60 Transactions Texas Academy of Science. — 1908 - 1909 . 
stead of a rule of dry reason, instead of a sentimentality centered in a 
narrow sphere, we now have a universal culture. Schelling and He- 
gel completed the philosophical system of the romantic movement, 
the former by giving a comprehensive form to nature-poetry and the 
religious features of the romantic thought, the latter by turning the # 
historical feature oJ the new intellectual movement into a powerful, 
into a universal view. 
Schopenhauer owes his principal doctrine of the will as absolute to 
Kant, Fichte and Schelling, his theory of ideas to Plato, and his pessi- 
mism and his doctrine of the negation of the will so gloriously repre- 
sented in his “Die Welt als Wille and Vorstellung” to Buddha. Ac- 
cording to Schopenhauer, there is no virtue worthy of the name, except 
pity or sympathy, the principle of the Buddhistic morality. All other 
virtues are founded on the will-to-live and will-to-enjoy. Life is the 
goal, and life is necessary, irremedial suffering, positive happiness is 
an eternal Utopia. The negation of the will is the common essence 
of the gospel and of Buddhism. His philosophy is realistic, because 
of the extreme concessions it makes to materialism ; it is idealistic and 
critical, in that it denies the absolute reality of the phenomenal world 
and makes it depend entirely on our intellectual organism; its ex- 
treme pessimism rests on an imperfect knowledge of human nature. 
The real dangers of these speculations, if danger lay in them, was 
not so much in naturalism, for that is self-correcting, and would soon 
throw off the slag and retain only the purified metal. It lay rather 
in the logical conclusions to be drawn from the various theories, both 
of the scientists and the philosophers. These led consequently and 
conclusively to a revaluation of old values, as Nietzsche puts it, and 
a complete revolution of society, of thoughts and ideas. Now, only 
the personal characteristics are demanded in the drama and novel; 
the idea is a matter of indifference. The abstract thought is replaced 
by the concrete, individual acts of man. It is the period of individ- 
ualism. We see it in the alembic of Tolstoi’s socialistic and religious 
evolutions, in which the conventional life of his day is finely por- 
trayed. We see it in Zola, where the individual is subject to the 
laws of heredity and bound by the social environment in which he is 
born. We see it in Ibsen, where the individual is fighting against 
tradition, in which the issue is an open question. The individual is 
not anarchical enough to cross the Rubicon of society life and de- 
clare his complete independence, hence its problematic nature. The 
philosophy of the day sets problems, but does not solve them. The 
more important, weightier problems of the ethical value of life, since 
Kant assigned to the intellect a secondary place and put in its stead 
the practical reason, the will, have become the burning questions of 
