A NEW PHASE OF GERMAN THOUGHT. 153 



familiar with inflexible reality, there is no reason for surprise if, in the 

 moment of reaction from the illusions of the past, certain spirits, un- 

 able to keep the golden mean, permit themselves to be led captive by 

 exaggerations of quite another kind, and, taking the leap over realism, 

 fall into a pessimism which shows things to them, no longer such as 

 they are, with the impress of facts, hard and brutal enough already, 

 upon them, but even more sad and evil than the reality. But we may 

 well think it strange that such exaggerations, heavy discouragements 

 as they are to humanity, should win their growth and start into theories 

 in the very country of Leibnitz, and of systematic optimism the coun- 

 try seemingly destined, by the political events of our times, to lead all 

 others in giving brightness and cheer to all judgments of the aspect 

 of the world. 



There has arisen in Germany a philosophic school built on the be- 

 lief that, in existence taken as a whole, evil prevails over good a 

 school that sighs for the annihilation of being as the sole relief from 

 its miseries. It is one of Cousin's most just remarks that the path ot 

 German metaphysics, opened by Kant, must find its logical issue in 

 nihilism. Indeed, the romantic writers, relying on Schelling's half- 

 mystical system, did not hesitate to preach a sort of quietist indolence 

 as the highest aim given to man to reach. Thus Schlegel, with other 

 critics of the same school, was led to envy for man " the divine idle- 

 ness and happy life of plants and flowers ; " and, in his famous work 

 " On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians " (Heidelberg, 1808), to 

 admire the calm and passionless life of Oriental ascetics. Homer, 

 whom romanticism had already sacrificed to Ossian, saw himself ere 

 long dethroned by Buddha. The political events of this lower world 

 had no power to shake souls permeated by so lazy a wisdom. Yet it 

 was the hour of storms raging everywhere the hour for the crash 

 and downfall of the old Germanic edifice, when Austria and Prussia 

 trembled for their threatened successive overthrow under the blows of 

 Napoleon ; but all this mattered little to those mystic spirits who per- 

 sisted in living in an ideal world, careless of French bayonets, or the 

 embargo, or the Confederation of the Rhine. They averted their looks, 

 especially from those low creatures who struggle on the earth's surface 

 to win their bread, and proclaimed that the perfection of the science 

 of life is to do nothing. It is true these fine theories were put forth in 

 a highly-emphatic style, which provoked Richter's raillery, and gave a 

 flat contradiction to the quietist doctrines they upheld. 



In 1819, Schopenhauer's great work appeared, "The World re- 

 garded as a Manifestation and a Will." Though this philosopher was 

 an independent thinker, disconnected with any school, he too had 

 yielded to the influence of Eastern studies. " I have been fortunate 

 enough," he said, " to be initiated into the Vedas, access to which was 

 opened to me by the Upanishad's, a great enlargement of my mental 

 vision, for I believe this age is destined to receive from Sanscrit litera- 



