SOURCE: "Schopenhauer as a Critic of Religion," in The Andover Review, Vol. X, No. LV, July, 1888, pp. 1-23.

In the following essay, Gardiner outlines and evaluates Schopenhauer's objections to religion and explores his life to suggest some factors that may have sparked his anti-religious fervor.

[In James Martineau's A Study of Religion (1888),] the story is told of an eminent English Positivist, that, listening to an account of the argument in Mr. Fiske's Destiny of Man, he gave silent attention until the inference was being drawn of personal immortality, when he brake in with the exclamation: "What! John Fiske say that? Well; it only proves what I have always maintained, that you cannot make the slightest concession to metaphysics without ending in a theology!"

Whatever truth there may be in the opinion thus expressed that metaphysics culminates, by a logical necessity, in theology, it is certain that every system...