguth had trumpeted abroad Schopenhauer's name. In 1844 a letter from a Darmstadt lawyer, Joh. August Becker, asking for explanation of some difficulties, began an intimate correspondence which went on for some time (and which was published by Becker's son in 1883). But the chief evangelist (so Schopenhauer styled his literary followers as distinct from the apostles who published not) was Frauenstadt, who made his personal acquaintance in 1846. It was Frauenstalt who succeeded in finding a publisher for the Parerga and Paralipomena, which appeared at Berlin in 1851 (2 vols., pp. 4 6 5, 53 1; sel. trans. by J. B. Saunders, 1889; French by A. Dietrich, 'clog). Yet for this bulky collection of essays, philosophical and others, Schopenhauer received as honorarium only ten free copies of the work. Soon afterwards, Dr E. O. Lindner, assistant editor of the Vossische Zeitung, began a series of Schopenhauerite articles. Amongst them may be reckoned a translation by Mrs Lindner of an article by John Oxenford which appeared in the Westminster Review for April 1853, entitled "Iconoclasm in German Philosophy," being an outline of Schopenhauer's system. In 1854 Frauenstadt's Letters on the Schopenhauerean Philosophy showed that the new doctrines were become a subject of discussion - a state of things made still more obvious by the university of Leipzig offering a prize for the best exposition and examination of the principles of Schopenhauer's system. Besides this, the response his ideas gave to popular needs and feelings was evinced by the numerous correspondents who sought his advice in their difficulties. And for the same reason new editions of his works were called for - a second edition of his degree dissertation in 1847, of his Essay on Colours and of The Will in Nature in 1854, a third edition of The World as Will and Idea in 1859, and in 1860 a second edition of The Main Problems of Ethics.
In 1854 Richard Wagner sent him a copy of the Ring of the Nibelung, with some words of thanks for a theory of music which had fallen in with his own conceptions. Three years later he received a visit from his old college friend Bunsen, who was then staying in Heidelberg. On his seventieth birthday congratulations flowed in from many quarters. In April 1860 he began to be affected by occasional difficulty in breathing and by palpitation of the heart. Another attack came on in autumn (9th September), and again a week later. On the evening of the 18th his friend and subsequent biographer, Dr Gwinner, sat with him and conversed. On the morning of the 21st September he rose and sat down alone to breakfast; shortly afterwards his doctor called and found him dead in his chair. By his will, made in 1852, with a codicil dated February 1859, his property, with the exception of some small bequests, was devised to the above-mentioned institution at Berlin. Gwinner was named executor, and Frauenstalt was entrusted with the care of his manuscripts and other literary remains.
It is often said that a philosophic system cannot be rightly understood without reference to the character and circumstances of the philosopher. The remark finds ample application in the case of Schopenhauer. The conditions of his training, which brought him in contact with the realities of life before he learned the phrases of scholastic language, give to his words the stamp of self-seen truth and the clearness of original conviction. They explain at the same time the naïveté which set a high price on the products his own energies had turned out, and could not see that what was so original to himself might seem less unique to other judges. Preoccupied with his own ideas, he chafed under the indifference of thinkers who had grown blasé in speculation and fancied himself persecuted by a conspiracy of professors of philosophy. It is not so easy to demonstrate the connexion between a man's life and doctrine. But it is at least plain that in the case of any philosopher, what makes him such is the faculty he has, more than other men, to get a clear idea of what he himself is and does. More than others he leads a second life in the spirit or intellect alongside of his life in the flesh - the life of knowledge beside the life of will. It is inevitable that he should be especially struck by the points in which the sensible and temporal life comes in conflict with the intellectual and eternal. It was thus that Schopenhauer by his own experience saw in the primacy of the will the fundamental fact of his philosophy, and found in the engrossing interests of the selfish 'pros the perennial hindrances of the higher life. For his absolute individualism, which recognizes in the state, the church, the family only so many superficial and incidental provisions of human craft, the means of relief was absorption in the intellectual and purely ideal aims which prepare the way for the cessation of temporal individuality altogether. But theory is one thing and practice another; and he will often lay most stress on the theory who is most conscious of defects in the practice. It need not, therefore, surprise us that the man who formulated the sum of virtue in justice and benevolence was unable to be just to his own kinsfolk and reserved his compassion largely for the brutes, and that the delineator of asceticism was more than moderately sensible of the comforts and enjoyments of life.
The philosophy of Schopenhauer, like almost every system of the 19th century, can hardly be understood without reference to the ideas of Kant. Anterior to Kant the gradual advance of Philosophy from Kant to Schopenhaueridealism had been the most conspicuous feature in philosophic speculation. That the direct objects of knowledge, the realities of experience, were after all only our ideas or from perceptions was the lesson of every thinker from Descartes to Hume. And this doctrine was generally understood to mean that human thought, limited as it was by its own weakness and acquired habits, could hardly hope to cope successfully with the problem of apprehending the real things. The idealist position Kant seemed at first sight to retain with an even stronger force than ever. But it is darkest just before the dawn; and Kant, the Copernicus of philosophy, had really altered the aspects of the doctrine of ideas. It was his purpose to show that the forms of thought (which he sought to isolate from the peculiarities incident to the organic body) were not merely customary means for licking into convenient shape the data of perception, but entered as underlying elements into the constitution of objects, making experience possible and determining the fundamental structure of nature. In other words, the forms of knowledge were the main factor in making objects. By Kant, however, these forms are generally treated psychologically as the action of the several faculties of a mind. Behind thinking there is the thinker. But in his successors, from Fichte to Hegel, this axiom of the plain man is set aside as antiquated. Thought or conception without a subjectagent appears as the principle - thought or thinking in its universality without any individual substrata in which it is embodied: τὸ νοείν or νόησις is is to be substituted for νούς. This is the step of advance which is required alike by Fichte when he asks his reader to rise from the empirical ego to the ego which is subject-object (i.e. neither and both), and by Hegel when he tries to substitute the Begriff or notion for the Vorstellung or pictorial conception. As spiritism asks us to accept such suspension of ordinary mechanics. as permits human bodies to float through the air and part without injury to their members, so the new philosophy of Kant's immediate successors requires from the postulant for initiation willingness to reverse his customary beliefs in quasi-material subjects of thought.
But, besides removing the psychological slag which clung to Kant's ideas from their matrix and presenting reason as the active principle in the formation of a universe, his successors carried out with far more detail, and far more enthusiasm and historical scope, his principle that in reason lay the a priori or the anticipation of the world, moral and physical. Not content with the barren assertion that the understanding makes nature, and that we can construct science only on the hypothesis that there is reason in the world, they proceeded to show how the thing was actually done. But to do so they had first to brush away a stone of stumbling which Kant had left in the way. This was the thing as it is by itself and apart from our knowledge of it - the something which we know, when and as we know it not. This somewhat is what Kant calls a limit-concept. It marks only that we feel our knowledge to be inadequate, and for the reason that there may be another species of sensation than ours, that other beings may not be tied by the special laws of our constitution, and may apprehend, as Plato says, by the soul itself apart from the senses. But this limitation, say the successors of Kant, rests upon a misconception. The sense of inadequacy is only a condition of growing knowledge in a being subject to the laws of space and time; and the very feeling is a proof of its implicit removal. Look at reason not in its single temporal manifestations but in its eternal operation, and then this universal thought, which may be called God, as the sense-conditioned reason is called man, becomes the very breath and structure
