The World as Will and Idea, Vol. II — Arthur Schopenhauer, trans. Haldane & Kemp

to it by religion. The Schoolmen proper, down to Suarez, confess this openly; the succeeding philosophers do it more unconsciously, or at least unavowedly. It is held that Scholastic philosophy only extends to about a hundred years before Descartes, and that then with him there begins an entirely new epoch of free investigation independent of all positive theological doctrine. Such investigation, however, is in fact not to be attributed to Descartes and his successors,1 but only an appearance of it, and in any case an effort after it. Descartes was a man of supreme ability, and if we take account of the age he lived in, he accomplished a great deal. But if we set aside this consideration and measure him with reference to the freeing of thought from all fetters and the commencement of a new period of untrammelled original investigation with which he is credited, we are obliged to find that with his doubt still wanting in true seriousness, and therefore surrendering so quickly and so entirely, he has, indeed, the appearance of wishing to throw off at once all the early implanted opinions belonging to his age and nation, but does so only apparently and for a moment, to assume them again immediately and hold them all the more firmly ; and so is it with all his successors down to Kant.

1 Bruno and Spinoza are here en- age, and he also shows a presentitirely to be excepted. They stand ment of his fate which led him to

each for himself and alone, and delay the publication of his views, belong neither to their age nor their till that inclination to communicate quarter of the globe, which rewarded what one knows to be true, which the one with death and the other is so strong in noble minds, prewith persecution and insult. Their vailed :

miserable existence and death in » Ad Hum fnftr9in tuum ^^ this Western world is like that of a cegra quidobstat • tropical plant in Europe. The banks Sedo ^ ind^m ^ tHlumda of the sacred Ganges were their licet?

true spiritual home; there they Umbrarum fiuctu terras mergente, would have led a peaceful and cacuraen honoured life among men of like Adtolle in clarum, noster Olympe, mind. In the following lines, with Jovem." which Bruno begins his book Bella

Causa Principio et Uno, for which Whoever has read this his prinhe was brought to the stake, he cipal work, and also his other Italian expresses clearly and beautifully writings, which were formerly so how lonely he felt himself in his rare, but are now accessible to all

p. 14

Goethe's lines are, therefore, very applicable to a free independent thinker of this kind :

" Saving Thy gracious presence, he to me A long-legged grasshopper appears to be, That springing flies, and flying springs, And in the grass the same old ditty sings." '

Kant had reasons for assuming the air of also intending nothing more. But the pretended spring, which was permitted because it was known that it leads back to the grass, this time became a flight, and now those who remain below can only look after him, and can never catch him again.

Kant, then, ventured to show by his teaching that all those dogmas which had been so often professedly proved were incapable of proof. Speculative theology, and the rational psychology connected with it, received from him their deathblow. Since then they have vanished from German philosophy, and one must not allow oneself to be misled by the fact that here and there the word is retained after the thing has been given up, or some wretched professor of philosophy has the fear of his master in view, and lets truth take care of itself. Only he who has observed the pernicious influence of these conceptions upon natural science, and upon philosophy in all, even the best writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, can estimate the extent of this service of Kant's. The change of tone and of metaphysical background which has appeared in German writing upon natural science since Kant through a German edition, will find, this work of his, in the hands of as I have done, that he alone of all coarse, furious priests as his judges philosophers in some degree ap- and executioners, and thank Time proaches to Plato, in respect of the which brought a brighter and a strong blending of poetical power gentler age, so that the after-world and tendency along with the philo- whose curse was to fall on those hophical, and this he also shows espe- fiendish fanatics is the world we cially in a dramatic form. Imagine now live in.

the tender, spiritual, thoughtful l Bayard Taylor's translation of being, as he shows himself to us in " Faust," vol. L p. 14. — Tbs.

p. 15