His father, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, the youngest of a family to which the mother had brought the germs of mental malady, was a man of strong will and originality, vehement and resolute in the extreme, and so proud of the independence of his native town that when Dantzic in 1793 surrendered to the Prussians he and his whole establishment withdrew to Hamburg. The mother of the future philosopher was Johanna Henriette Trosiener. Both parents belonged to the mercantile aristocracy, the bankers and traders, of Dantzic. Johanna, who at the age of twenty accepted a husband of forty, was as yet undeveloped in character; and perhaps he hoped that her want of love, which she did not conceal, might be compensated by the community of tastes and interests which, under his guidance, would grow up between them. But the radical rift in the wedded heart could not be stopped up by a merely intellectual cement. The two children of the marriage, Arthur born in 1788 and Adele in 1796, bore (according to the theory of the former) the penalty of their parents’ incompatibilities. While they inherited from their mother a high degree of intelligence and literary style, they were burdened by an abnormal urgency of desire and capacity for suffering, which no doubt took different phases in the man and the woman, but linked them together in a common susceptibility to ideal pain.

In the summer of 1787, a year after the marriage, the elder Schopenhauer, whom commercial experiences had made a cosmopolitan in heart, took his young wife on a tour to western Europe. It had been his plan that the expected child should see the light in England, but the intention was frustrated by the state of his wife’s health, and they had to beat a hasty retreat homewards in early winter. The name of Arthur, given to the child in St Mary’s at Dantzic, was chosen because it remains the same in English, French, and German. The first five years of his life Arthur spent under the care of his mother, chiefly in their country house at Oliva, about 4 miles west of Dantzic. There, at the foot of the prettily wooded sandhills which look out upon the dim Baltic, the young mother enjoyed a life of leisure, dissipating the long solitary hours with her horses, the gondola on the pond, the fountains, and the lambs, or with the French novels her husband put amply at her disposal. It was only on Saturday and Sunday that he would quit his office in town and come down, generally in company with a friend or two, to get a glimpse of his wife and son. The latter was often taken on a visit for weeks to the manor-house, between Dantzic and the sea-coast, where his maternal grandparents lived. After 1793 the father never set foot in his old home; but Johanna was allowed every four years to revisit the scenes of her youth.

During the twelve years they had their home at Hamburg (1793-1805) the Schopenhauers made frequent excursions. The year after his sister’s birth Arthur was taken by his father to France, and left for two years (1797-99) as a boarder with M. Gregoire, a merchant of Havre, and friend of the Hamburg house. The boy formed a fast friendship with his host’s son, Anthime, and grew so familiar with French that by the end of his sojourn he had almost forgotten his mother-tongue. The youthful friends lost sight of each other for long years; and when the Frenchman sought to renew their correspondence in the evening of life they found that they had drifted far asunder; and unworthy suspicions led Schopenhauer to dismiss his old comrade in abrupt silence. Arthur returned alone by sea to Hamburg, and for the next four years had but indifferent training. When he reached the age of fifteen the scholarly and literary instincts began to awaken, and he became anxious to be initiated into the fraternity of the liberal arts and sciences. But his father, steeped in that old pride of caste which looks down upon the artist and the writer of books as mere means or instruments to decorate and diversify the life of business, was unwilling a son of his should worship knowledge and truth as ends in themselves. Accordingly he offered his son the choice between the classical school and an excursion to England. A boy of fifteen could scarcely hesitate. In 1803 the Schopenhauers and their son set out on a lengthened tour, of which Johanna has given an account, to Holland, England, France, and Austria. Six months were spent in England, and Arthur, while his parents proceeded as far as Scotland, was left for a few weeks as a boarder with a Rev. Mr Lancaster at Wimbledon. He found English ways dull and precise and the religious observances exacting; and his mother had—not for the last time—to talk seriously with him on his unsocial and wilful character. Perhaps the part of the tour which gave him most pleasure was the last,—a solitary pedestrian stroll along the ridge of the Riesengebirge, just before he joined his mother at Dantzic, September 1801, where he was confirmed.

At Hamburg in the beginning of 1805 he was placed in the office of a merchant called Jenisch. He had only been there for three months when his father, who had shown symptoms of mental alienation, fell or threw himself from an elevated opening of his warehouse into the canal. After his death the young widow (still under forty) got affairs wound up, and, leaving Arthur at Hamburg, proceeded with her daughter Adele in the middle of 1806 to Weimar, where she arrived only a fortnight before the tribulation which followed the victory of Napoleon at Jena. At Weimar her talents, hitherto held in check, found an atmosphere to stimulate and foster them; her aesthetic and literary tastes formed themselves under the influence of Goethe and his circle, and her little salon gained a certain celebrity. Arthur, meanwhile, was left at his desk in Hamburg, cursing his prosaic lot, and smuggling literature under the ledger; the hot blood of youth was turning his thoughts to morbid cynicism, and his easy-minded mother, alarmed at his discontent, adopted the advice of her friend Fernow, and offered him a release from the loathed taskwork. He hastened to make up lost ground, and at the age of nineteen began to decline mensa with Doering at Gotha. But the wantonness and restiveness which he had grown familiar with in the lax schooling of the world would not let him alone: he allowed his satirical pen to play on one of the teachers of the grammar-school, and professional etiquette required Doering to dismiss his pupil. After a plain but gentle rebuke for his folly, his mother settled him at Weimar—not in her own house, for, as she told him, she was content to know that he was well and could dispense with his company—but with the Greek scholar Passow, who superintended his classical studies. This time he made so much progress that in the course of two years he became a tolerable scholar, and read Greek and Latin with fluency and interest.

In 1809 his mother handed over to him (aged twenty-one) the third part of the paternal estate, a sum of 19,000 thalers, which, being invested in good securities, yielded him from the first a yearly income of more than 1000 thalers = £150. Possessed of this fair patrimony, Schopenhauer in October 1809 entered the university of Göttingen, with a clear plan of acquiring all that machinery of knowledge which schools can give. The direction of his philosophical reading was fixed by the advice of Professor G. E. Schulze to study, especially, Plato and Kant. For the former he soon found himself full of reverence, and from the latter he acquired the standpoint of modern philosophy. The names of “Plato the divine and the marvellous Kant” are conjunctly invoked at the beginning of his earliest work. But neither the formal exercises of the class-room nor the social and hygienic recreations which he did not fail to combine with them filled his hours to the exclusion of the ideas which began to formulate them selves in him. Contempt for the superficiality of human life settled itself more and more deeply in his heart, with the sense of a bitterness tainting the very source of being, and the perception that the egoism of individuals seeks for nothing better than to push on the load of misery from one to another, instead of making an effort to reduce the burden. These pessimistic reflexions (which his mother found eminently unsocial) were naturally concomitant with groundless nervous terrors; sudden panics would dash over his mind, and even in those days he had begun to keep loaded weapons always ready at his bedside. As a philosopher has said, “the sort of philosophy we choose depends on the sort of people we are; for a philosophical system is not a dead bit of furniture: it draws its life from the soul of the man who has it.” He was a man of few acquaintances, amongst the few being Bunsen, the subsequent scholar-diplomatist, and Bunsen’s pupil, W. C. Astor, the son of Washington Irving’s millionaire hero. Even then he found his trustiest mate in a poodle, and its bearskin was an institution in his lodging. Yet, precisely because he met the world so seldom in easy dialogue, he was unnecessarily dogmatic in controversy; and many a bottle of wine went to pay for lost wagers. But he had made up his mind to be not an actor but an onlooker and critic in the battle of life; and, when Wieland, whom he met on one of his excursions, suggested doubts as to the wisdom of his choice, Schopenhauer replied, “Life is a ticklish business; I have resolved to spend it in reflecting upon it.”

After two years at Göttingen, he took two years at Berlin, where the university had been founded only four years before. Here also he dipped into divers stores of learning, notably classics under Wolf. In philosophy he heard Fichte and Schleiermacher. Between 1811 and 1813 the lectures of Fichte (subsequently published from his notes in his Nachgelassene Werke) dealt with what he called the “facts of consciousness” and the “theory of science,” and struggled to present his final conception of philosophy. These lectures Schopenhauer attended,—at first, it is allowed, with interest, but afterwards with a spirit of opposition which is said to have degenerated into contempt, and which in after years never permitted him to refer to Fichte without contumely. Yet the words Schopenhauer then listened to, often with baffled curiosity, certainly helped to give direction to the current of his speculation.

Schopenhauer did not find the city of intellect at all to his mind, and was lonely and unhappy. One of his interests was to visit the hospital La Charité and study the evidence it afforded of the interdependence of the moral and the physical in man. In the early days of 1813 sympathy with the national enthusiasm against the French carried him so far as to buy a set of arms; but he stopped short of volunteering for active service, reflecting that Napoleon gave after all only concentrated and untrammelled utterance to that self-assertion and lust for more life which weaker mortals feel but must perforce disguise. Leaving the nation and its statesmen to fight out their freedom, he hurried away to Weimar, and thence to the quiet Thuringian town of Rudolstadt, where in the inn Zum Ritter, out of sight of soldier and sound of drum, he wrote, helped by books from the Weimar library, his essay for the degree of doctor in philosophy. On the 2d of October 1813 he received his diploma from Jena; and in the same year from the press at Rudolstadt there was published—without winning notice or readers—his first book, under the title Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde, in 148 pages 8vo.

Schopenhauer’s monograph On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason urged that, in discussing the principle of necessary connexion, philosophers had failed to distinguish between reason as ground of belief and reason as cause of a fact. The principle gives expression to the law that nothing singular and unconnected can be an object for us but only as forming part in a system. This law has four main roots, according to the four classes of objects, in each of which a special form of connexion prevails. These objects are—(1) real objects of perception, where the relation of cause and effect requires each state to be dependent on its antecedent; (2) propositions, which are tied together as premises and conclusions; (3) the formal conditions of perception, viz., space and time, where each part is intuitively seen to be in reciprocal dependence on every other; (4) voluntary agents, where the law of motivation prescribes the dependence of action upon the idea of an object presented to the character of the agent. Modifying the Kantian theory, that things are mental projections, he emphasizes the intellectual operation which elevates sensation to perception. The feeling of alteration in an organ is taken by the intellect, whose one category is causality, to refer to a real, ue., material object which generates the change in our body. But the reference is an intuitive interpretation of a felt modification in the organism. Hence the important place assigned to the human body: it is the first of objects, the “immediate object,” the means by which all other objects come within consciousness. As a perpetual correlative of external perceptions, the body further serves as an instrument for separating phantasm from fact. To detect and scare away hallucination we have only to realize the presence of our bodies. In dealing with motives Schopenhauer touches upon the relation between volition and cognition. The ego—which is the subject that knows —is a mere correlative to the known object: object perceived and subject perceiving are not two things, but one, perpetually dividing itself into two poles; and what are called the several faculties of the ego are only an inference or a reflex from the several classes of mental object. The “I” in “I know” is already the implication and virtual presence of knowledge. But the “I will” is a new fact,—the revelation of another aspect of the world, the first fact of inner and real existence. In this perception there is given us the unity of the volitional self with the knowing subject; and this identity of the “I” who “will” with the “I” who “know” is in Schopenhauer’s words the miracle par excellence (das Wunder κατ’ ϵξoχηv, § 43).

In November 1813 Schopenhauer returned to Weimar, and for a few months boarded with his mother. But the strain of daily association was too much for their antagonistic natures. The mother felt herself gênée in the presence of a disputatious and gloomy son; she missed the ease of her emancipated life; and her friends found their movements watched by a suspicious eye, which was ready to surmise evil in the open and light-hearted style of housekeeping. In short, his splenetic temper and her volatility culminated in an open rupture in May 1814. From that time till her death in 1838 Schopenhauer never saw his mother again. It was during these few months at Weimar, however, that he made some acquaintances destined to influence the subsequent course of his thought. Conversations with the Orientalist F. Mayer directed his studies to the philosophical speculations of ancient India. In 1808 Friedrich Schlegel had in his Language and Wisdom of the Old Hindus brought Brahmanical philosophy within the range of European literature. Still more instructive for Schopenhauer was the imperfect and obscure Latin translation of the Uρanishads which in 1801-2 Anquetil Duperron had published from a Persian version of the Sanskrit original. Another friendship of the same period had more palpable immediate effect but not so permanent. This was with Goethe, who succeeded in securing his interest for those investigations on colours on which he was himself engaged. Schopenhauer took up the subject in earnest, and the result of his reflexions (and a few elementary observations) soon after appeared (Easter 1816) as a monograph, Ueber das Sehen und die Farben. The essay, which must be treated as an episode or digression from the direct path of Schopenhauer’s development, due to the potent deflecting force of Goethe, was written at Dresden, to which he had transferred his abode after the rupture with his mother. It had been sent in MS. to Goethe in the autumn of 1815, who, finding in it a transformation rather than an expansion of his own ideas, inclined to regard the author as an opponent rather than an adherent.

The pamphlet begins by re-stating with reference to sight the general theory that perception of an objective world rests upon an instinctive causal postulation, which even when it misleads still remains to haunt us (instead of being, like errors of reason, open to extirpation by evidence), and proceeds to deal with physiological colour, i.e., with colours as felt (not perceived) modifications of the action of the retina. First of all, the distinction of white and black, with their mean point in grey, is referred to the activity or inactivity of the total retina in the graduated presence or absence of full light. Further, the eye is endowed with polarity, by which its activity is divided into two parts qualitatively distinct. It is this circumstance which gives rise to the phenomenon of colour. All colours are complementary, or go in pairs; each pair makes up the whole activity of the retina, and so is equivalent to white; and the two partial activities are so connected that when the first is exhausted the other spontaneously succeeds. Such pairs of colour may be regarded as infinite in number; but there are three pairs which stand out prominently, and admit of easy expression for the ratio in which each contributes to the total action. These are red and green (each= ½), orange and blue (2: 1), and yellow and violet (3: 1). This theory of complementary colours as due to the polarity in the qualitative action of the retina is followed by some criticism of Newton and the seven colours, by an attempt to explain some facts noted by Goethe, and by some reference to the external stimuli which cause colour.

The grand interest of his life at Dresden was the composition of a work which should give expression in all its aspects to the idea of man’s nature and destiny which had been gradually forming within him. Without cutting himself altogether either from social pleasures or from art, he read and took notes with regularity. More and more he learned from Cabanis and Helvetius to see in the will and the passions the determinants of intellectual life, and in the character and the temper the source of theories and beliefs. The conviction was borne in upon him that scientific explanation could never do more than systematize and classify the mass of appearances which to our habit-blinded eyes seem to be the reality. To get at this reality and thus to reach a standpoint higher than that of aetiology was the problem of his as of all philosophy. It is only by such a tower of speculation that an escape is possible from the spectre of materialism, theoretical and practical; and so, says Schopenhauer, “the just and good must all have this creed: I believe in a metaphysic.” The mere reasonings of theoretical science leave no room for art, and practical prudence usurps the place of morality. The higher life of aesthetic and ethical activity—the beautiful and the good —can only be based upon an intuition which penetrates the heart of reality. Towards the...