Atheism in Philosophy; And Other Essays (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER. TY first example of philosophic atheism was drawn from the schools of ancient wisdom. I have spoken of Epicurus, a founder of one of those schools, a member of the great Socratic movement which survived the edict of Justinian, which passed into Christian history through Arabian savans, and spent itself in mediaeval scholasticism. My second example shall be a modern, a philosopher of this century, a member of the Kantian movement, a name of note in metaphysic, ? Arthur Schopenhauer. I select this German partly as being the only modern atheist who seems to me really profound, and partly because of the points of contrast between him and Epicurus, showing the range of the atheistic mind. The contrast is striking. Epicurus was a flat materialist; Schopenhauer an out-and-out idealist. Epicurus was an optimist; Schopenhauer a pessimist. Epicurus was sunny-tempered, bland, humane; Schopenhauer was a cynic and malcontent. Epicurus gathered his followers around him in a garden, and invited the world to partake of his cheer; Schopenhauer shut himself up in a German Studierzimmer, and wreaked with curses on the world his spite at theworld's neglect of his wisdom. Epicurus despised and decried all learning; Schopenhauer was richly, widely, profoundly learned. Epicurus exhorts us to make the most of life; Schopenhauer teaches that renunciation of the will to live is the true wisdom. Epicurus lived abstemiously, and taught that pleasure is man's chief end; Schopenhauer lived daintily, and taught that the end of man is suffering. Arthur, son of Heinrich Floris and Johanna Henrietta Schopenhauer, was born at Danzig, in East Prussia, an important seaport of the Baltic, on the 22d of February, 1788. He should have been a native of England, to which country his father, an ...