ism. 



418 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



problem in the English school. Beginning with Hume, 

 who significantly turned away from the fruitless attempt 

 to solve the problem of Knowledge, and betook himself 

 to the more fruitful study of moral, political, and 

 historical questions, English thinkers have the merit of 

 having established the study of morality or ethics as an 

 independent philosophical discipline which has latterly 

 been enlarged into the modern science of Sociology, 

 scho^en- "^^^ iutcrcst which led Schopenhauer to emphasise the 



voiuntar- problem of the Will was very different from that which 

 had led or was to lead English or French thinkers. His 

 aim was neither epistemological nor sociological, it was 

 purely metaphysical. He desired to give what he con- 

 sidered the only possible answer to the problem left over 

 by Kant, as it was understood by Kant's early disciples. 

 What Kant called the " Noumenon " or the " Thing in 

 itself" which underlies the phenomenal world, reveals 

 itself, according to Schopenhauer, in its real nature in 

 our will. What Spencer more recently termed the 

 Unknowable is conceived by Schopenhauer in analogy 

 with the human Will. 



By emphasising the existence of the active factor, not 

 only in the human mind but in the whole of nature, 

 Schopenhauer perpetuated on the one side that dualism 

 which exists already in Kant's philosophy between the 

 theoretical and the practical reason, and on the other 

 side drew attention to that region of psychology 

 which had been unduly neglected by the contemporary 

 systems of German philosophy, but which had been 

 specially cultivated in this country — the region of the 

 Emotions and the Will. Although it cannot be said that 



