THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

SCHOPENHAUER 263
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 soull
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 coordination of desires into a united
and harmonious will? What if "will" itself, except as the unified product
of such coordination, 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 mat-
ter, 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 cal-
**. Schopenhauer: "The greatest intellectual capacities are only found in connection
\vith a vehement and passionate will." II, 413.