Essays of Schopenhauer | Page 5

expedition to Cassel and to the Hartz Mountains.
It was about this time, and partly owing to the influence of Schulze, the
author of Aenesidemus, and then a professor at the University of
G�ttingen, that Schopenhauer came to realise his vocation as that of
a philosopher.
During his holiday at Weimar he called upon Wieland, then
seventy-eight years old, who, probably prompted by Mrs.
Schopenhauer, tried to dissuade him from the vocation which he had
chosen. Schopenhauer in reply said, "Life is a difficult question; I have
decided to spend my life in thinking about it." Then, after the
conversation had continued for some little time, Wieland declared
warmly that he thought that he had chosen rightly. "I understand your
nature," he said; "keep to philosophy." And, later, he told Johanna
Schopenhauer that he thought her son would be a great man some day.
Towards the close of the summer of 1811 Schopenhauer removed to
Berlin and entered the University. He here continued his study of the
natural sciences; he also attended the lectures on the History of
Philosophy by Schleiermacher, and on Greek Literature and Antiquities
by F.A. Wolf, and the lectures on "Facts of Consciousness" and
"Theory of Science" by Fichte, for the last of whom, as we know
indeed from frequent references in his books, he had no little contempt.
A year or so later, when the news of Napoleon's disaster in Russia
arrived, the Germans were thrown into a state of great excitement, and
made speedy preparations for war. Schopenhauer contributed towards
equipping volunteers for the army, but he did not enter active service;
indeed, when the result of the battle of L�tzen was known and Berlin
seemed to be in danger, he fled for safety to Dresden and thence to
Weimar. A little later we find him at Rudolstadt, whither he had
proceeded in consequence of the recurrence of differences with his
mother, and remained there from June to November 1813, principally
engaged in the composition of an essay, "A Philosophical Treatise on
the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason," which he

offered to the University of Jena as an exercise to qualify for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy, and for which a diploma was granted. He
published this essay at his own cost towards the end of the year, but it
seems to have fallen flatly from the press, although its arguments
attracted the attention and the sympathy of Goethe, who, meeting him
on his return to Weimar in November, discussed with him his own
theory of colour. A couple of years before, Goethe, who was opposed
to the Newtonian theory of light, had brought out his Farbenlehre
(colour theory). In Goethe's diary Schopenhauer's name frequently
occurs, and on the 24th November 1813 he wrote to Knebel: "Young
Schopenhauer is a remarkable and interesting man.... I find him
intellectual, but I am undecided about him as far as other things go."
The result of this association with Goethe was his Ueber das Sehn und
die Farben ("On Vision and Colour"), published at Leipzig in 1816, a
copy of which he forwarded to Goethe (who had already seen the MS.)
on the 4th May of that year. A few days later Goethe wrote to the
distinguished scientist, Dr. Seebeck, asking him to read the work. In
Gwinner's Life we find the copy of a letter written in English to Sir C.L.
Eastlake: "In the year 1830, as I was going to publish in Latin the same
treatise which in German accompanies this letter, I went to Dr. Seebeck
of the Berlin Academy, who is universally admitted to be the first
natural philosopher (in the English sense of the word meaning physiker)
of Germany; he is the discoverer of thermo-electricity and of several
physical truths. I questioned him on his opinion on the controversy
between Goethe and Newton; he was extremely cautious and made me
promise that I should not print and publish anything of what he might
say, and at last, being hard pressed by me, he confessed that indeed
Goethe was perfectly right and Newton wrong, but that he had no
business to tell the world so. He has died since, the old coward!"
In May 1814 Schopenhauer removed from Weimar to Dresden, in
consequence of the recurrence of domestic differences with his mother.
This was the final break between the pair, and he did not see her again
during the remaining twenty-four years of her life, although they
resumed correspondence some years before her death. It were futile to
attempt to revive the dead bones of the cause of these unfortunate
differences between Johanna Schopenhauer and her son. It was a

question of opposing temperaments; both and neither were at once to
blame. There is no reason to suppose that Schopenhauer was