It remains true, no doubt, that death is terrible. Much of its terror disappears if one has lived a normal life; one must have lived well in order to die well. And would deathlessness delight us? Who envies the fate of Ahasuerus, to whom immortal life was sent as the heaviest punishment that could be inflicted upon man? And why is death terrible if not because life is sweet? We need not say with Napoleon that all who fear death are atheists at heart; but we may surely say that a man who lives to three-score years and ten has survived his pessimism. No man, said Goethe, is a pessimist after thirty. And hardly before twenty; pessimism is a luxury of self-conscious and self-important youth; youth that comes out of the warm bosom of the communistic family into the cold atmosphere of individualistic competition and greed, and then yearns back to its mother’s breast; youth that hurls itself madly against the windmills and evils of the world, and sadly sheds utopias and ideals with every year. But before twenty is the joy of the body, and after thirty is the joy of the mind; before twenty is the pleasure of protection and security; and after thirty, the joy of parentage and home.
How should a man avoid pessimism who has lived almost all his life in a boarding-house? And who abandoned his only child to illegitimate anonymity?163 At the bottom of Schopenhauer’s unhappiness was his rejection of the normal life,—his rejection of women and marriage and children. He finds in parentage the greatest of evils, where a healthy man finds in it the greatest of life’s satisfactions. He thinks that the stealthiness of love is due to shame in continuing the race—could anything be more pedantically absurd? He sees in love only the sacrifice of the individual to the race, and ignores the delights with which the instinct repays the sacrifice,—delights so great that they have inspired most of the poetry of the world.164 He knows woman only as shrew and as sinner, and he imagines that there are no other types. He thinks that the man who undertakes to support a wife is a fool;165 but apparently such men are not much more unhappy than our passionate apostle of single infelicity; and (as Balzac said) it costs as much to support a vice as it does to support a family. He scorns the beauty of woman,—as if there were any forms of beauty that we could spare, and that we should not cherish as the color and fragrance of life. What hatred of women one mishap had generated in this unfortunate soul!
There are other difficulties, more technical and less vital, in this remarkable and stimulating philosophy. How can suicide ever occur in a world where the only real force is the will to live? How can the intellect, begotten and brought up as servant of the will, ever achieve independence and objectivity? Does genius lie in knowledge divorced from will, or does it contain, as its driving force, an immense power of will, even a large alloy of personal ambition and conceit?166 Is madness connected with genius in general, or rather with only the “romantic” type of genius (Byron, Shelley, Poe, Heine, Swinburne, Strindberg, Dostoievski, etc.); and is not the “classic” and profounder type of genius exceptionally sound (Socrates, Plato, Spinoza, Bacon, Newton, Voltaire, Goethe, Darwin, Whitman, etc.)? What if the proper function of intellect and philosophy is not the denial of the will but the coördination of desires into a united and harmonious will? What if “will” itself, except as the unified product of such coördination, is a mythical abstraction, as shadowy as “force”?
Nevertheless there is about this philosophy a blunt honesty by the side of which most optimistic creeds appear as soporific hypocrisies. It is all very well to say, with Spinoza, that good and bad are subjective terms, human prejudices; and yet we are compelled to judge this world not from any “impartial” view, but from the standpoint of actual human sufferings and needs. It was well that Schopenhauer should force philosophy to face the raw reality of evil, and should point the nose of thought to the human tasks of alleviation. It has been harder, since his day, for philosophy to live in the unreal atmosphere of a logic-chopping metaphysics; thinkers begin to realize that thought without action is a disease.
After all, Schopenhauer opened the eyes of psychologists to the subtle depth and omnipresent force of instinct. Intellectualism—the conception of man as above all a thinking animal, consciously adapting means to rationally chosen ends—fell sick with Rousseau, took to its bed with Kant, and died with Schopenhauer. After two centuries of introspective analysis philosophy found, behind thought, desire; and behind the intellect, instinct;—just as, after a century of materialism, physics finds, behind matter, energy. We owe it to Schopenhauer that he revealed our secret hearts to us, showed us that our desires are the axioms of our philosophies, and cleared the way to an understanding of thought as no mere abstract calculation of impersonal events, but as a flexible instrument of action and desire.
Finally, and despite exaggerations, Schopenhauer taught us again the necessity of genius, and the value of art. He saw that the ultimate good is beauty, and that the ultimate joy lies in the creation or cherishing of the beautiful. He joined with Goethe and Carlyle in protest against the attempt of Hegel and Marx and Buckle to eliminate genius as a fundamental factor in human history; in an age when all the great seemed dead he preached once more the ennobling worship of heroes. And with all his faults he succeeded in adding another name to theirs.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Herbert Spencer
I. Comte and Darwin
The Kantian philosophy which announced itself as “prolegomena to all future metaphysics,” was, by malicious intent, a murderous thrust at traditional modes of speculation; and, contrary to intent, a damaging blow to all metaphysics whatsoever. For metaphysics had meant, throughout the history of thought, an attempt to discover the ultimate nature of reality; now men learned, on the most respectable authority, that reality could never be experienced; that it was a “noumenon,” conceivable but not knowable; and that even the subtlest human intelligence could never pass beyond phenomena, could never pierce the veil of Maya. The metaphysical extravagances of Fichte, Hegel and Schelling, with their various readings of the ancient riddle, their Ego and Idea and Will, had canceled one another into zero; and by the eighteen-thirties the universe was generally conceded to have guarded its secret well. After a generation of Absolute intoxication, the mind of Europe reacted by taking a pledge against metaphysics of any kind.
Since the French had made a specialty of scepticism, it was natural that they should produce the founder (if there are such persons in philosophy, where every idea is hallowed with years) of the “positivist” movement. Auguste Comte—or, as his parents called him, Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte—was born at Montpellier in 1798. The idol of his youth was Benjamin Franklin, whom he called the modern Socrates. “You know that at five-and-twenty he formed the design of becoming perfectly wise, and that he fulfilled his design. I have dared to undertake the same thing, though I am not yet twenty.” He made a fair start by becoming secretary to the great Utopian, Saint-Simon, who passed on to him the reforming enthusiasm of Turgot and Condorcet, and the idea that social, like physical phenomena, might be reduced to laws and science, and that all philosophy should be focused upon the moral and political improvement of mankind. But, like most of us who set out to reform the world, Comte found it difficult enough to manage his own home; in 1827, after two years of marital infelicity, he suffered a mental break-down, and attempted suicide in the Seine. To his rescuer, therefore, we owe something of the five volumes of Positive Philosophy which appeared between 1830 and 1842, and the four volumes of Positive Polity which appeared between 1851 and 1854.