s do not belong--concepts taught them when they
were confirmed.

Schopenhauer's philosophy is as rich in inconsistencies as his personality
was self-willed and unharmonious. "He carries into his system all the
contradictions and whims of his capricious nature," says Zeller. From the
most radical idealism (the objective world a product of representation) he
makes a sharp transition to the crassest materialism (thought a function of
the brain); first matter is to be a mere idea, now thought is to be merely
a material phenomenon! The third and fourth books of _The World as Will and
Idea_, which develop the aesthetic and ethical standpoint of their author,
stand in as sharp a contradiction to the first (poetical) and the second
(metaphysical) books as these to each other. While at first it was
maintained that all representation is subject to the principle of
sufficient reason, we are now told that, besides causal cognition, there is
a higher knowledge, one which is free from the control of this principle,
viz., aesthetic and philosophical intuition. If, before, it was said that
the intellect is the creature and servant of the will, we now learn that in
favored individuals it gains the power to throw off the yoke of slavery,
and not only to raise itself to the blessedness of contemplation free from
all desire, but even to enter on a victorious conflict with the tyrant,
to slay the will. The source of this power--is not revealed. R. Haym _(A.
Schopenhauer_, 1864, reprinted from the _Preussische Jahrbuecher_) was not
far wrong in characterizing Schopenhauer's philosophy as a clever novel,
which entertains the reader by its rapid vicissitudes.

The contemplation which is free from causality and will is the essence of
aesthetic life; the partial and total sublation, the quieting and negation
of the will, that of ethical life. It is but seldom, and only in the
artistic and philosophical genius, that the intellect succeeds in freeing
itself from the supremacy of the will, and, laying aside the question of
the _why_ and _wherefore_, _where_ and _when_, in sinking itself completely
in the pure _what_ of things. While with the majority of mankind, as with
animals, the intellect always remains a prisoner in the service of the will
to live, of self-preservation, of personal interests, in gifted men,
in artists and thinkers, it strips off all that is individual, and, in
disinterested vision of the Ideas, becomes pure, timeless subject, f