will to live. Knowledge breaks free from the service of the will, and loses itself in the object; man forgets his individuality, his will, and only continues to exist as the pure subject, the clear mirror of the object—the pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge. The faculty of continuing in this state of pure perception, and of enlisting in this service the knowledge which originally existed only for the service of the will, is what we call genius. Genius is the power of entirely renouncing one's own personality for a time, so as to remain pure knowing subject, clear vision of the world. The common mortal, the manufacture of nature which she produces by the thousand every day, is not capable thus of observation that in every sense is wholly disinterested; he can turn his attention to things only so far as they have some relation to his will.

But such moments as art can give, are too fleeting for complete deliverance—that can come about only by the complete suppression of the will to live. This cannot be attained by suicide. The destruction of its phenomenal manifestation, the body, leaves quite unchanged that underlying will which is the true cause of our misery. The real source of the conditions we are trying to escape remains untouched by death. "If a man fears death as his annihilation, it is just as if he were to think that the sun cries out at evening: Woe is me! for I go down into eternal night." The suicide, therefore, goes to work the wrong way. Instead of denying the will, he gives up living just because he cannot give up willing. True deliverance comes, not by rejecting life, but the desire for life; not by shunning sorrows, but by shunning joys. To the attainment of this happy consummation, morality forms a step. Morality is in essence the crushing out of the egoistic selfassertion, which is ready to annihilate the world in order to maintain its own self, that drop in the ocean, a little longer; it does this through the recognition of the fact that, after 11, p. 361.

all, it is only phenomenally that I differ from my neighbor. In reality, each man must say to himself with reference to other things: This art Thou. Down beneath the appearance of difference which the space and time forms give, it is the same unitary will which constitutes your life and mine; and so our interests are not different, but identical. The true root of all morality, therefore, is sympathy; for sympathy is nothing but the obscure perception of this identity between myself and my neighbor.

But while morality is a partial abandonment of the striving will, in so far as it sinks the law of mere selfpreservation in a sense of human brotherhood, it is only the starting-point. He who through morality, however, by renouncing every accidental advantage, desires for himself no other lot than that of humanity in general, cannot desire even this long. And thus only do we reach the final goal. True salvation only comes when all striving ceases, when we mortify the deeds of the body by voluntarily crushing out all desire and all activity. "Every gratification of our wishes won from the world is like the alms which the beggar receives from life to-day, that he may hunger again to-morrow; resignation, on the contrary, is like an inherited estate, it frees the owner forever from all care.'

The highest ideal of life, then, is that ascetic starvation of all the impulses, which results in the attainment of Nirvana, the heaven of the extinction of consciousness. "Then nothing can trouble a man more, nothing can move him, for he has cut all the thousand cords of will which hold us bound to the world, and, as desire, fear, envy, anger, drag us hither and thither in constant pain. He now looks back smiling and at rest on the delusions of this world, which once were able to move and agonize his spirit also, but which now stand before him as utterly indifferent to him as the chessmen when the game is ended, or as in the morning the cast-off masquerading dress, which worried

1 I, p. 504.

Life and its

and disquieted us in the night in carnival. forms now pass before him as a fleeting illusion, as a light morning dream before half waking eyes, the real world already shining through it so that it can no longer deceive; and like this morning dream, they finally vanish altogether, without any violent transition." Is it said that this is an ideal of nothingness? It is not denied. "Rather do we freely acknowledge that what remains after the entire abolition of the will, is, for all those who are still full of will, certainly nothing; but conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and has denied itself, this our world which is so real, with all its suns and milky ways—is nothing." 1

LITERATURE

Schopenhauer, Chief Works: Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813); World as Will and as Idea (1819). Translations: Haldane and Kemp (World as Will and as Idea); Hillebrand (Fourfold Root); Bax (Essays); Saunders (Essays).

Wallace, Schopenhauer.

Sully, Pessimism.

Caldwell, Schopenhauer's System in its Philosophical Significance. Wenley, Aspects of Pessimism.

§ 40. Comte and Positivism

1. In the Positivism of the French philosopher Comte, the claims of science receive a full recognition. Auguste Comte, born in 1798, was influenced in early life by the Socialist St. Simon, and it was from him that he got the germ, at least, of the idea which was to make him more than a philosopher of science, and lead him to subordinate his scientific interests to the conception of man and society. His Cours de Philosophie Positive, published in 18391842, gave him a position among the most important thinkers of his day. A school of Positivism soon appeared in France, and in England men like J. S. Mill and Herbert 1 I, pp. 504, 532.

Spencer, though never disciples in the strict sense, were influenced by him. His death occurred in 1857.

Positivism means the definite abandonment of all search for ultimate causes, and the inner essence of things, and the turning of human attention rather toward the laws of phenomena as the only facts alike knowable and useful. Knowledge is of value because it helps us modify conditions in the physical and the social world; to do this we need to know how things act, and that is all we need to know. This limitation of all knowledge to phenomena Comte hardly attempts to prove in detail. He assumes it to be self-evident to all minds that are abreast of their age; it is the one great lesson which the history of human thought has to teach. This is the outcome of Comte's famous "Law of the Three Stages." Man starts in by explaining the phenomena of nature theologically. He attributes the activities of things to an arbitrary will, such as he finds in himself. In its earliest and most thoroughgoing form this is fetichism, which obviously leaves but little room for the recognition of positive law. Later on, the conception of a separate will in each material thing becomes generalized, and we have the polytheistic stage. Polytheism is more general and abstract in character than fetichism; the gods act through things, without things themselves being alive; and by reason of this greater abstractness, the secondary details of phenomena are set free for scientific observation.

The final stage of theological thought is monotheism. Here we have everything brought back to a single abstract will, and consequently a still wider extension of scientific observation is made possible in connection with the details of nature. Just because it is so abstract, however, monotheism cannot yield any permanent satisfaction, and must give place to a strictly scientific explanation. But it cannot do this immediately a transition stage must intervene ; and this is the stage of metaphysics. Metaphysics drops, indeed, the idea of a personal will, but it substitutes there

for, not positive law, but metaphysical essences and powers, mere abstract repetitions of the gods of the previous stage, the dry bones of the living creatures of poetry. These furnish no real explanation, accordingly, but are only the phenomena over again, with an abstract name substituted for the concrete facts. To the metaphysical stage succeeds the final goal of human thought, the positive stage, which occupies itself solely with the facts of experience, and the laws which they reveal, without making the impossible attempt to penetrate behind phenomena to the unknown real.

The first part of Comte's task, then, is to sum up in organized form the laws of the various sciences. This organization he tries to carry out by a definite hierarchy of the sciences, beginning with the most abstract — mathematics and passing up, in the order of greater and greater complexity, through astronomy, physics, chemistry, to biology, each science basing itself on, and making use of, the results of the science beneath it. But now there is one great class of facts which has not been touched the facts of social life; and here we come to the centre of Comte's whole position, and that which gives him his greatest historical importance. He will furnish a crown and climax to his whole system, by founding a positive science of society, a sociology. Not only will he thus bring within the scope of the positive scientific method the whole round of experienced facts, but he will also give to what has preceded its unity and rational justification. For as each group of sciences enters into the next higher group, so the whole science of material nature gets its reason and end in the service of humanity. Here we have not, indeed, an objective and absolute principle of unity for our philosophy, a unity based on the inner essence of reality, which we have seen to be unknowable; but at least we have a subjective and practical basis. That basis is humanity, whose life we can modify because we know its laws; and it is for the service of humanity that science exists. Humanity