Part 21

The root of existence, the inmost kernel of all being, the original vitalizing power, the fundamental reality of the universe, is, according to Schopenhauer, "WILL." What is Will? Will, in the usual sense, is the faculty of our mind by which we decide to do or not to do. Will is the power to choose. In Schopenhauer's philosophy, Will is something less as we know will, and something more than force. Will, connected with consciousness, as peculiar to man, is, in a less developed form, the real essence of all matter, of all things, organic or inorganic. Will is the blind, irresistible striving for existence; the unconscious organizing power, the omnipotent creative force of Nature, pervading the whole limitless universe; the endeavor to be, to evolve, to expand.

The whole world of phenomena is the objectivation or apparition of Will.

Will, the same force which slumbers in the stone as inert gravity, forms the crystals with such wonderful regularity.

Will impels a piece of iron to move with ardent desire toward the magnet. Will causes the magnet to point with unfailing constancy to the north. Will causes the embryo to cling as a parasite and feed on the body of the mother. Will causes the mother's breast to fill that her babe may be fed. Will fills the mother-heart with love that the young may be cared for.

The same force urges the tender germ of the plant to break through the hard crust of the earth and, stretching toward the light, to enfold itself in the proud crown of the palm-tree. Will sharpens the beak of the eagle and the tooth of the tiger and, finally, reaches its highest grade of objectivation in the human brain. Want, the struggle for existence, the necessity of procuring and selecting sufficient food for the preservation of the individual and the species, has at last developed a suitable tool, the brain, and its function, the intellect. With the intellect appear consciousness and a realm of rational life full of yearning and desires, pleasures and pain, hatred and love. Brothers slay their brothers, conquerors trample down the races of the earth, and tyrants are forging chains for the nations.

There is violence and fear, vexation and trouble. Unrest is the mark of existence, and onward we are swept in the hurrying whirlpool of change. This manifold restless motion is produced and kept up by the agency of two single impulses--hunger and the sexual instinct. These are the chief agents of the Lord of the Universe--the Will--and set in motion so strange and varied a scene.

The Will-to-Live is at the bottom of all love-affairs. Every kind of love springs entirely from the instinct of sex.

Love is under bonds to secure the existence of the human race in future times. The real aim of the whole of love's romance, although the persons concerned are unconscious of the fact, is that a particular being may come into the world.

It is the Will-to-Live, presenting itself in the whole species, which so forcibly and exclusively attracts two individuals of different sex towards each other.

This yearning and this pain do not arise from the needs of an ephemeral individual, but are, on the contrary, the sigh of the Spirit of the Species.

Since life is essentially suffering, the propagation of the species is an evil--the feeling of shame proves it.

In his "Metaphysics of Love," Schopenhauer says: "We see a pair of lovers exchanging longing glances--yet why so secretly, timidly and stealthily? Because these lovers are traitors secretly striving to perpetuate all the misery and turmoil that otherwise would come to a timely end."

Will, as the source of life, is the origin of all evil.

Having awakened to life from the night of unconsciousness, the individual finds itself in an endless and boundless world, striving, suffering, erring; and, as though passing through an ominous dream, it hurries back to the old unconsciousness. Until then, however, its desires are boundless, and every satisfied wish begets a new one. So-called pleasures are only a mode of temporary relief. Pain soon returns in the form of satiety. Life is a more or less violent oscillation between pain and ennui. The latter, like a bird of prey, hovers over us, ready to swoop down wherever it sees a life secure from need.

The enjoyment of art, as the disinterested cognition devoid of Will, can afford an interval of rest from the drudgery of Will service. But esthetic beatitude can be obtained only by a few; it is not for the hoi polloi. And then, art can give only a transient consolation.

Everything in life indicates that earthly happiness is destined to be frustrated or to be recognized as an illusion. Life proves a continuous deception, in great as well as in small matters. If it makes a promise, it does not keep it, unless to show that the coveted object was little desirable.

Life is a business that does not pay expenses.

Misery and pain form the essential feature of existence.

Life is hell, and happy is that man who is able to procure for himself an asbestos overcoat and a fire-proof room.

Looking at the turmoil of life, we find all occupied with its want and misery, exerting all their strength in order to satisfy its endless needs and avert manifold suffering, without daring to expect anything else in return than merely the preservation of this tormented individual existence, full of want and misery, toil and moil, strife and struggle, sorrow and trouble, anguish and fear--from the cradle to the grave.

Existence, when summed up, has an enormous surplus of pain over pleasure.

You complain that this philosophy is comfortless! But Schopenhauer sees life through Schopenhauer's eyes, and tells the truth about it as he sees it. He does not care for your likes and dislikes. If you want to hear soft platitudes, he advises you to go to a non-conformist church--read the newspapers, go somewhere else, but not to the philosopher who cares only for Truth.

Although Schopenhauer's picture of the world is gloomy and somber, there is nothing weak or cowardly in his writings, and the extent to which he is read, proves he is not depressing. Since a happy life is impossible, he says the highest that a man can attain to is the fate of a hero.

A man must take misfortune quietly, because he knows that very many dreadful things may happen in the course of life. He must look upon the trouble of the moment as only a very small part of that which will probably come.

We must not expect very much from life, but learn to accommodate ourselves to a world where all is relative and no perfect state exists.

Let us look misfortune in the face and meet it with courage and calmness!

Fate is cruel and men are miserable. Life is synonymous with suffering; positive happiness a fata morgana, an illusion.

Only negative happiness, the cessation of suffering, is possible, and can be obtained by the annihilation of the Will-to-Live.

But it is not suicide that can deliver us from the pains of existence.

Suicide, according to Schopenhauer, frustrates the attainment of the highest moral aim by the fact that, for a real release from this world of misery, it substitutes one that is merely apparent. For death merely destroys the phenomenon, that is, the body, and never my inmost being, or the universal Will.

Suicide can deliver me merely from my phenomenal existence, and not from my real self, which can not die.

How, then, can man be released from this life of misery and pain? Where is the road that leads to Salvation?

Slow and weary is the way of redemption.

The deliverance from life and its sufferings is the freedom of the intellect from its creator and despot, the Will.

The intellect, freed from the bondage of the Will, sees through the veil of selfhood into the unity of all being, and finds that he who has done wrong to another has done wrong to his own self. For selfhood--the asserting of the Ego--is the root of all evil.

Covetousness and sensuality are the causes of misery.

Sympathy is the basis of all true morality, and only through renunciation, through self-sacrifice, and universal benevolence, can salvation be obtained.

He who has recognized that existence is evil, that life is vanity, and self an illusion, has obtained true knowledge, which is the reflection of reality. He is in possession of the highest wisdom, which is not merely theoretical, but also practical perfection; it is the ultimate true cognition of all things in mass and in detail, which has so penetrated man's being that it appears as the guide of all his actions. It illumines his head, warms his heart, leads his hand. We take the sting out of life by accepting it as it is. "Drink ye all of it."

* * * * *

Arthur Schopenhauer very early in life contracted a bad habit of telling the truth. He stated the thing absolutely as he saw it. He spared no one's feelings, and conciliation was not in his bright lexicon of words. If any belief or any institution was in his way, the pilot in charge of the craft had better put his prow hard a' port--Schopenhauer swerved for nobody.

Should every one deal in plain speaking on all occasions, the philosophy of Ali Baba--that this earth is hell, and we are now suffering for sins committed in a former incarnation--would be fully proved. Our friends are the pleasant hypocrites who sustain our illusions. Society is made possible only through a vast web of delicate evasions, polite subterfuges, and agreeable falsehoods. The word person comes from "persona," which means a mask. The reference is to one who plays a part--assumes a role. The naked truth is not pleasant to look upon, and that is the reason it is so seldom put upon parade.

The man Schopenhauer would be intolerable, but the writer Schopenhauer is gaining ground in inverse ratio to the square of the distance we are from him. "Where shall we bury you?" a friend asked him a few days before his death.

"Oh, anywhere--posterity will find me!" was the answer. And so on the modest stone that marks his resting-place at Frankfort, are engraved the two words, ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, and nothing more. The world will not soon forget the pessimist who had such undying optimism--such unquenchable faith--that he knew the world would make a path to his tomb.

Schopenhauer was the only prominent writer that ever lived who persistently affirmed that life is an evil--existence a curse. Yet every man who has ever lived has at times thought so; but to proclaim the thought--or even entertain it long--would stagger sanity, befog the intellect and make mind lose its way.

And yet we prize Schopenhauer the more for having said the thing that we secretly thought; in some subtle way we get a satisfaction out of his statement, and at the same time, we perceive the man was wrong.

The man who can vivisect an emotion, and lay bare a heart-beat in print, knows a subtle joy. The misery that can explain itself is not all misery. Complete misery is dumb; and pain that is all pain is quickly transformed into insensibility. Schopenhauer's life was quite as happy as that of many men who persistently depress us by requesting us to "cheer up." Schopenhauer says, "Don't try to cheer up--the worst is yet to come." And we can not refrain a smile. A mother once called to her little boy to come into the house. And the boy answered, "I won't do it!" And the mother replied, "Stay out then!" And very soon the child came in.

Truth is only a point of view, and when a man tells us what he sees, we swiftly take into consideration who and what the man is. Everybody does this, unconsciously. It depends upon who says it! The garrulous man who habitually overstates--painting things large--does not deceive anybody, and is quite as good a companion as the painstaking, exact man who is always setting us straight on our statistics. One man we take gross and the other net. The liar gross is all right, but the liar net is very bad.

Schopenhauer was a talkative, whimsical and sensitive personality, with a fine assortment of harmless superstitions of his own manufacture. He was vain, frivolous, self-absorbed, but he had an eye for the subtleties of existence that quite escape the average individual. He lived in a world of mind--alert, active, receptive mind--with a rapid-fire gun in way of a caustic, biting, scathing vocabulary at his command.

The test of every literary work is time. The trite, the commonplace, and the irrelevant die and turn to dust. The vital lives. Schopenhauer began writing in his youth. Neglect, indifference and contempt were his portion until he was over fifty years of age. His passion for truth was so repelling that the Mutual Admiration Society refused to record his name even on its waiting-list. He was of that elect few who early in life succeed in ridding themselves of the friendship of the many. His enemies discovered him first, and gave him to the world, and after they had launched his fame with their charges of plagiarism, pretense, bombast, insincerity and fraud, he has never been out of the limelight, and in favor he has steadily grown.

No man was ever more thoroughly denounced than Schopenhauer, but even his most rabid foe never accused him of buying his way into popular favor, or bribing the judges who sit on the bookcase.

We admire the man because he is such a sublime egotist--he is so fearfully honest. We love him because he is so often wrong in his conclusions: he gives us the joy of putting him straight.

Schopenhauer's writing is never the product of a tired pen and ink unstirred by the spirit. With him we lose our self-consciousness.

And the man who can make other men forget themselves has conferred upon the world a priceless boon. Introspection is insanity--to open the windows and look out is health.

HENRY D. THOREAU

Seeing how all the world's ways came to nought, And how Death's one decree merged all degrees, He chose to pass his time with birds and trees, Reduced his life to sane necessities: Plain meat and drink and sleep and noble thought. And the plump kine which waded to the knees Through the lush grass, knowing the luxuries Of succulent mouthfuls, had our gold-disease As much as he, who only Nature sought.

Who gives up much the gods give more in turn: The music of the spheres for dross of gold; For o'er-officious cares, flame-songs that burn Their pathway through the years and never old. And he who shunned vain cares and vainer strife Found an eternity in one short life.

[Illustration: HENRY THOREAU]

As a rule, the man who can do all things equally well is a very mediocre individual. Those who stand out before a groping world as beacon-lights were men of great faults and unequal performances. It is quite needless to add that they do not live on account of their faults or imperfections, but in spite of them.

Henry David Thoreau's place in the common heart of humanity grows firmer and more secure as the seasons pass; his life proves for us again the paradoxical fact that the only men who really succeed are those who fail.

Thoreau's obscurity, his poverty, his lack of public recognition in life, either as a writer or lecturer, his rejection as a lover, his failure in business, and his early death, form a combination of calamities that make him as immortal as a martyr. Especially does an early death sanctify all and make the record complete, but the death of a naturalist while right at the height of his ability to see and enjoy--death from tuberculosis of a man who lived most of the time in the open air--these things array us on the side of the man 'gainst unkind Fate, and cement our sympathy and love.

Nature's care forever is for the species, and the individual is sacrificed without ruth that the race may live and progress. This dumb indifference of Nature to the individual--this apparent contempt for the man--seems to prove that the individual is only a phenomenon. Man is merely a manifestation, a symptom, a symbol, and his quick passing proves that he isn't the Thing. Nature does not care for him--she produces a million beings in order to get one who has thoughts--all are swept into the dustpan of oblivion but the one who thinks; he alone lives, embalmed in the memories of generations unborn.

One of the most insistent errors ever put out was that statement of Rousseau, paraphrased in part by T. Jefferson, that all men are born free and equal. No man was ever born free, and none are equal, and would not remain so an hour, even if Jove, through caprice, should make them so.

The Thoreau race is dead. In Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at Concord there is a monument marking a row of mounds where a half-dozen Thoreaus rest. The inscriptions are all of one size, but the name of one alone lives, and he lives because he had thoughts and expressed them. If any of the tribe of Thoreau gets into Elysium, it will be by tagging close to the only man among them who glorified his Maker by using his reason.

Nothing should be claimed as truth that can not be demonstrated, but as a hypothesis (borrowed from Henry Thoreau) I give you this: Man is only the tool or vehicle--Mind alone is immortal--Thought is the Thing.

* * * * *

Heredity does not account for the evolution of Henry Thoreau. His father was of French descent--a plain, stolid, little man who settled in Concord with his parents when a child; later he tried business in Boston, but the march of commerce resolved itself into a double-quick, and John Thoreau dropped out of line, and turned to the country village of Concord, where he hoped that between making lead-pencils and gardening he might secure a living.

He moved better than he knew.

John Thoreau's wife was Cynthia Dunbar, a tall and handsome woman, with a ready tongue and nimble wit. Her attentions were largely occupied in looking after the affairs of the neighbors, and as the years went by her voice took on the good old metallic twang of the person who discusses people, not principles.

Henry Thoreau was the third child in the family of seven. He was born in an old house on the Virginia Road, Concord, about a mile and a half from the village. This house was the home of Mrs. Thoreau's mother, but the Thoreaus had taken refuge there, temporarily, to escape a financial blizzard which seems to have hit no one else but themselves.

John Thoreau was assisted in the pencil-making by the whole family. The Thoreaus used to sell their pencils down at Cambridge, fifteen miles away, and Harvard professors, for the most part, used the Concord article in jotting down their sublime thoughts. At ten years of age, Thoreau had a furtive eye on Harvard, directed thither, they say, by his mother. All the best people in Concord, who had sons, sent them to Harvard--why shouldn't the Thoreaus? The spirit of emulation and family pride were at work.

Henry was educated principally because he wasn't very strong, nor was he on good terms with work, and these are classic reasons for imparting classical education to youth, aspiring or otherwise.

The Concord Academy prepared Henry for college, and when he was sixteen, he trudged off to Cambridge and was duly entered in the Harvard Class of Eighteen Hundred Thirty-seven. At Harvard, his cosmos seemed to be of such a slaty gray that no one said, "Go to--we will observe this youth and write anecdotes about him, for he is going to be a great man." The very few in his class who remembered him wrote their reminiscences long years afterward, with memories refreshed by magazine accounts written by pious pilgrims from Michigan.

In college pranks and popular amusements he took no part, neither was he a "grind," for he impressed himself on no teacher or professor so that they opened their mouths and made prophecies.

Once safely through college, and standing on the threshold (I trust I use the right expression), Henry Thoreau refused to accept his diploma and pay five dollars for it--he said it wasn't worth the money.

In his "Walden," Thoreau expresses his opinion of college training this way: "If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where everything is professed and practised but the art of life. To my astonishment, I was informed when I left college that I had studied navigation! Why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I would have known more about it."

It is well to remember, however, that Thoreau had no ambitions to become a navigator. His mission was simply to paddle his own canoe on Walden Pond and Concord River. The men who really launched him on his voyage of discovery were Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson--both Harvard men. Had he not been a college man, it is quite probable he would never have caught the speaker's eye. His efforts in working his way through college, assisted by his poverty-stricken parents, proved his quality. And as for his life in a shanty on the shores of Walden Pond, the occurrence is too commonplace to mention, were it not for the fact that the solitary occupant of the shanty was a Harvard graduate who used no tobacco.

Harvard prepares a youth for life--but here is a man who, having prepared for life, deliberately turns his back on life and lives in the woods.

A genuine woodsman is no curiosity, but a civilized woodsman is. The tendency of colleges is to turn men from Nature to books; from bonfires to stoves, steam-heat and cash-registers; but Thoreau, by reversing all rules, suddenly found himself, and others, explaining his position in print.

Harvard supplied him the alternating current; he influenced the people in his environment, and he was influenced by his environment.

But without Harvard there would have been no Thoreau. Having earned his diploma, he had the privilege of declining it; and having gone to college, it was his right to affirm the emptiness of the classics. Only the man with a goodly bank-balance can wear rags with impunity.

* * * * *

John Thoreau made his lead-pencils and peddled them out, and we hear of his saying, "Pencils, I fear, are going out of fashion--people are buying nothing but these miserable new-fangled steel pens." When called upon to surrender, Paul Jones replied, "We haven't yet begun to fight." The truth was, the people had not really begun to use pencils. Pencils weren't going out of fashion, but John Thoreau was. The poor man moved here and there, evicted by rapacious landlords and taken in by his relatives, who didn't care whether he was a stranger or not. If he owed them ten dollars, they took fifty dollars' worth of pencils and called it square.

Then they undersold John one-half, and he said times were scarce.

This, it need not be explained, was in Massachusetts.