SCHOONER 



SCHOPENHAUER 



221 



schooner.' In the former both foremast and main- 

 mast are rigged like the mainmast of a cutter, with 

 fore-and-aft Sails (q.v.). In the latter the foremast 

 carries a square topsail and a square topgallant- 

 sail. Topsail schooners, though carrying no square 

 foresail, have a squaresail for running free which 

 sets from the deck. On a wind the former rig 

 has a great advantage, as the schooner can sail up 

 within 44 or even 4 points of the wind ; but before 

 the wind the square topsail gives the advantage 



Fore-and-aft Rigged Schooner. 



to the topsail schooner ; and as the latter can on 

 occasion strike her squaresails, and set a fore-and- 

 aft topsail in their place, she has usually the pre- 

 ference. No sailing-vessel is faster than a schooner 

 of fine build when she carries ample canvas ; hence 

 it is a favourite form for the larger class of Yachts 

 (q.v.), and before the introduction of steam despatch- 

 vessels was employed much in the packet service. 

 Schooners are still employed to a great extent in 

 the merchant service for running small cargoes, 

 and especially those of perishable goods, as fish or 

 fresh fruit. They are easily managed by a small 

 crew, but, from the sharpness of their build, have 

 no great amount of stowage. 

 Schopenhauer, ARTHUR, the founder of 



systematic; modern Pessimism (q.v.), was born at 

 Danzig, 22d February 1788. His father was a 

 banker ; his mother, Johanna Trosina ( 1776- 

 1838), wrote twenty-four volumes of novels and 

 novelettes, and on her husband's death settled in 

 1806 at Weimar, where she saw much of Goethe. 

 Schopenhauer, after resigning the business career 

 for which his father had trained him by travel and 

 residence in foreign countries ( France, England ), 

 acquired a classical education at the schools of 

 Sotha and Weimar ; and having after his father's 

 death inherited a patrimony of 150 a year, 

 entered the university of Gottingen in 1809, heard 

 later Fichte and Schleiermacher, and devoted 

 much attention to physical and medical science 

 in Berlin. He graduated at Jena with his first 

 work, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of 

 Sufficient Reason, a treatise in which he seeks to 

 classify the principles which determine respectively 

 the provinces of Physics, Logic, Mathematics, and 

 Ethics. Schopenhauer's philosophy, although not 

 devoid of elements of objective value, is a perfect 

 expression of his most unique personality, and can- 

 not be fully understood save in connection with his 

 character. He inherited from his father an un- 

 breakable energy of character ( some friends of his 

 youth called him a Jupiter Tonans) and cosmo- 

 politan, freethinking sympathies, and from his 

 mother a brilliant polish of mind and facility of 



literary expression. His mind was not formed by 

 years of patient acquisition but by the society of 

 his seniors and by a congeries of vivid sights and 

 experiences of travel, and retained to the end its 

 habit of seizing at a conclusion through the force 

 of intuition or apprehension rather than of reason- 

 ing. Inner discord was the keynote of his life in 

 that in him the subjective and the objective, feelin" 

 and reason, were in perpetual conflict ; he believed 

 the tendency of life to be to separate more and 

 more the heart and the head. His disposition was 

 heavy and severe, dark, mistrustful and suspicious, 

 preventing him from entering into permanent 

 trustful relations with men or 'women : his mother 

 desired him to live apart from her after the death 

 of her husband, and he could hardly think seriously 

 of marriage as he saw only in woman a wayward, 

 mindless animal ugly too he said existing solely 

 for the propagation of the species, an end which 

 perpetuated the woe of the world. Lastly he 

 believed that he had brought to the birth a philo- 

 sophy which made himself the successor of Socrates, 

 since whose time nothing had been done in philo- 

 sophy save Kant's undoing of the mass of tradition- 

 ary error; and he saw himself and his thinking 

 passed over until he was sixty, and what he regarded 

 as fatuous ravings (the Fichte-Schelling-Hegel 

 philosophy) praised as the highest wisdom, so that 

 lie was tempted to l>elieve there was a conspiracy 

 of professors of philosophy against him and his 

 truth. The cardinal articles of his philosophical 

 creed, which he seized as it were by intuition early 

 in life, were: first, Idealism (Idealism is of course 

 more likely to lead to Pessimism than Realism, as 

 it bejieves the world to be illusory) Subjective 

 Idealism i.e. that the world is my idea, a mere 

 phantasmagoria of my brain, and therefore in itself 

 nothing; secondly, that the way of knowledge or 

 speculation to the centre of things, to the ' thiiig- 

 in-itself,' was demolished for ever by the immortal 

 criticism of Kant ( it simply galled him to fury to 

 hear Schelling talking of knowing God by 'Intel- 

 lectual Intuition'); and thirdly, that there was 

 accessible to the mind, to the intuition of genius, 

 the contemplation of the Platonic ideas that is, 

 the ideas of Art, the only knowledge not subser- 

 vient to the Will and to the needs of practical life. 

 His own contribution to the sum of human 

 knowledge, as he thought, was the truth that Will, 

 the active side of our nature, or Impulse, was the 

 key to the one thing we did know directly and 

 from the inside i.e. the self (all else of course we 

 know from without and through the self), and 

 therefore the key to the understanding of all 

 things from the atom up through plants and 

 animals to the starry systems. His philosophy 

 thus is, as he puts it, that the world is through 

 and through Will, and also (but secondarily) 

 through and through Idea : Will is the creative, 

 the primary, while Idea is the secondary, the 

 receptive factor in things a mere offshoot from 

 the brain. There is thus a pronounced Materialistic 

 side to Schopenhauer's philosophy which is incon- 

 sistent with his Idealism ; he always taught too 

 the descent of man from some lower form of life 

 the basis of his theory that what animals wanted 

 from man was not compassion but justice and 

 equality, although of course as a metaphysician he 

 deprecates a natural as opposed to a philosophical 

 explanation of the world. Time, as he said, is 

 only in us a form of our thought ; and Schopen- 

 hauer had no sense for history. His chief book, 

 The World as Will and Idea (1819), expounds in 

 four books the Logic, the Metaphysic, the ^Esthetic, 

 and the Ethic of his view ; it teaches a pantheism of 

 the Will (Panthelismus), and defends the extension 

 of the word Will as blind irresistible energy or im- 

 pulse ( it is essential to remember the irrationality of 



