OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 77 



Schopenhauer is able to assimilate not only the platonic 

 doctrine of ideas but also Kant's philosophy of the 

 beautiful. In fact, at a very early stage of his mental 

 development he conceived that the solution of the 

 central philosophical problem, the problem of Reality, 

 would lie in uniting the truth as expressed by Plato with 

 the truth as expressed by Kant. Kant had defined the 

 Beautiful as that which gives us disinterested pleasure, 

 and he had maintained that this enjoyment is not merely 

 individual or personal but that it is universal. Schopen- 

 hauer shows the real significance of this disinterested 

 enjoyment, inasmuch as we, through it and for the 

 moment, liberate ourselves from the principle of Evil, 

 from the endless striving of the Will ; and he further 

 explains how this is not a purely subjective and in- 

 dividual experience, but an achievement of the universal 

 Will which retires in such moments into its original 

 unity by forgetting the difference of self and not-self. 



" Schopenhauer," as Kuno Fischer says, " distinguishes 

 three kinds of knowledge, each of which consists in a 

 definite relation between the subject and the object ; for 

 these two are always correlated : phenomena, under the 

 law of causation, are opposed to the understanding, as 

 the intellectual subject ; conceptions, abstracted from 

 sensuous perceptions, are opposed to the reason ; ideas 

 are opposed to the pure knowing subject. The ideas are 

 the appearance of the thing in itself in the scale of actual 

 phenomena, they are the world-ideas which constitute 

 the eternal and changeless essence of the world. Could 

 we abandon the order of time or succession, this in- 

 evitable form of our intellect, we should behold the 



