Mysticism is strong in Schopenhauer. Now and again it breaks through the even flow of European thought, usually, as with Schopenhauer, drawing its main inspiration from the East. There is a recurring period in the history of thought, when the scientific point of view does not make its accustomed appeal, when it is felt intensely that science can give but a partial and limited view. Academic culture and science are felt to be inadequate, are felt even to be leading away from the real heart of the matter, and putting us outside the deepest current of existence. Intuitive and direct knowledge is given then an importance { 92} denied to the knowledge of the reason. Man retires into himself, instead of searching outside himself for objective knowledge. He seeks the secret of the universe in the depths of his own heart and will, and strives to pluck out the heart of life's mystery in waiting on the silent twilight of inner feeling. The eyes are shut on the outer world, in order that one may see the more inwardly. Then only does man experience the sense of solidarity and kinship which runs through all things, and feel himself one with the universe.
These recurring waves of mysticism seem always to appear in the history of thought at the end of a specially brilliant intellectual period. It is as though the human mind, having striven to the top of its capacity on the lines of the intellect and the reason, impatient at its own limitations, and wearying of the discrepancy between its endeavours and its achievements, turns eagerly in the opposite direction, and directs its gaze inward. The great school of Neo-Platonists, for example, followed immediately the most brilliant age of Greek thought. And the same is true of the strong trend in the direction of mysticism, which is so marked towards the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries in Germany, a tendency which shows itself in Schopenhauer more strongly than in any other philosopher.
There is a strong appeal in this ideal of human life, which Schopenhauer depicts in words of glowing eloquence. Based on the pessimism which claims that all life is worthless, it aims at conquering life by withdrawing altogether from it. This is a negative solution of the problem of life. It is possible to oppose to this philosophy a robuster view, which would come to grips with the misery and evil of existence on another plane. { 93} William James points to the spiritual gain that comes of fighting ills. To wage war obstinately against the odds of life fills us with courage and resolution, and there is possibly a deeper satisfaction to be won from the determined facing of the battle of life than in the attitude of pessimism, which bids us draw back and take no part in the fray. There is a fine courage in the attitude of mind, which admits "the deliciousness of insanities and realities, strivings and deadnesses, hopes and fears, agonies and exultations," but which claims that we who are born for the conflict, the shifting struggle of the sunbeam in the gloom, must accept it all as a vital part of the whole. "When the healthy love of life is on one, and all its forms and its appetites seem so unutterably real; when the most brutal and the most spiritual things are lit by the same sun, and each is an integral part of the total richness, it seems a grudging and sickly way of meeting so robust a universe to shrink away from any of its facts and wish them not to be. Rather take the strictly dramatic point of view, and treat the whole thing as a great unending romance which the spirit of the universe, striving to realise its own content, is eternally thinking out and representing to itself."