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humanity, and the beauty of holiness, are wanting in Schopenhauer, or are obliquely put in his one conclusion that the man who soonest attains to a sense of the misery of life, and the futility of knowledge, may become the best and holiest of men by a complete surrender of self, and be a benefactor to those members of the race yet unborn, by refusing to take part in their propagation.

son were as ill-fitted as formerly for harmonious association. To increase her income, Joanna Schopenhauer had offered a home in her house to a young man named Müller, with whom Schopenhauer took the first opportunity of disagreeing. To the son it seemed that his mother found the agreeable young lodger's society very pleasant; and he taunted her with disregard of his father's memory, as In 1813, Schopenhauer wrote the "Es- well as indifference to his (Schopenhauer's) say on the Fourfold Root of the Principle welfare. In short, a new crisis occurred, of Sufficient Reason," which procured him and young Schopenhauer was again banhis philosophical diploma from the Jena ished the house. Permission was given university. This important essay, the him to board at his mother's table; but foundation of his maturer work, was con- for this privilege it was understood that ceived and fashioned under peculiar diffi- he must pay so much per week. A fatalculties. He fled from Berlin, where every ity seems to have urged him to run counter one was in arms for, or against Napoleon, to his mother's plans for happiness. For to the quieter retreat of Rudolstadt; but he had not long been on the footing of a even here he had to pit his thought against daily boarder in the establishment when the braying of trumpets and the clank of he invited a university student to come weapons. Not to be conspicuously worse and live with him. At first Joanna Schothan his fellow-men, he had bought a gun penhauer did not strenuously object to this and sword, as if ready and willing to fight new guest at meal-times, she was short of for his fatherland. But, in his heart, he money, and the lad would of course pay was lamentably unpatriotic. The philoso- for his aliment. But a few weeks of this pher is of no country, and Schopenhauer new experience made her regret that she exemplified the saying in words as well as had not been peremptory from the begindeeds. In the letter that accompanied ning; and, that her son should not slackly his essay, he alluded to the martial tumult interpret her words this time, she abruptly in the midst of which it had been com- put an end to the arrangement, and asked posed, and made the confession that in his for the payment due for him and his friend opinion he was born to serve mankind up to date. No doubt Schopenhauer's with his head, not his fist, and that his words and arguments did not help towards fatherland was a greater than Germany. conciliation; but on the other hand his The essay was duly published, duly praised mother's taunts because he and his friend as a masterly performance by one or two had managed to evade the general conhigh priests of culture, and duly, for the scription were only too well adapted to most part, remade into pulp as so much increase the domestic inflammation. She waste paper. One amusing little circum-expressed her opinion that he was acting stance about it may be mentioned. Schopenhauer of course sent his mother a copy of the book. She read it sceptically, and, no doubt, much to her mystification, and then ventured to congratulate her son. "Not bad for an apothecary," she observed, referring to his medical studies at Berlin, made in the interest of his metaphysical schemes. "It will be read when there is barely a single copy of your writings left in any lumber-room," replied Schopenhauer. But his mother was determined to have the last word in this passage of wits: "The entire edition of your book will stay in the printer's hands," she retorted, with abundance of probability on her side.

Soon afterwards Schopenhauer paid his final visit to Weimar. He was received by his mother as a guest; but in a very short time it was apparent that mother and

dishonorably in not assuming a uniform and taking a sword in hand. As for the friend, "No doubt he is glad to shelter his innate cowardice behind you."

On the other chief subject of their discord, Joanna wrote thus to her son: "Were I to sacrifice my friend Müller because he and you do not agree, I should be wronging him and myself. You and I can never live together for any length of time, that is the real meaning of it, and should I for that reason tear myself apart from a friend who is faithful and of use, and who makes my life more pleasant, and is liked and esteemed by many worthy men? And this merely because in a sudden heat of passion he was rude to you, who were by no means polite to him? I should be acting very unjustly towards him and myself. Do but leave him where he is; he does you no harm. . . . Do not

reply to this; it is useless. If you have arranged for your departure, let me know, but do not hurry, as I do not want to know of it long beforehand . . . Since our last annoying conversation, I have firmly resolved, dear Arthur, never again to have any verbal intercourse with you, whether pleasant or unpleasant, because my health suffers from it."

world below him: its sandy wastes and morasses disappear; its inequalities are levelled; its discordant sounds fail to reach him, and its roundness is made manifest. And thus he and sees the sun in the heavens while the stands ever in the clear cold mountain air, night is yet dark beneath him.

CHARLES EDwardes.

From The Spectator.

Schopenhauer respected his mother's injunctions. He left Weimar for Dresden soon after this disruption in 1814, and never saw her again. The estrangement ARDENT AGNOSTICISM. was so absolute indeed that during the THE death of Mr. Cotter Morison has twenty-four years which intervened before deprived the English literary world of one her death in 1838, hardly five or six letters of the most learned and brilliant of that seem to have been exchanged between paradoxical group of men who may propthem. Adele Schopenhauer was of ten- erly be termed ardent agnostics, men who derer fibre than her mother. She could press their agnosticism with a sort of not bear to think that her brother was to apostolic unction, and ask us to serve be blotted out of her life so completely, man, as the best men serve God, with a and her letters to him, later, in Italy, are zeal as disinterested and as absorbing as pleasant reading. But this correspond- ever missionaries have displayed in the ence soon came to an end. The "little conversion of the heathen. Mr. Cotter goose," as Feuerbach somewhat harshly Morison has left no work behind him at calls her, suffered from that old curse of all adequate to the impression of ability human nature whereby the sins of the which he produced on the minds of those father are visited upon the children. Scho- who could appreciate what he had done. penhauer was discarded by his mother; But his studies of St. Bernard, of Gibbon, he in his turn expressed distrust of his of Macaulay, and of Madame de Maintesister, and of the sincerity of her letters. non have supplied no mean test of his He was by this time as lonely a man as purely literary skill; while his last work, any that trod the earth, with no compan- on "The Service of Man," burns with the ion but that strong brain of his upon zeal of a sombre enthusiast who would which he relied for all the genuine satis-risk as much to suppress the degraded faction to be drawn from an experience of life. In his old age, he asked himself, "What is the greatest possible enjoyment a man may have?" "The intuitive knowledge of truth - there cannot be the slightest doubt of the correctness of the answer," was his reply.

With this before us, and speaking in simple terms, we may congratulate Schopenhauer that, by his own way, he reached the goal he strove for. But that the course he designed to follow was no easy one will be clear to the novice from these words of his, written the year before he began his chief philosophical work :

Philosophy is a high Alpine pass, accessible only by a narrow track over stony pinnacles and sharp thorns. It is a lonely way that grows more desolate as it ascends, and whoever follows it must not be afraid, but must leave everything behind him, and confidently make a path for himself in the cold snow. Often he finds himself suddenly on the edge of a precipice, and sees the green valley beneath him; he gets dizzy, and would fain cast himself into the abyss; but he must bear up, and, with his own blood, glue the soles of his feet to the rocks. Then he soon sees the

classes, or at least to prevent them from transmitting their degraded nature to a future generation, as ever an apostle risked in order to infuse into those classes the spiritual fire of a divine renovation. Mr. Cotter Morison, though he was so thoroughgoing an agnostic that he eagerly desired to sweep what he regarded as the obstacle now presented by Christianity out of the path of human progress, was nothing if not, in his own peculiar sense, religious. His books are full of what we may call unction. He says of Gibbon that women who could enter into his great book "are better fitted than men to appreciate and to be shocked by his defective side, which is a prevailing want of moral elevation and nobility of sentiment. His cheek rarely flushes in enthusiasm for a good cause. The tragedy of human life never seems to touch him, no glimpse of the infinite ever calms and raises the reader of his pages. Like nearly all the men of his day, he was of the earth earthy, and it is impossible to get over the fact." Of Macaulay he says that his "utter inability to comprehend piety of mind, is one of the

such realities as human responsibility, sin, merit, demerit, and penitence. In a word, Mr. Cotter Morison wanted to keep the saintly character without its daily bread, -to keep the "anguish or ecstasy of spirit" which arises exclusively from the faith in a perfect Being who condemns or approves us, without the faith to which it is solely and exclusively due. It was a very strange state of mind. We can understand the saint, and we can understand the scoffer at saintly illusions. But we cannot understand the fervor with which the man who wants to expose the illusions, delights in the spiritual delirium which these illusions have produced.

most singular traits in his character, con- | too soon exposed and expelled from all sidering his antecedents," and it is evi- reasonable natures, namely, that there are dent that he regards it as one of the most serious blemishes in Macaulay's character. Of Madame de Maintenon he writes with even sterner reprobation when he is describing what George Eliot called the "other-worldliness" of her religious observances: "With reference to spiritual affairs, though punctilious about her salvation, she always treats the matter as a sort of prudent investment, a preparation against a rainy day which only the thoughtless could neglect. All dark travail of soul, anguish, or ecstasy of spirit, were hidden from her." And he marks strongly his dislike of her "utter lack of all spiritual - we will not say fervor, but sensibility." On the other hand, no one can re- Certainly it is not easy to explain how proach Mr. Cotter Morison with any want a man with so keen an insight into both of such sensibility, if that is to be called character and history as Mr. Cotter Morispiritual sensibility which seems to covet son's study of Madame de Maintenon, for the feelings of a saint without believing in instance, betrays, could have admired pasany object for those feelings. "The true sionately the type of character which was Christian saint," he says in " The Service produced by the belief in what he held to of Man" (p 196), "though a rare phenom- be mischievous superstitions, and could enon, is one of the most wonderful to be have desired to sweep away those superwitnessed in the moral world; so lofty, so stitions while retaining the type. Perhaps pure, so attractive, that he ravishes men's the best explanation of these ardent agsouls into oblivion of the patent and gen-nostics, of these believers in the ecstasy eral fact that he is an exception amongst of a spiritual communion with mere memthousands or millions of professing Chris-ories and hopes, is to be found in the fact tians. The saints have saved the Churches that they are all more or less capricious from neglect and disdain." "What needs admitting, or rather proclaiming, by agnostics who would be just, is that the Christian doctrine has a power of cultivating and developing saintliness which has had no equal in any other creed or philosophy. When it gets firm hold of a promising subject, one with a heart and head warm and strong enough to grasp its full import and scope, then it strengthens the will, raises and purifies the affections, and finally achieves a conquest over the baser self in man of which the result is a character none the less beautiful and soulsubduing because it is wholly beyond imitation by the less spiritually endowed. The blessed saints are artists who work with unearthly colors in the liquid and transparent tints of a loftier sky than any accessible or visible to common mortals." Clearly there is no lack of religious sensibility here. And the amazing thing is that those saints whom Mr. Cotter Morison so much admired, not only filled their souls with the worship of what he regarded as an empty dream which had no existence in any world, but trained their hearts and minds on a firm belief in what he held to be a moral delusion which could not be

in their individual prejudices, men who, like Comte, institute impossible devotions which make nobody devout, and draw up calendars of miscellaneous notables which are to include some of the saints, and replace the others by persons of very dubi ous merit. Mr. Cotter Morison, with all his learning and all his enthusiasm and unction, frequently showed traces of a singularly capricious and uncatholic judg ment, which accounts in some degree, perhaps, for his admiration of air-fed idealists. Thus, in his little study of Macaulay, he expends much indignant wrath upon him for repeating to himself a great part of Milton's "Paradise Lost " on board the ship which was taking him to Ireland: "The complaint is," he wrote, “that Macaulay's writings lack meditation and thoughtfulness. Can it be wondered at, when we see the way in which he passed his leisure hours? One would have supposed that an historian and statesman, sailing for Ireland, in the night on that Irish Sea would have been visited by thoughts too full and bitter and mournful to have left him any taste even for the splendors of Milton's verse. He was about to write on Ireland and the battle of the

Boyne, and had got up his subject with | Morison thought they should, because they his usual care before starting. Is it not did not employ their time in sifting truth, next to incredible that he could have instead. Criticisms like this seem to us thought of anything else than the pathetic, to betray the wilfulness and caprice which miserable, humiliating story of the con- have entered as an alloy into the characnection between the two islands? And teristics of most of the curious group of he knew that story better than most men. men who have been what we have called Yet it did not kindle his mind on such an ardent agnostics. They are men who inoccasion as this. There was a defect of dulge themselves in arbitrary intellectual deep sensibility in Macaulay, - a want of caprices of their own, in killing the root moral draught and earnestness, which of what is great, while insisting on keepis characteristic of his writing and think-ing the greatness; in lamenting the abuse ing." Surely there never was a more of some petty habit of thought by which amazing outburst of indignation than this. they lay great store, and attributing to It would seem that Mr. Cotter Morison it a kind of value of which it is wholly wants men of genius always to reflect the destitute. Mr. Cotter Morison strangely reflections which are specially appropriate combined the eloquence and fervor of to the particular situation in which they Christian sentiment with the scornful find themselves; to be in a mood appro- fastidiousness and critical pedantry of a priate to Ireland as they approach Ireland, systematic thinker who sternly rejected and a mood for historical survey as they all that did not fit into his system. "Agprepare themselves for the writing of his nostics," he boasts, "when smitten by the tory. A more capricious assumption of pe- sharp arrows of fate, by disease, poverty, dantic appropriateness between the mind bereavement, do not complicate their misand its anticipated interests could hardly ery by anxious misgivings and fearful be conceived. Shakespeare might have wonder why they are thus treated by the taught a man of much less capacity than God of their salvation. The pitiless, Mr. Cotter Morison that some of the most brazen heavens overarch them and believ. reflective characters are disposed to joke ers alike; they bear their trials or their when they are on the very edge of the hearts break according to their strength. most solemn experience, and to rise But one pang is spared them, the mys lightly, as it were, with wings into the air, tery of God's wrath, that he should visit on the eve of approaching calamity. It is them so sorely." Yes, that pang is spared the mark of a doctrinaire to demand, on them, and the strength which it gives is pain of censure, the mood conventionally spared them also. The Christian knows appropriate for the occasion from such that whether it is retribution for his sins, men as Macaulay. And the same remark or purging for purification, or stimulus may be made concerning Mr. Cotter Mori- intended to give him higher spiritual son's still stranger criticism on Macaulay's strength, the pang which comes from "Lays of Ancient Rome," - all the more above is full of power. But the ardent remarkable that it is preceded by a very agnostics of our own day want to throw fine and true appreciation of the literary all the ardor of faith into the propagation value of the ballads themselves, namely, of an agnostic service of humanity, and that it was not "worthy of a serious scholar that is an impossible combination which to spend his time in producing mere fancy only a capricious intellect could imagine. pictures which could have no value beyond You cannot combine Gibbon's cold intel a certain prettiness, 'in the prolongation lect with a saint's passion for communion from age to age of romantic historical with the Infinite. You cannot advocate descriptions instead of sifted truth.'" the service of a limited posterity of mor. "Could we imagine," he asks, “Grote or tal beings with the passion which is due Mommsen or Ranke or Freeman engaged to the regeneration of a world of immortal in such a way without a certain sense of beings; and though here and there, as in degradation?" To which we should cer- such eloquent critics as Mr. Cotter Moritainly answer, not merely with an emphatic son, the paradox may seem to be achieved, yes, but further, that if these historians we may be quite sure that either the ag had the capacity to produce such ballads nostics of the future will cease to be as Macaulay's "Lays," they would rise ardent, or that the ardent devotees of the indefinitely in our esteem by producing future will cease to be agnostic. them, instead of falling lower in it, as Mr.

From The Saturday Review.

MR. COTTER MORISON.

leisure are really better for the student than those opposite conditions under No shock of painful surprise can have which so much of the world's work has accompanied the regret with which the been actually done. It cannot be said friends of the late Mr. Cotter Morison that in Mr. Morison's case they produced heard the news of his death. For more their commonest and least satisfactory than two years past his health had been effect. There was certainly nothing of declining with distressing rapidity, and the dilettante about him, in the sense, at the disease from which he was suffering any rate, in which dilettantism is only anwas one which seldom or never spares. other name for the literary recreations of Not even the most resolutely hopeful of the elegant trifler. All his work, or all at those who saw him lately could have an- least which he has ever given to the world, ticipated for him any permanent recovery; was eminently of the thorough and conwe believe that to most of them the end scientious kind. But it may be doubted appeared as rear as in fact it was. Could whether his complete exemption from all his life, indeed, have been prolonged in external pressure did not tend to foster the state of physical and mental exhaus- that excessive intellectual fastidiousness tion to which his wasting malady had which is almost as fatal as indolence itself reduced him, the boon, to a man of his to the achievement of such a task as Mr. temperament, would have been a more Morison had set himself. He was an arthan doubtful one. The discovery made dent admirer of Macaulay, and even a by the writer of one obituary notice that frequent, though perhaps an unconscious a decline of his intellectual faculties is imitator of his manner; and we all know traceable in his latest work is perhaps a that a writer with unlimited time on his little fanciful; but few who knew him hands, and a keen appreciation of style, doubted that that work would be his last, may easily continue polishing epigrams and many must have regretted that neither and balancing antitheses from manhood in it nor in any of his previous writings, to past middle age. It may not be good admirable as in many respects these latter for any man to work always with the spur are, has he left behind him any adequate of necessity in his flanks; but perhaps an monument of his remarkable powers. As occasional touch of that wholesome stimit is, he adds another name to the notulus is necessary for most of us. It is inconsiderable list of writers who pass a not impossible, too, that the brilliancy of good part of their lives in the preparation of an opus magnum which is never destined to see the light. Mr. Morison had for years been meditating an elaborate history of the growth of French institutions from, it is believed, the time of Charlemagne down to the overthrow of of the ancien régime. No one could have been better fitted by tastes, attainments, and abilities for such a task than he. In pursuance of it he was understood to have accumulated a mass of valuable materials, and in particular to have devoted a closer and more minute study to the fiscal and jurisprudential sides of the French polity during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than any English scholar had yet bestowed upon them. From time to time he has whetted the curiosity of the literary world by the publication in one or other of the periodicals of some brilliant fragments of his work. But it never grew to its completion in his lifetime, and in what stage of maturity he has left it we are unable to say.

A review of Mr. Morison's career can hardly fail to revive it has, indeed, already revived - the eternal question as to whether ample competence and abundant

another gift than that of literary expression may have occasionally exercised a distracting effect upon his work. He was one of the most admirable of talkers, as excellent in manner as in matter, and one of those rare masters of the art who seem to use it far more for bringing out the conversational powers of their company than for the display of their own. With his store of accurate and varied knowledge, and his unfailing command of felicitous expression, with the wit, good sense, and intellectual enthusiasm which he brought to bear upon his subject, he could not fail to take a prominent part in any discussion; yet he never left upon any mind the impression of having ap propriated more than his due share of the conversation. No doubt there are some minds which are only braced and quickened for the labor of the study by these exercises of the salon. But there are again others which find their store of intellectual energy sensibly reduced by them, and Mr. Morison's may very possibly have been a mind of this particular order. Distractions of some sort or another there must have been, or the amount of his literary production could hardly fail

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