OF THE SPIRIT. 391 



of the ruling philosophy of their age and country. 

 We owe it to them, notably to Schopenhauer, that 

 philosophical style has been greatly improved and 

 clarified, that philosophical questions have been made 

 interesting to the general reader, and that the centre 

 of gravity of philosophical reasoning has been moved 

 from the intellectual to the ethical problem, the 

 problem, indeed, which already in the eyes of Kant 

 and Fichte was the most important problem of philo- 

 sophy. And so far as the special problem of this chapter 

 is concerned, they may be said to have again pushed 

 into the foreground as the most important question, the 

 spiritual or religious problem, the problem of Good and 

 Evil, and of Eedemption. As Mr Whittaker says : The 

 spirit of Schopenhauer's philosophy "is different from that 

 of European philosophy in general. What preoccupies 

 him in a special way is the question of evil in the 

 world. Like the philosophies of the East, emerging 

 as they do without break from religion, Schopenhauer's 

 philosophy is in its outcome a doctrine of redemption 

 from sin. The name of Pessimism commonly applied 

 to it is in some respects misleading, though it was 

 his own term ; but it is correct if understood as he 

 explained it. As he was accustomed to insist, his 

 final ethical doctrine coincides with that of all the 

 religions that aim, for their adepts or their elect, at 

 deliverance from this ' evil world.' . . . For Schopen- 

 hauer the desire for speculative truth does not by itself 

 suffice to explain the impulse of philosophical enquiries. 

 On one side of his complex character he had more 

 resemblance to the men who turn from the world to 



