OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 71 



with the fundamental beliefs which governed the aspira- 

 tions and endeavours of contemporary German culture. 

 This aimed at realising what has been termed the Ideal 

 of Humanity. Two aspects are characteristic of all 

 those endeavours, however different their expression may 

 have been in the various systems or in the unsystematic 

 writings of the great leaders of German thought. They 

 were, first of all, hopeful they inherited the optimism of 

 Leibniz's philosophy ; and they were, secondly, religious 

 in the Christian sense of the word. They desired to get 

 hold of the essence, as distinguished from the letter, of 

 Christian truth, to purify and elevate the existing dogmas 

 of the Church, to do away with the narrowness of 

 orthodoxy, and to spiritualise the teaching of rational- 

 ism. Although they appeared, at times and in single 

 instances, to favour the pantheistic view of Spinoza, they 

 were theistic in this sense that their pantheism did not 

 oppose Christian Theism, but that the one implied the 

 other. In many cases we find that a more or less 

 pantheistic version of the Christian truth returned 

 again, in its final developments, to a theistic concep- 

 tion. Schopenhauer's philosophy was neither optimistic 

 i.e., hopeful nor was it theistic or pantheistic; it 

 was pessimistic and anti-theistic. I intentionally avoid 

 the use of the word atheistic, as this has acquired in 

 modern controversial literature a much more extreme 

 meaning, having almost become an epithet of moral 

 opprobrium which I should be sorry to cast upon any 

 honest searcher after truth. But it was less through the 

 second characteristic trait of his teaching that Schopen- 

 hauer placed himself and all his followers and admirers 



