Blavatsky on Schopenhauer

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 6 pages

Six pages written for a particular readership and worth reading for that reason. A correspondent had sent The Theosophist a translated fragment of Schopenhauer showing the close identity between his thesis that the world is my mental perception and the Vedanta. Blavatsky adds a note for the benefit of readers in India who, though excellent Vedantic scholars, might never have heard of the German metaphysician at all — without which the fragment would seem unintelligible in isolation.

What she supplies is a compact intellectual biography. A student of Gottingen and Berlin, a friend of Goethe and his disciple, initiated by him into the mysteries of colour, Schopenhauer evolved into a profoundly original thinker without any seeming transition and had his philosophy in a complete system before he was thirty; a large private fortune let him pursue his ideas without interruption and remain independent. The wider point is the one the whole exchange exists to make — that the archaic philosophy and the comparatively modern school founded by Schopenhauer arrive at the same position, which she notes with a passing apology to Professor Max Muller.

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