SOURCE: “Eduard Von Hartmann 1842-1906,” in Founders of Modern Psychology, D. Appleton and Company, 1912, pp. 181-243.

[In the following essay, Hall relates biographical details of Hartmann's life in order to explicate his philosophy.]

The most conspicuous figure in the philosophical world for years was unquestionably Hartmann. His opinions, however, were so largely the expression of his remarkable personality, to which attention is irresistibly drawn at so many points in reading his works, that the only logical introduction to an epitome of his philosophy is a brief characterization of the man himself. He was born on February 13, 1842, in Berlin, where nearly all of his life was passed, the only child of a captain and examiner in the artillery school, and was trained at home with the greatest tenderness and devotion by his mother and her maiden sister, although a spirit of military discipline pervaded his father's house. He entered the public school at six, three years in advance of boys of his age. Associating even at school with those older than himself, we can easily believe him when he intimates that he was precocious and somewhat spoiled. His dislike of the routine of school life, his early aversion to Cicero, Demosthenes, history, and mathematics, and his fondness for the English novelists, religious instruction, natural science, and later for Thucydides, Sophocles, mathematics, etc., are detailed with great fullness in an autobiographic sketch.¹ The most joyous day of his life was when he took leave of the Friedrichwerdische Gymnasium at the age of sixteen. His tastes were solitary and he had few bosom friends. He had already taken instruction in Herbartian philosophy and had shown gifts for drawing, Latin, piano, and singing, which tastes he maintained through life.

His aversion to all the ordinary university curricula, his dislike of the barbarities of German student life on the one hand and his admiration of the ton in circles of young officers induced him to follow the wishes of his father and enter the artillery school in the belief that only as a soldier was it possible to be a whole man. Here, however, he found no genial companionship, especially in the idealistic enthusiasms which he had already begun to cherish, but this loss was more than compensated by several intimate literary and artistic friendships with daughters of family friends and with former schoolmates, to whom he expressed himself greatly indebted. He had hardly determined on the military profession when he was prostrated by an acute attack of rheumatism in both knees, which was aggravated later by a severe contusion and which at the age of twenty obliged him to contemplate another career. For one year he devoted himself to painting and then decided that he had no talent for it and turned to musical composition, only after another year to see that mediocrity awaited him also here. Now it was, he tells us, that he found that only philosophy had guided him hitherto, enabling him con œquo animo to regard all things sub specie œtermitas, and had already taught him to overcome more illusions, errors, and prejudices than it is permitted many to outgrow in the course of a lifetime. Accordingly he at once began at the age of twenty-two the Philosophy of the Unconscious, despite the exhortation of his father to devote himself to more practical pursuits, and three years later, after the finished manuscript had lain twelve months in his desk, he was induced by an accidental acquaintance with a publisher to allow it to appear in print. He assures us that he was quite indifferent to the sudden and world-wide fame which thus early in life overtook him. His only object henceforth was the dissemination of his opinions, and critical praise and blame he now began to estimate, he says, only according to their value as advertisements.

Of the genesis of his opinions he has little to say. He had from a boy been in the habit of noting down his deepest reflections and at the age of sixteen had elaborated an argument that the soul after death lost its individuality and was absorbed in the Absolute, and had composed unnumbered aphorismic essays on Coquetry, Friendship, Honor, Conscience, Neatness, Phrenology, Kant's “Kritik,” etc., etc. It was with supreme satisfaction that he was able to state that all his productions from first to last are naïve monologues written only to satisfy his own metaphysical cravings and with no very definite thought of publishing, and with little care for the public. The system he has thus developed we are told was absolutely free from every extraneous personal or material end or motive and was not, like the productions of the “professorlings,” written as a basis for future habilitation, or to enforce an application for a professorship, or to win personal esteem in any society, or to make money in the book market. It was a most happy instinct that kept him from the “clique philosophy” of the professors who since the end of the heroic age of German philosophy half a century ago have been philologists whose extreme originality was a sort of scholastic eclecticism which tested and proved the criticism and observations of previous criticizers and observers in indefinite perspective, by all conceivable permutations and combinations, until now, leaving the trail of theology, they are obliged to save themselves from oblivion by retailing the discoveries of natural science. He even regretted the hours spent on the current literature of the university philosophers and longed again for idyllic ignorance of the writings of most of his philosophical contemporaries.

In the seventies, as a student, I used to visit him on Sunday afternoons in his suburban cottage. He led a purely intellectual life, was an indefatigable worker, and besides his larger treatises published many hundred pages of magazine articles and minor essays. His hours of relaxation were spent in the practice or composition of music. After the publication of the Philosophy of the Unconscious he wrote one tolerable drama entitled Tristan und Isolde, but he eschewed current literature.

His manner and personal appearance were striking. He was short and rather thick, with a head too big for his body. He walked with great difficulty, only on level ground, and preferred to wheel himself in an invalid chair. His long, abundant sandy hair and beard, and his fine poetic eye, his very rapid utterance and quick movements, his brief and ready characterization, contemptuous denunciation of those who most severely criticized his opinions, his express confidence that he was only in the beginning of his philosophical activity, all combined to give the impression of a most strongly marked and original personality, in which the keen sensitiveness of a poet and an invalid was combined with great force of purpose and power of sustained mental effort. His pessimism was almost a religion with him, and he accepted and defended with ardor in private conversation all its consequences and implications and was fond of repeating, in spite of most serious pecuniary disasters, that if one would see contented and happy faces he must go among the pessimists. His books were worn and ragged in every public library, his correspondence was extensive, and even cultivated German ladies fell to reading his philosophy and never ceased to interest themselves in the remarkable personality and the no less remarkable career of the author.

Agnes Taubert, the daughter of an artillery colonel, had long been his friend and helper, and when he was twenty-nine they were married. She remained his enthusiastic coadjutor and in 1875 published her well-known book Der Pessimismus und seine Gegner, but six years later she died, leaving a son hardly old enough, as Hartmann said, to pronounce the Fichtean Ich, and after a year and a half, during which he composed his Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins, he married Alma Lorenz, a young teacher who had long been his sympathetic admirer and who lived to celebrate her silver wedding with him. He next composed Die Selbstersetzung des Christentums und die Religion der Zukunft. At the age of thirty-seven his knee became worse and he henceforth went about with two crutches and a wheel chair, and he entered the longest illness of his life, during which he wrote Die Bedeutung des Leides. At the age of thirty-nine he again had to submit to three severe operations. Meanwhile he had friends, Duprel, Venetianer, Olga Plumacher, and many others who were often with him. This was perhaps the most fertile period of his life when he wrote his History of Metaphysies, Psychology, his Problem of Life, and his System of Philosophy, all of which attracted little attention. His family consisted of a son and three daughters and he lived just outside Berlin near the Botanical Gardens till his death. He declared “Der Mensch verschalt in der Familie und mundet in die See.” He took great pleasure in teaching his children, particularly music, and both afternoons and evenings he devoted to them and his friends. He was of kindly and mild manner, attentive to trifles, very fond of conversing upon the wide piazza of his little house, although quite commonly he talked with his friends propped up in his bed. Although isolated from the world he took great interest in it, but wrote out of his own life, and yet the tragedy of it is not expressed in his writings, so that we do not know how far he felt it to be tragic. After his death from obscure but acute stomach trouble, Otto Pfleiderer pronounced the eulogy at his funeral, without church service, and his wife and daughters, who had seen his soul sink into the Unconscious, were left pathetically alone. Although he once, perhaps half-humorously, advocated a club of savants whose function it should be to make post-mortem examination of each other's brains instead of to write each other's obituary notices (which he satirically characterized as the real object and the best work of certain learned societies and academies), his brain was not examined, nor were those of Zeller, Lotze, or Fechner, as all should have been, in the interests of science.

Of The Philosophy of the Unconscious (1867) a brief epitome of the leading points will suffice here. The Unconscious is the absolute subject, substance, ego, idea, or force of the universe. It contains will and intellect, which are inseparable save in the mind of man. Efficient causes are unintelligible and impossible without final. Analyze any object of nature, e. g., the eye, and we shall find that there are so many elements combined in its structure, composition, and use that on a mathematical calculation of the doctrine of chances they are found almost infinitely against such a combination as really exists. Hence at the outset he rejected Darwinism. First the Unconscious is considered in natural organisms. We will, e.g., to move the foot and it is as correct to say it is moved for us as that it is moved by us. It is done, we know not how, or by what agency. So animal instinct is action always according to a purpose, although without a knowledge of the purpose. Likewise in the operation of natural laws we are compelled to recognize a power which never hesitates or tires or makes mistakes. It creates the brain and then thinks and acts through it. It is as manifest in the vis reparatrix which replaces the broken feather of a bird's wing as in the intelligence which builds the nest. Schopenhauer considered will as primeval and held that intellect is unfolded late from its processes; Hartmann believes that will is guided from the first by knowledge. Yet the final end of all animal life is the development of consciousness, while the most intelligent and purposive action is often dominated by an unconscious bottom motive. Volition always implies dissatisfaction with the present or existing state of things and a desire to change, but always depends on intelligence for guidance.

The second book treats of the Unconscious in the organization of language, which is a creation of the instinct and mind of the race. All the fundamental principles of logic are innate and embedded as it were in language and it is one great function of reason to analyze what is here found preëxistent. Thus indeed the syllogism was developed. Speech of course does not represent the primitive elemental processes and modes of thinking. These created it as a convenient shorthand or algebra of thought. How thoughts are written out in the brain or, in other words, the retentive power of memory, is no such mystery as is the reproductive power of the mind. The former is our own work, the latter is given as by the Unconscious. All pleasure and pain, whether conscious or unconscious, which make up indeed the bulk of human experience, depend for their intensity on the strength of the volition which is favored or crossed, and thus the prick of a pin, the loss of wealth, or the reproofs of conscience are qualitatively alike and differ only in quantity. The Unconscious inductively generalizes what is of use in human experience and these results afterward appear in consciousness as a priori and we come to know our own character just as we learn that of others. The Unconscious, e.g., creates the rudiments of space perception in us from local signs and then the notion of space comes into consciousness as one of its aboriginal possessions. In point of absolute fact, however, intellect creates space in us and will creates it in reality, while both are themselves essentially unspatial.

The third book is occupied with the metaphysics of the Unconscious. If we ask why the universe exists, the only answer is that it is a form which the Unconscious has assumed to rid itself of its own miseries. It is even deluded into the building of the brain wherein intellect is freed from bondage to the will in consciousness. All that the Unconscious wills is attained when it knows what it wills and yet consciousness is not directly willed, but is rather the forcing on the mind of a generically new perception, not by or according to its volitions. The world must press on and not, as Schopenhauer said, cease to will, not in order to obtain happiness or freedom, but only to develop consciousness till action becomes absolutely rational and will is eliminated by intellect.

The history of human ideals is briefly told in his characterization of the three stages of illusion: (1) In primitive ages, as now in childhood, men expected to be happy in the present earthly life with no thought of a future one. They were content to labor, suffer, and practice self denial in the hope of spending maturer years in the unalloyed enjoyment of attainment or possession. This, however, was soon found to be deceptive. Age brought its own cares and pain, and later by a long intricate play of circumstances (2) the belief in a future life was developed. The fancied happiness beyond this life at last became so near and tangible that no risk and no sacrifice was so great during this despised and brief existence that it was not to be compensated a thousandfold hereafter. This, too, has proven an illusion. Neither the philosopher, the scientist, nor the astronomer can find any place for heaven in his ken, where the individual life can be prolonged, and (3) evolutionary theories brought the belief that happiness awaits only future generations on this earth who shall arrive farther along in the growth of the race than we. But even this is an illusion. The philosopher now sees that the future will be as the past. This life is be-all and death its end-all. The sturdiest swimmers of us all were brought into existence only to sink with bubbling groans into the unknown depths at last. If the life we see and live to-day is all, how poor and sad! Here pleasure is misery's decoy duck. Man never is and never is to be blessed—the more consciousness, the more wretchedness. A satisfied wish brings a hundred louder unsatisfied ones. Pleasant impressions soon fade, sad ones are indelible. Indeed it is a law of the nervous system not only that pains increase with their duration but that pleasures diminish and even become painful if long continued. Man's life is a false nature. Only ignorance and superstition find a preponderance of joy in this bankrupt world. Such are the appalling insights which according to Hartmann no thoughtful mind can long escape, and it is only a sublime because truly philosophical heroism which can enable us to take the one course which duty demands in this supreme emergency, viz., to keep quietly at work as before and make ourselves as comfortable and oblivious as possible with the consolations of art, science, family life, and fame, and especially with the great and conscious satisfaction of superior confidential insight into the malignant purpose of the absolute.

There seems to be no doubt that Hartmann's mind was as exquisitely if not even morbidly susceptible as Shelley's sensitive plant, and that he felt keenly every breath of critical praise or blame, in spite of the generally calm and dignified tone of his more polemic writings. He published, bound together with his later works, a prospectus wherein are collected, extending over many pages, scores of excerpts from the daily and periodical press from Russia to California commenting upon his system, from which a choice anthology of polemic phrases might be culled. The bitter discussion went on while the work passed through many editions. Professor Michelet, the remarkable and long sole surviving representative of pure and unadulterated Hegelianism, expressed “honest pity” for an author who brings such “miserable nonsense” into the philosophical mart. J. C. Fischer pronounced it a “pyramid of absurdity,” fit to excite “universal laughter.” One writer averred that Hartmann had “shamefully duped the world”; another called his book a “snarl of idiotic stupidity”; “reason run mad”; “the odor of death pervading the whole volume”; “purely pathological”; “frivolity and pretense”; “the jugglery of logic”; “a plea for moral bankruptcy”; “a philosophic Dunciad”; “an apotheosis of ignorance and old Mother Night”; and similar verdicts almost by the score have been pronounced by adversaries. Dr. Hausermann feared that the doctrine of the infallibility of the Unconscious would tend to the notion of a potential infallibility of the pope.

On the other hand, Dr. Lasson considered it one of the best expressions of the tendency of modern times, admirably calculated to reconcile not only Hegel and Schopenhauer, but the classic works of German philosophy with the methods and results of modern science. Prof. Kapp called it the inauguration of a “new way of regarding the universe.” Other writers too numerous to mention have acknowledged his system to be “brilliant,” “genial,” of a “thoroughly pure and noble moral tone,” “a remarkable bit of culture history which will survive the next century,” “suggestive to an unparalleled degree,” etc., etc., and a writer in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy even called it “encouraging,” elevating and ennobling. It is probably not too much to say with Dr. Kirchmann that its reception not only among scholars but throughout the reading world was unprecedented in the previous history of philosophy, and that on the whole Hartmann is treated with increasing respect even by his enemies.

It was essentially a new book. The author has taken an independent look at the universe for himself. He has in fact been called almost the only modern who has made himself distinctly heard in philosophy, while he has articulated with great definiteness and moral earnestness the questions which the Zeitgeist whispers in many thoughtful souls. His book was long in the focus of philosophical interest in Germany. In place of the absolute idea, the ego, the Begriff-force—matter, motion, etc., Hartmann has erected a new altar to the unknown God, and while he worships at the same shrine of nescience as Herbert Spencer it is with a far more reverent and even more hopeful mind. With him more than with his dispraisers are the noble and inspiring traditions of the classical period of German philosophy and for all who succeed to his influence or who would gainsay his principles he has made a knowledge of at least the results of natural science indispensable. He vindicated the ideal against materialism, and by at least partially satisfying the metaphysical needs of his contemporaries made philosophy again an enthusiasm and emancipated it from extraneous literary, scientific, and even university influences. His appeal was to the average popular consciousness with a single comprehensive and easily comprehensible principle, and he called again the attention of the world from petty and distracting irrelevancies and temporalities to the vital center of the great questions of human destiny, nature, and duty. All who would better understand the human soul and the intellectual influences which are at work in the world to-day would do well to read this work thoughtfully. His argument throughout is for an intelligent purposive power governing nature, and, despite the negative predicates with which he invests it, it goes very far toward answering the current materialistic scribblers. It is moreover idle to try longer to discredit even his pessimism by urging that he is enraged at the universe because his knee was sometimes painful or his bankers proved dishonest. It is, of course, greatly exaggerated, but it can hardly be regarded like that of Schopenhauer as largely curious and amusing. Excessive optimism does not incline men to indifference to moral inaction, and so likewise that by such a scheme as his some men should be led to suicide or a life of vice, as has been urged, seems as improbable as that Goethe's “Werther” should have produced similar results among its readers. If individual and actually attained pleasure be assumed as the measure instead of as the motive or final cause of human actions, as he both asserts and implies throughout, much that he urges of the sadness and disappointment of life will be readily admitted as true.

On the other hand, that both in personal intercourse and in the tone of most and especially the later of his writings he was often arrogant, arbitrary, and dogmatic cannot be denied. His constructions were often painfully forced, his analyses fanciful, and he was probably more than suspected of the vanity of the neologist which inclined him to express views and to form paradoxes whose strongest commendation to his own mind was that no one before him had uttered or even seen them. He was not seldom more ingenious in supporting or defending his positions than philosophical in choosing them, but the event showed no reason to believe the predictions of some of his opponents that he had no career before him save in reiterating his already expressed views, or that he would end either as a devotee or as an unmitigated quack and fanatic.

The criticisms of a modern orthodox and academic philosopher of consciousness would run, I fancy, somewhat along the following lines: The pessimism which forms the sequel of his system is inadequately motivated, and has scarcely more logical connection with the theory of the Unconscious than have the later speculations of Auguste Comte with the “Philosophie Positive.” As a whole, the system has a decidedly baroque look, and its chapters are about as much separate essays as organic parts of a symmetrical and logically compacted and elaborated view. In choosing the Unconscious as his principle he has succeeded in what was never achieved before, viz., in committing every fallacy of formal logic at once, for he makes it not only a perpetual deus ex machina, who is made to play into the author's hands at every point and to whom recourse is often prematurely had to supplement his ignorance of details or of ulterior but well-established explanations, but at the same time it plays the part of a handy receptacle for every sort of residuary obscurity and inconsistency. If philosophy be, as Avenarius defined it, that mode of thinking the universe which requires the least possible expenditure of cerebral force, we must indeed allow much right to Hartmann, for the world can never be apprehended in a more simple way. But the Unconscious, as he voiced it in his first edition, is no philosophical principle, for it explains nothing nor is it explained by anything. It is the dark alternative, the dialectic opposite of all knowledge.

Hartmann's Miscellaneous Essays, published between 1867 and 1874, and making a large volume of 729 pages, cover a wide range of topics and are mostly illustrations of his philosophical principles. We will very briefly epitomize for the reader a few of the best of these.

In the much-debated essay on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet it is urged in the teeth of a score of German critics that Romeo, though chivalric, wearing a good sword, possessing ready wit and an abundant esprit, is by no means manly. His love, like that of Juliet, is roused to a paroxysm at first sight, before either can know or trust the other. Juliet was wantonly careless of her parents' feelings, Romeo eventually slays himself in the instant and before even knowing how his lady died. The love here depicted was hot but not deep enough to last a lifetime, and love, at least as known in German life and letters, is deeper and richer than Shakespeare here knew how to represent it. Tragedy must show one passion destroying a man, and Romeo is not a man.

Goethe's Faust teaches that there is no satisfaction in knowledge, none in pleasure, but that in action is salvation. Yet after seeing the inadequacy of knowledge it is only a blind instinct which guides Faust to enlarge his sympathies and devote himself to philanthropic labor as he does in the last act of the second part. Goethe went no further, and his masterpiece remained unfinished, a blind prophecy of the Philosophy of the Unconscious, which latter explains why it is that only after a profound experience of pessimism one can truly learn how to make himself comfortable and useful in the world.

In another long essay he answers the question: “Is pessimism inconsolable?” in the negative. Sweetmeats taste as good to the pessimist as to the optimist. The great ethical problem and duty is to make selfishness powerless and hence pessimism is the strongest motive for a solidarity of races, and monism once admitted all egoism is forever impossible. Love, which is the joy of self-surrender, is a lightning flash of truth into the delusion of the individual consciousness. All great passions, arduous endeavors, or high motives make men forget and even immolate self, for death is simply rest. It is only puny Philistine souls, whose history is written only on their gravestones, who cry out loudest for the preservation of their identity in another world. The great and essential joys and sorrows of life are open to all, and it is because artificial social distinctions, richness and poverty, fame and obscurity, etc., come to be unduly magnified that the need of compensation in a future life is felt. No man is given wormwood here that he may enjoy honey hereafter. In a sense, in short, there is nothing transcendent, all is immanent. A virtue which does not carry its own reward in itself is no virtue. The only evil in the universe is to be guilty, and to feel guilty is the only punishment. Pessimism does not tend to quietism, but is the strongest of all possible motives to activity. Pain is a stronger stimulus than pleasure, and the fact that this is the best of all possible worlds, but at the same time worse than none at all, will not discourage but only give greater poise and seriousness to all healthy souls.

The nature of tragedy is a favorite theme with our author. True tragedy, which no optimist can consistently tolerate, which is quite superseded on the modern stage and in literature by the sad and the ugly, unlike these gives the highest possible elevation of soul. It is not essential that in its issue it reward virtue or punish guilt. To the spectator if not to the hero himself at last comes the insight that there is something better than life and reality, and that these may be relinquished. A more abiding sadness, which has been falsely called the highest of all tragic effects, is produced when the hero cannot die, but is forced to live on, a weary, desolate life, like Dante's souls in the Inferno, or like the Wandering Jew. Yet death produces not only the greatest present effect, but, according to pantheism, it is a type of the dissolution and resumption of all things. The pivotal acts must be voluntary acts of an unconciliatory inappeasable character and the conflict and catastrophe must be necessary.

Again he attempts to tell us how great artists bring forth their works. All works of art live in the depths of character, and must be produced often by the aid of deep meditation, but are always fundamentally spontaneous. The understanding may oversee and even criticize now and then but should never be allowed to control. The poet, he believes with Ludwig, should vanish behind his work as Nature does.

He deplores what he calls symptoms of decay in art and science. The rise of popular science, though so far less disastrous than in England and especially in France, has seduced hundreds of the best minds from original work to the public platform or press and has called into unmerited repute scores of half-trained dilettanti. In the large cities, especially Berlin, the professors, called thither for the most part in middle life from smaller places, are too apt to become salonists. They associate largely with men of their own department and an esprit de corps arises, often unfolding into a strict caste feeling where the local and other prejudices of members are mutually countenanced and strengthened, outgrown traditions of the schools are cemented, and in the absence of efficient and authoritative valuation of work great individual injustice is done, valuable workers silenced, and their work ignored.

In one long essay he characterizes Haeckel, whom he considers to be intellectually descended from Schelling through Johannes Müller. Jena he designates as the freest of all universities for an independent thinker. He urges that Haeckel's form of the evolutionary theory is far less mechanical than that of Darwin, in that it recognizes immanent forces, and ascribes to the former the merit of having made empirical science and philosophy henceforth not only reciprocal but necessary to each other. He regrets that Haeckel should have opposed the teleological view of the universe, and predicts that his philosophical self-training will eventually bring him to recognize the planful order and organization of nature.

Under the leadership of Professors Lazarus and Steinthal the rites, customs, superstitions, mythology, and language of primitive and uncultivated peoples, called folk-psychology (Völker-Psychologie), were made one department of philosophy. Of this Hartmann argues that its fundamental conception should be that the action of individual minds is not so much the cause as the result of the action of a collective subject of which they are less attributes or predicates, as argued by Lazarus, than embodiments. In all acts, even the freest, we will consciously to do this by these means but from a higher standpoint it is ever seen that we have at the same time been unconsciously doing other things by other means. The history of development is thus very different from the history of the conscious purposes of individuals. The latter are contradictory and often mutually canceled; the former never errs and is never out of harmony with itself or inconsistent with personal freedom. This is due to the bottom ideality of existence, not in the sense that the severed parts of a polyp each developing an independent life are identical but requiring the assumption of an absolute prius working consistently in and through all.

Again and similarly he argues the cause of dynamism against atomism. He well objects to Fechner's argument that atoms are at the same time material but unextended. Instead of Ulrici's view of atoms as centers of different forces working at a distance in one point of space, which yet have found size as space elements in the working sphere of their repulsion, Hartmann argues that atomic forces are the individualized expression of one pure, absolute, non-spatial, transcendent essence and that the form of this force as such is changeable only a potentia ad actum.

Again it is well known that Lotze when a young man published an article entitled “Life Force,” in which it was argued that in animal organisms all the phenomena of life are conceivably due to different combinations and relations of elements, arrangements of conditions, etc., an essay which has been often quoted in support of a mechanical evolutionism, to the author's exceeding annoyance, and which is said to have made his later reaction to an inner teleology more pronounced. Against this and all materialistic and vitalistic theories alike Hartmann pleads for his familiar “transcendent mediatory real principle.”

In one essay he praises the consistency of Leibniz as a practical optimist, who tried to mediate all antitheses in his thought and all conflict in his active philanthropic life. In another he suggests that the funds so often subscribed in Germany for the erection of monuments to distinguished writers would be better expended in permanently reducing the price of the works. In another he argues not only against capital punishment, but less restraint in prisons, which he predicts in the future will be made little model artificial states where experiments in self-government may be made for and by students of the art of statesmanship.

In a brochure of 122 pages published in 1874 entitled The Dissolution of Christianity and the Religion of the Future, and expressly addressed only to those whose minds have been emancipated by the critical study of positive Christian dogma, Hartmann expresses his religious opinions without reserve. Christianity should no longer delay to confess itself bankrupt in the means of satisfying the religious needs of the present, which is the most irreligious period of history. The bestiality of the social democracy shows how degraded man becomes when deprived of religion, which has always been not only the chief means of popular education but the only form in which idealism has been made accessible to the masses. Yet the power of even the mummified Christianity of Catholocism to rouse its followers to fanatical enthusiasm shows that a degree of vitalizing power still remains in it which may become one element in the world religion of the future. Protestantism he designates as a mere transition-stadium from the true Christianity of the past to the ideas of modern culture and civilization. These being essentially irreconcilable, Protestantism soon became a maze of logical contradictions, yet practically it has also been a school of self-control wherein the world has been taught the valuable lesson that radicalism, while it brings men to a clearer consciousness of their rights, does not emancipate them from duties. The essence of Christianity was exhausted in the Middle Ages. Protestantism was not so much its slayer as its burier. But for its historical relations and its geographical position, which make it still a source of countless dangers to modern civilization, Catholicism has long been no less a caput mortuum in history than the worship of the Dalai Lama in Thibet. All religion, being necessarily an affair of feeling, must subordinate intellectual culture as a means. Christianity entered the world, grew strong in a period of general decadence, and preserved the remnants of a moribund civilization, a dead language, a mass of traditions, etc., at first as objects of superstitious wonder to the rune-revering German races, which in the Renaissance began to prove themselves its destruction, until now it is not only impossible for a sane man to be a Christian in the true, unadulterated sense of the word, but the very conception of the meaning of the word “religion” is almost lost to the modern world.

The Cultur-Kampf, he continues, in which the interests of Catholicism and Protestantism are one as against the true spirit of modern science, art, etc., was long doubtful and desperate, and not till the days of Königsgratz and Sedan, when Prussia—the center of crystallization for the modern secular spirit—was able to bring Germany with a united front to a renewal of the thousand years' war with the church, was a belief in the future autonomous moral and intellectual development of the world assured for those who had faith in the consequent logical development of ideas in history. All but Catholics now admit that the Christianity even of the New Testament is a development and Protestantism must not be content with eliminating merely the additions and forced interpretation of the mediæval church. Radical German Protestants we are assured no longer believe with Luther that the Pauline doctrine contains the essence of Christianity; in fact Christianity has ceased to be Lutheran, Augustinian, or even Pauline. Later, under the influence of Schleiermacher, the Johannean period of German dogmatics began. Now, however, since John's Gospel has been proven the latest instead of the most primitive and more especially on account of its supposed pantheistic tendencies (as shown, e.g., in Biederman's “Christliche Dogmatik,” where the incompatibility of the absoluteness of personality is argued from the Logos doctrine) this position has also been tacitly abandoned. It only remains, therefore, to consider the Christianity of Christ as distinct from that of the writers of the Gospels and Epistles. This the reader is assured has been done once for all by the Tübingen school. Jesus was a Jew and nothing but a Jew from first to last. He popularized upon the street the esoteric traditions of the Talmud in an ingenious and discriminating way. He was liberal, but by no means radical. The primitive and essential kernel of his doctrine is the Mosaic command to love God and our neighbor, coupled with Hillel's doctrine of moral reciprocity. Radical Protestantism is really eclectic, culling doctrines indiscriminately from Jesus, Paul, Peter, the church councils, or modern reason, and is, therefore, essentially unchristian. It is more, it is irreligious. Every religion rests upon a pessimistic contempt of the world as vain and fleeting, but the Renaissance and Reformation introduced the “optimistic intermezzo” and disposed men to make the most and best out of this earthly life. Protestantism began as a compromise and ended by calling this the best of possible worlds. Secular culture now approaches a time when it must become manifest that in attainment and possession mankind has reached all that is obtainable in this world. Then the Gemüth, which is the soul of religion, will be freed from the growing tyranny of the understanding, and religious questions will become once more central and supreme in human consciousness.

But the inquiry is already pertinent what ideas must enter as elements in the future religion which, as universal, must synthesize all Oriental and Occidental, all pantheistic and monotheistic tendencies. It must have “no heteronomous morality, no transcendent manipulation of redemption by extraneous merits,” although it will doubtless cull some of its elements from Christianity. But man must redeem himself. Pantheism, which fills and illumines the dreams of mystics with reason, and which has always been, in the words of Heine, the real, though half-concealed religion, of Germany, which teaches that no man is out of God or undivine, and which honors God by regarding his being as something far nobler and higher than a personality like ourselves, is expressed in the native impulses of pity and love, and reconciles forever philosophy and science with religion. Such are the vague and indeterminate and, in Germany at least, somewhat commonplace conceptions from which our author predicts that in a few generations a new and world-embracing religious synthesis will be developed.

In 1868-9, partly under the influence of the Tübingen school, he had written a severe criticism of the New Testament, which was published in 1905 after being greatly revised and toned down (“ The Christianity of the New Testament”). In 1880 appeared his book, The Crisis of Christianity, criticizing speculative Protestantism. In these works he not only criticized but condemned the belief in the existence of a personal God, since he thought there could be nothing divine that was not impersonal and unconscious; denied the need of any mediator or mediation, every man being his own savior if he was saved; flouted the assumption that the end of religion is to bring happiness now or hereafter as akin to a sensuous heaven or work for a pay day; denounced the conception of personal immortality, holding that at death the tides that brought us hither only “turn again home.” He pilloried what he thought the bigoted idea of a God-man, holding that humanity itself was divine; repudiated all the historical elements of Christianity or any need of them. Christian morality is puerile because based on rewards, happiness, and heteronomous virtues. These positions he urged with such vehemence, his criticisms were marshaled in such array, and his negations were so all-pervading and relentless that he has been called “the ablest and most dangerous enemy the Christian church has ever had.”

This view has been widely accepted by orthodoxy, but it is false and shallow. If he seemed to hate theology and the church, it was because of his great love for what he deemed the religion of the future, which is set forth in his Religion of the Spirit (1881) and his Religious Consciousness (1882). Here he urges that the world cannot possibly do without religion and that the church is only half-hearted and shallow-thoughted in its faith. His positive “religious religion” was not unlike that of Nietzsche, which it antedated by years, and both found their point d'appui in the Persian Zarethustra's conception of a necessary war between light and dark or the rational idea and blind instinct and irrational will. For their conflict the whole world-process is the drama, and from this stand-point we can first glimpse the true religion, which is to be the new dispensation of all Oriental as well as Christian faiths. Hartmann's God is the blind but all-pervading and impelling Power that utters itself in and through the entire process of cosmic evolution, which makes for righteousness in the ethical domain, which animates all his work and that of all other soldiers of the spirit, and is revealed in the lives of all the great and good light-bringers in history. Arthur Drews² thinks Hartmann is the most religious of all men, one called and ordained by a world-soul to be its saint, prophet, and apostle. Although Hartmann called the modern Jesus-worship a form of heathenism and the Jesus of evangelical orthodoxy a fetich, his faith was in one only unconscious principle with the two attributes, will and concept, that is, one that is omnipotent and omniscient. From this point of view he is able to make a genial synthesis between the pessimistic negative religion of India and the optimistic affirmative religion of Persia. Not eudæmonological pessimism or passive reflection on the excess of pain over pleasure in the world, but evolutionistic optimism, active practice, and aggressive participation in the processes of culture was his creed. He demanded not flight from reality or renunciation, but self-immolating sacrifice and work “all for God's sake.” He turned from Schopenhauer's Weltschmerz and passive quietism to the eternal yea of Zarethustra, and did so just because he saw that pain is inevitable. Indeed, it was this that gave his piety a heroic mold. He also sought to revive the old German spirit, which he did by appealing to the heroic age of Teutonic myth as Wagner did, and also with the slogan Das Deutschentum musst das Christentum zeigen. Thus one eulogist calls Hartmann's creed “the deepest, most worthy religious expression of the Aryan mind, pointing out the only way in which the world can pass beyond Christianity as it must do or suffer arrest.”

The Truth and Error of Darwinism (177 p.), published in 1875, contains by the author's admission nothing essentially new, but is an important amplification of opinions already expressed in the “Philosophy of the Unconscious.” Darwinism has become popular, it is said, not from its intrinsic truthfulness but because for those who lacked the mental discipline to hold the question open there was no choice between it and more mechanical theories. Here Hartmann's friends think he incidentally anticipated Weismann. Darwinists are wrong in insisting that the transmutation of species always takes place by the summation of minimal variations in the individual, and in neglecting the embryological processes through which types are changed by germ metamorphoses. The result of this long and bitter controversy has convinced philosophical minds that Darwin's too mechanical instinct has failed to draw sufficient attention to the immanent formative force present and active at every point in Nature, which compels a teleological conception of the universe. The organic development theory, which designation Hartmann proposes as more German and more correct than Darwinism, which is derived directly from Kant and which as Haeckel well says should be called natural philosophy and not natural science, which is the most “eminent fact in the modern intellectual world and opens a prospect of limitless change for philosophical thought,” has demonstrated the absolute logical inseparability of teleology and causality. They are related as means and end, and each is both impossible and unintelligible without the other. The complex bundle of hypotheses called the theory of natural selection, which Darwin himself originated by applying observations made on plants and animals artificially cultivated to organic nature at large, is analyzed into subordinate principles, themselves complex. The first, the struggle for existence, seeks to explain how types are purified and perfected. All alterations, however chemical, the anatomical enlargement of the whole or parts, the changes of periodic processes which must take account of useless qualities, as well as of those absolutely necessary for existence, can affect only external properties; no adaptation to changed environment can effect any change of morphologic type. Variability and heredity both especially postulate the recognition of an immanent teleological principle which Darwin is not disposed to admit. The direct influence of environment, which he borrowed from Geoffrey St. Hilaire, Hartmann urges is slight and superficial. The principle of use and disuse derived from Lamarck can only affect structure and weight, not form, and can account only for change of size in an organ and never for its appearance or disappearance. Change of use is, moreover, preceded by change of instinct. New conditions always cause an inner development of more or less conscious and purposive and hence unmechanical action. Sexual selection also can explain only outward decorative variations and cannot reach fundamental organs, while correlation of growth with associated variations is only the last refuge of Darwinians when they are obliged to admit that mechanical hypotheses fail and to recognize an inherent and unfathomable power working within or through atomic and vital forces.

In 1872 appeared an anonymous and lengthy criticism of Hartmann's system entitled “The Unconscious from the Standpoint of Philosophy and the Development Theory” in which many important concessions were made, and it was urged that even if consciousness be only a summation of the forces inherent in the lowest forms of existence these must be conceived as merely nonpurposive and morphological predispositions to intelligence and by no means as a clairvoyant unconscious intention in matter itself. The writer was minutely versed in all Hartmann's views and treated him with great deference, expressing regret that hitherto no competent antagonist had been found. Haeekel, whose pan-psychic speculations of soul cells and of memory as inherent in atoms had been thought to have some near analogies to Hartmannism, declared that this pamphlet expressed exactly his views and even Professor Schmidt,³ who is the only eminent scientific specialist who has taken pains to examine and refute the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” in detail, warmly praised the anonymous pamphlet. Several years later, in an enlarged edition, Hartmann avowed himself the author of it, and refuted, although many thought quite unsatisfactorily, his own self-refutation. This performance he defended as one step in the true Socratic dialectic method of unfolding and establishing opinions, and his more implicit followers regard it as a triumphant stratagem. It has, however, strengthened with many the conviction that a mind which can “confute, change hands, and still confute” in such dapper Hudibrastic style must be more ingenious than sincere, and raised the question whether a thinker who had become so much more philosophical in criticizing than in defending his own opinions might not eventually abandon the standpoint of his precocious youth and turn against his own disciples with a new principle.

In several hundred pages the author has at various times unfolded his views of the Kantian theory of cognition.⁴ This he calls the essential question of philosophy and therefore of all science. He asserts the existence of something transcendentally real beyond and independent of consciousness, the knowledge of which is attained not by mere sensuous perception nor by direct inner intuition but as mediately and inductively impressed as a necessary cause of our immediate immanent experience or its effects in consciousness. The certainty thus obtained that the cosmos is a teleological process of self-determining intelligence is not absolute but practical.

In following thus far in a general way the historical order in our all too brief epitome of his opinions—for there is absolutely no other order—we come now to speak of his earlier disciples. As the word was used during the heroic age of German philosophy there are now no schools; least of all has Hartmann one. He feels himself so unique and even solitary in the intellectual world that he recognizes no master and tolerates no pupil in the full and former sense of the word. His conception of the Ding-an-sich he admits is a development of Kant's æsthetics, and he allows us to call him a reconciler and modernizer of Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, each of whom is true because the other is. He even takes Darwin and the physiologists under his protection, but is at vastly more pains to detail points of difference, often quite fictitious, than of essential agreement with them. On the other hand he made almost every conceivable application and development of his principles himself and left very little for his disciples to do. Moreover he no doubt unconsciously experienced the consummate luxury of the egotistic principle, which is to have a system of the universe all to one's self wherein one may live in undisputed squatter sovereignty not by philosophy, like the professors he derides, and certainly not according to philosophy, which requires, he tells us, the suppression of all egoism, but for philosophy.

Beginning with those who most closely represent Hartmann's own standpoint we name first Agnes Taubert,⁵ the lady who became his first wife. This little volume of reflections has only a literary significance, but has been quite widely read. A larger volume by Moritz Venetianer⁶ is a mystic and extreme accentuation of the besouled principle of the universe. It goes far beyond Hartmann in emphasizing the unity at the expense of the manifoldness of the universe and ends by a defense of the principle of reformed Judaism. We have plodded through many hundred dreary pages in tracing the ramifications of Hartmannism, but with no such mental nausea as in struggling with this book, over which the very spirit invoked in the Dunciad seems to have woven a resistless spell. We have tried to read it when the blessed sun of a bright spring morning shone full upon its pages and late at evening when the mind was jaded, but no mood or motive would avail. It simply will not read. The author fairly gloats over the widely gleaned recognition of the mystery of life and the limits of human knowledge by learned men of all ages, whom he gathers into the asylum ignorantiœ of his system.

Volkelt's book⁷ is far better. From the standpoint of new Hegelianism the author attempts to show that the unconscious logical principle is the silent and necessary presupposition of all philosophy from Kant onward. This is perhaps the best of many attempts to show that Hartmann is essentially an Hegelian in spite of himself, and it also attempts to modify his pessimistic theories.

Du Prel, a well-known popular scientist and traveler, has written a keen and well-tempered rejoinder to Prof. J. C. Fischer's coarse criticisms of Hartmann,⁸ and in a later and widely read work⁹ argues that Venus, the earth, Mars, the moon, the asteroids, meteors, and comets, all to be burned up at last into the cosmic mist from which they all sprang by the various atmospheres they encounter in their course, represent decaying phases of the solar and all other systems; that all sidereal bodies and orbits are selected survivals of innumerable others destroyed or thrown out of harmony by collisions; “that the truth which is a special case among all errors survives them all,” and that as sensation is a fundamental property of all matter and as being is transformed material energy, so pain is lessened during the organization of a system, a world, or an animal, etc., and increased by its dissolution; and that thus, assuming from similar physical and chemical laws that forms of life analogous to those in the earth are developed at some stage of all planetary existence, so as they decay suffering gradually “deepens into the absolute and universal pain of atomic disintegration,” unfolding in infinite perspective far below the horizon of animal life or individual consciousness. It would of course be unfair to call all this Hartmannism, but it is at least one of the allied vagaries of pessimism, and all these authors were Hartmann's friends.

Another choice and elaborate pessimistic theology, written by an unknown author¹⁰ under an assumed name, asserts that God was the primeval and absolute unity, broken up into individual existences when the universe came into being. He willed nothingness and all the processes of animate and inanimate existence are advancing stages toward the fulfillment of that will. In place of Schopenhauer's will to live he postulates an equally universal will to die and annihilation as immanent in all things and as the bottom and unconscious impulse of human life. Noble characters which compel us to admire unselfishness; works of art, in the contemplation of which we forget self and become all eye and ear to the generic ideal which is intuited in itself freed from its causal and all other relations to things; the State, wherein individuality reaches its full development by abolition of slavery, under the rule of freedom and equality for all, only that by the mutual friction of these individualities, by legality, social restraint, and competition, egoism may be again reduced and all particularism subordinated in enlarging political and other solidarities—all these are means of redemption from the only sins which are recognized, viz., pain and imperfection, not sent by a heavenly Father but freely chosen by us before the world was, i. e., resulting by the free determination of the physical elements of our brains and bodies ever since the time they were all undifferentiated in the primeval cosmic gas. The highest duty for all is abstinence from that act which is the “quintessence, compendium, and focus of all the world.” The author thanks the “Providence which is over all,” and by whom “men are to be redeemed from sin,” that he has no children and that, knowing mankind are consecrated to Nirvana, he can look future nothingness, obscured by no mythic shadows, fully and joyously in the face.

Bahnsen¹¹ is a miserabilist, as original as Jean Paul and as morbid as Heine, very inchoate but with a talent for aperçus, whom Hartmann calls “full of the noblest blood of idealism.” His own mind he considers as the elect stage where the unconscious will is peculiarly distracted and tortured. Self-torment is the end of all. He hates the very sound of the word “healthy,” but for those who can construct his hysterical thought between the lines, shattered by dashes and parentheses, there is a brilliancy which makes even the most pathological of them rather amusing than otherwise. The work here quoted is extremely suggestive, novel, but of little philosophical significance.

The same may be said of the brilliant philologist,¹² Nietzsche, whose widely read essays, written in an intuitive Emersonian way, deal with the net of misunderstandings and misrepresentations sure to grow up around any one in the climate of German culture who wills to think only the truth and who has the awful power of self-expression. He believes that the noble pessimism of the opera-motives of Wagner has for its leading purposes to explain the past and not to preform the future, to show that true greatness increases the more it retires, that man will never find final ideal order in the world, and above all to reveal the omnipotence and omnipresence of unconscious motives and impulses. His Tristan und Isolde he calls the most metaphysical of all works of art. He joins Schopenhauer in condemning the university philosophy, which he says makes students indifferent to natural science and to history, while the study of the history of philosophy teaches them to hold no opinion whatever. The professors he says never touch the question of central interest and the one on which they are most competent to give valuable counsel, viz., by what sort of a system of philosophy can one make the best living and win the greatest applause, and how their department can keep ahead of science (as a fox ahead of dogs). The true philosopher, he urges, must always be, as Niebuhr termed Socrates, a bad citizen. He must trouble people, lead away the youth, be more feared than favored in high places, brave the tyranny of public opinion by introducing a new degree of culture which always reverses every settled consensus—in short, he must revolutionize, as a thinker always does when he breaks out. Such a man he calls Schopenhauer, who espoused the cause of philosophy against the philosophers, and who was free because he had absolutely no pay and knew no debts of gratitude.

We have no space left to speak of the more or less definite relations in which Hartmann stands to the thought of Dühring, A. Lange, and his pupil Veihinger; to Frauenstadt who after a life spent in patching and propagating Schopenhauer later and reluctantly found himself forced to confess that his conception of the world contains irreconcilable contradictions and must be entirely reconstructed; to Biedermann, the Hegelian theologian of Zurich, who in his Christian dogmatics argues that the absoluteness of God's being is irreconcilable with his personality, or to Rehmke, his disciple, who makes large concessions to pessimism; and to scientific men who had no respect for his vagaries but let him alone, knowing that more than almost any one else he helped to popularize science and make it henceforth indispensable to philosophy and to evangelical German theology, which welcomes his vigorous championship of teleology and of an idealistic view of the world against current materialism, while it vigorously protests against his superficial and irreverent discussions of the profound problems of the Christian faith—but we pass at once to one of the leading objects of this chapter, which is to briefly characterize Hartmann's contribution to ethics,¹³ which in size and importance takes at least equal rank with his Philosophy of the Unconscious.

The first and lowest form of moral consciousness, says Hartmann, was characterized by the Cyrenaics. Their naïve hedonism taught that pleasure was the end of life. The discussion of the different sorts, degrees, and consequences of enjoyment led to the true eudæmonism of the Epicureans, who taught that mental pleasure was preferable to that of the senses, and that friendship and freedom from passion and desire were the supreme forms of happiness. Aristotle, Hobbes, and especially Spinoza represent this system in greater detail. Its practical half truth is a wise and moderate savoir vivre, which is the highest result of what is termed the mundane positive eudæmonistic morality. As soon, however, as men begin to reflect on the disproportion between happiness and merit, the postulate of an all-wise and transcendental judge is erected, and by degrees develops into a system of rewards and punishments in a future state. To this vulgar form of egoism, best represented according to the author by the Jesus of the synoptic Gospels, earthly motives and pleasures soon come to appear low and unworthy when compared with those which are heavenly. This antithesis he regards as both false and impossible. Sensuous elements are inexpugnable from every conception of any future, especially a retributive state, and a noble Epicureanism is far better. The inevitable self-criticism of this moral scheme leads to the negative phase of Cynicism. Pleasure is seen to be impossible and the individual in this stage withdraws from the world and is indifferent to its opinions. He seeks only to lead a harmless life and avoid evil, and feels that the world can neither give him anything he desires nor take from him anything he loves. This again is a partial, because a merely individual, standpoint, and the “negative transcendent moral” is sure to be inferred. Suicide, the refusal to live of asceticism, and the insight that the end and object of living is not to be happy, but to be independent of happiness, and that only those who know little and whose experience has been shallow find enjoyment in life result from various degrees of development of this stage of moral consciousness. All morality, at best, is only a palliative between full enjoyment of the world on the one hand and refusal to live on the other. In this extreme of self-negation the ultimate and inevitable bankruptcy of every egotistic moral system is manifest. The first cycle of moral consciousness ends thus in utter self-renunciation and despair.

The more complete this shipwreck of the selfish principles, the more eagerly do men grasp after heteronomous authoritative principles, and the more uncritically do they apply them to the guidance of conduct. According to the well known views of J. H. Kirchmann, this is the highest morality. Humanity, the state, etc., are infinitely higher and wiser than the individual. To obey because we are commanded now seems the highest and final moral motive. Precedent in law, good government, business, social intercourse, all depend on this instant and complete surrender of the individual will to a higher authority. The moral act brings rest but never pleasure, etc. True, replies Hartmann, the sentiments of reverence and veneration are independent of the feelings of pleasure and pain, but even these must not be unduly exalted above self-respect and independence in thought and action. The origin of paternal authority is sought in the animal instinct of defending the young. This is the first and fundamental form of all authority. Legislation stands for the control of the worst elements and individuals by the moral consciousness of the best. Custom is an unconscious which should be replaced by a conscious morality. Church authority is the most insidious and dangerous of all for both mental and moral culture. The autonomous movement by Protestantism is of great theoretical, but has proved to be of little practical worth.

With the discussion of such points the introductory, or “pseudo moral” portion of the work ends. It has shown that conscience is no simple, but a very complex, product of all varieties of instincts—feelings, opinions, tastes, etc.—and that freedom of conscience postulates merely the negation of every heteronomous element. Everything is thus far strictly in the spirit and method of Hegel's “Phenomenology.” Hartmann expressly assumes the same objective standpoint and, though renouncing the dialectic method, has not, save in a few inconspicuous details, succeeded in working his way to independence of his most ingenious model, which is now coming to be considered in Germany as one of the most suggestive of all products of philosophical thought.¹⁴

Is there in consciousness a spontaneous ethical estimate of human actions, apart from all conformity to outer authority or influence? With the discussion of this great question the second part, which is entitled the “True Ethical Consciousness,” begins and considers: (a) Ethical motives, or subjective moral principles; (b) ethical ends, or objective moral principles; (c) the ultimate and absolute moral principle. Under (a) are considered: (1) The æsthetic moral principles of taste, the existence of which enables us to answer the above question, which is purely empirical, affirmatively by asserting only the existence of such a principle without telling or knowing what it requires. Its psychological origin is here of no importance. It is considered before feeling, not because it is simpler but because its judgments are more objective and independent of personal well being. This is not to be confounded with Herbart's ethical sensation, which considers only the form of the act itself. Good moral taste inclines to moderation, to the avoiding of extremes and eccentricities. Yet the doctrine of the golden mean, as inferred from Aristotle, can lead only to the apotheosis of mediocrity. Harmony among the elements of the individual soul is also necessary. Evil is the undue accentuation of some one impulse, which is impossible for souls which are beautiful in the platonic sense, and which, no less than a talent for music, are born, not made. If we widen the principle to universal harmony, as Samuel Clarke strove to do by his theory of the fitness of things grounded in the will of God, or according to the Stoic principle of conformity with nature, we still find the idea of harmony indefinable, and, even if once agreed upon, disturbed by every change; hence morality is made a postulate in the Wolffian precept, perfice te ipsem. This is also indefinite, although it has the advantage of substituting a practical for a theoretical scheme. It leads, however, to the conception of countless ethical ideals from which, by the survival and development of the fittest, have developed the conceptions of God and Christ as good, which are the noblest of moral ideals. But there can be no absolute goodness, for ethical qualification of function requires finiteness and relativity. Hence, from the necessity of having concrete and realized ideals, springs the artistic conception of life with its heroes, madonnas, saints, etc. This is the consummation of the æsthetic principle. Life is a work of art, as in “Wilhelm Meister,” the poetic embodiment of an ethico-æsthetic sentiment. But thus the world comes to seem coarse and rough, and life stagey. When taste is cultivated before reason and understanding there is an inevitable loss of energy. Form is sacrificed to substance. Man becomes most manly when he plays the man. Hence the principle issues in idle dilettantism. “Each to his taste,” “because it pleases one,” are purely subjective maxims, and bring us to a new principle—(2), moral feeling, which is the ultimate thing in consciousness, mediating between it and the unconscious will. This is the standpoint of the Scotch moralists since Hutcheson. But neither benevolence nor Shaftesbury's moral sense, which is characterized as the embryonic unity of moral taste and feeling before reflection, is specific enough. True, the moral culture of woman must be based directly upon this factor, but the depth of her ethical character has been overrated. The deepest motives rarely come to the surface even in man. The moral element is a complex of many elements, which Hartmann proceeds to characterize. Moral self-feeling is a commendable pride and dignity. Ethical man cannot think too highly of himself. But, so far from despising or loving to humiliate others, he respects them, according to the Kantian precept, as self-ends. He is never proud of works, or achievements, virtue or wealth, or even divine grace in the heart, or anything from which any members of humanity are excluded. This noble pride is always grounded on an “inner possibility of moral personality” which is open to all. It is not inconsistent with self-reproach, but is justly shy of exposing imperfections to others. It is independent, autonomous and inconsistent with the “humility of heteronomy” taught by Christian ethics. The Stoics, and especially Fichte, are its best illustrations. This, however, is an imperfect principle. Its warmth and mildness are inward, and the character grows externally cold and perhaps rough and severe. A broader standpoint is reached when we contemplate the natural depression which follows a wrong or the exaltation after a right action. This after-feeling may be merely intellectual, resulting from a right or wrong judgment, as a good or bad investment, a proven or disproven theory, etc.; or it may be “characterological,” resulting from the conflict of two instincts, as in a maiden's choice between the will of her parents and of her wooer, or in the case of swallows, who must refuse to migrate with their fellows or leave their belated and callow young to perish. These are selfish impulses not necessarily moral, although they may become so by a special accident. The church has greatly emphasized the importance of regret for the irrevocable past, and even made the depth of this feeling a measure of the strength of the moral principle. It is, however, wholly bad, save in penitentiaries and among people who have developed no moral autonomy. It depresses the individual's ethical self-trust, and, in a word, demoralizes and throws him into the hands of the priests (in the confessional), and indirectly encourages him to commit secret sins, because God comes to seem more appeasable than men. Yet it cannot be said, with Spinoza, that purely rational reflection is enough. Reactive feelings, e.g., are practically inexpugnable from the moral budget. The instinct of retaliation which was once expressed in the law of equivalence—eye for eye, blood for blood, etc.—still inclines the masses to conceive state punishment as revenge, instead of a mere “prophylactic” against future wrong doing. No penalty should ever be inflicted because a law has been broken, but that laws may not be broken again. Protection of the community, not reformation of the criminal, is its object. So, too, the opposite feeling of gratitude should be restricted to a narrow sphere. The motive of every reward is that good may again be done. Anything more leads to unjust preferences, nepotism, and every species of corruption. To forgive a wrong, harmless save to the doer, and to be indifferent to a favor helpful only to one, is, however, impossible. The social instinct is almost as ineradicable as the opposite instinct of self-preservation. Instead of being, according to Grotius, the ground of legality, it is better regarded as the mediator between egoism and the true moral instincts. Isolation produces pathological conditions sometimes even in animals, but the elimination of all social inequalities would degrade and destroy even animal society. The social instinct is specialized in sympathy, historically one of the first feelings of social life, which is defined as a passive reaction on the passive feelings of others. Susceptibility to this sentiment is very fluctuating. It never impels to acts of great magnanimity, it is suppressed by every great idea or strong passion, as in war, and at best it has to do only with the sufferings and never with the rights of individuals. Schopenhauer erred in asserting that love for one's fellow men was pity, which he made the only motive to acts of moral worth. True, every motive from its very concept and name must appeal to our own weal or woe, but the high moral value of sympathy springs from its exorcism of the egoistic elements, though it must ever remain in a sense subsidiary and imperfect. Piety is “the feeling we experience toward persons whose ethical character we respect.” It is the “noblest bond between men” and strongest defense of a strong character. The desire to attain it is one of the deepest and best moral motives. Toward parents, pastors, and the dead, e.g., it is a free and spontaneous rendering of homage which casts out jealousy, makes us forget small failings, and worship the autonomous character and actions of a hero from no extraneous motive. It is an invaluable propadeutic principle and he who is too vulgarly democratic to feel it is lost morally. The instinct of loyalty implies trust in the constancy of its object. This peculiarly German virtue, illustrated by stories of Penelope, Gudrun, Griselda, etc., may be exercised toward law, profession, party, customs, or country as well as toward individuals. It is also expressed in the covenant by which the Jews were bound to Jehovah and the Christian to Christ; but a vow, oath, or promise can be at best only the emphatic expression of a matured intention which may change. Love, the unity of the preceding elements, is true to its object though false to all things else. The ego perishes, all conflict and all disagreement are impossible. In perfect love the “all-unity-feeling, which flickers in pity, burns with a bright and steady flame.” To it belong all the predicates of the Pauline charity. It suffers long, believes all things, hopes all things, never dies, etc. It is an identity feeling in which all longing and discontent are forever satisfied. But it is apt to remain specific and individual, and even if it be deepened and broadened it is still vague and indefinite, hence the need of an absolute yet explicit imperative sense of duty. This sense, whether opposed to, coinciding, or at-oned with natural desire, is always in itself an inclination, to which it can never, as Kant thought, be absolutely opposed. Yet because there are conflicts, the state of innocency, instead of being morally highest, is lowest, and the ethical consciousness must be developed to the utmost, while the absolute harmony between duty and desire remains an unattained ideal. Moreover, duty is a contentless, merely formal sense of obligation to which knowledge must come to give substance. Like each of the previous principles it has a moral value not by its own right, but only in so far as it unconsciously serves an end. To become, however, truly moral it must be rationalized. Taste and feeling are particular and concrete, and the higher principle of (3) rational morality, which is more general and abstract, is unfolded. Rationality, like all else in consciousness, e.g., taste and feeling, is an instinct emerging from an unconscious background, which, by its own automatic law, it gradually illuminates. As practical reason it imposes its imperative form, as yet unreasoned, upon previously alogical thoughts and actions. Yet it is not mere form, as Kant argued, but is itself as much product and material of subjective experience as anything else in consciousness. The field of its application is the understanding, which is the individual element. Moral truth is the practical reason's knowledge of itself, at first erroneous and imperfect. Every action is essentially a logical proposition in the truth or falsity of which lies the rightness or wrongness of the act, and to judge of the latter, the proposition must be explicitly stated as such. To do this, again, is an innate instinct, but it requires courage. Universal falsity, the natural defense of the weak, would destroy all human society, the conventionalities of which, coupled with those of political, mercantile, and religious life, have wrapped the modern world in a network of mutual flattery, hypocrisy, and deceit, which more than offsets the éclaircissement of science. This condition, however, is transient. The principle of freedom is negative and, abstractly considered, is not a demand of reason, which is concerned only with the form and degree of each concrete case of constraint. In every department of life, save religion alone, compulsion is necessary. Unlimited freedom is the state of nature and every tendency toward it is retrogression. What all men need is a rational tyranny, if it only hold them to a steady development, according to the laws of their own nature. Progress in the world-process consists in growth in the consciousness of necessity, as an inner law, which must be obeyed, as Hegel said, freely. Again, all development is by differentiation of extensive and intensive inequality.

All the above may also be said of inner freedom, which has no value in itself but only for the ends it makes possible. The liberum arbitrium indifferentiœ, like the problems of perpetual motion, or the quadrature of the circle, is practically impossible, and freedom is not a matter of theory or of æsthetics. The “cultus of arbitrariness,” best illustrated, e.g., in Schlegel's misuse of the Fichtean principle of the sovereignty of the ego, is the nearest possible approach to indeterminism. “There must be no pathological disturbance of the normal physiological process of the genesis of the act of willing.” This gives occasion for an extended discussion on the nature of individual and especially conscious responsibility as affected by insanity, intoxication, vicious habits, and passions, delusions of the senses, the constraint of egoism, external authority, excessive feeling, and even sleepiness, of all, in short, which interferes with self-control. Indeterminism is irreconcilable with any rational conception of the world as governed by law and of moral life as conditioned by duties, instincts, and desires, and is never based on direct subjective experience. The transcendental principle of freedom is negatively independent of the individual character on account of its intrinsic determination, and positively it is the asiety of the individual with respect to his own essence. Kant, and especially Schopenhauer, who held causality to be the universal law of all thought and being, sought to relegate freedom from operari to esse, the former by the well-known distinction between the intelligible and the empirical character, and the latter by asserting an identity between the thing in itself of individuality and the intelligible character. Hartmann, however, declares that indeterminate freedom is not only irreconcilable with the fundamental conditions of the moral life, but is impossible and logically inconceivable in every phenomenal sphere. It is possible only for the absolute will. Schelling's self-positing of the ego is conceived by him not as a free transcendental act of choice, but as a sort of contradiction. If Divine Grace is accepted by an act of choice, it is all a free and natural development of the individual function. If it is something which takes possession of the soul unbidden, it destroys the possibility of a free act. To determine the rational distribution of non-freedom and non-equality in the world we must introduce the principle of order “as the first distinct tenable form of rational morality.” Harmony, which is the law, and custom, which is the product of this new element, make progress possible and safe. Justice is the “later and more specific deposit of custom,” and its development is a continuous conflict between what was and what will be rational. Against striving egoism right must appear might, but only for help to dispense with might. There is no natural right save as an unconscious instinct which cannot be formulated, but is inadequately expressed in codes, constitutions, etc. Schopenhauer held that wrong is positive and right is primitively negative, and its commands are prohibitions. This is, however, only superficial and accidental, due to man's proneness to evil. The essential thing in law, as in duty, is positive, e.g., to pay taxes, educate children, testify in courts, etc. Rightness is made a predicate of actions; and justice, which must always be de lege lata, never de lege ferenda, is, in turn, a predicate of judicial decision. Yet literal and absolute justice is unjust and must be discreetly tempered with mercy. This is the feminine element, which is always prone to respect persons to the neglect of legality, principle and even honesty. The higher standpoint thus introduced is equity. Recognizing that summum jus may be summa injuria, it takes account of palliating circumstances. This is the highest of all moral duties—noblesse oblige. It is not mere womanly kindness of heart, still less is it indifference to right. This, of course, leads to the discussion of moral ends, the ultimate question for all rational morality. This chapter is an earnest plea for the author's familiar teleological conception of the universe which he applies to ethics by urging that the individual is not an end in nature, but is subordinate, relative, and even insignificant, as witness the premature perishing of all but a very few fittest cells, germs, embryos, young animals, etc., in the world. Nor can the sum of individual self-ends collectively be, as Kant thought, the final end of the moral world. Even these are subordinate in the nth degree to the all-embracing but unfathomable ends of the Absolute. Means can never be sanctified by ends, because all things are both ends and means, save that “far off divine event” toward which the world is moving, and which is too remote and too inscrutable to be materially served by any of the feeble offices of consciousness. The higher egoism is thus bankrupt and the ethical soul turns to altruistic social ends.

Under (b) the three Objective Aims or Ends of the Ethico-moral Principle are considered. First, the aim of social eudæmonism, or of collective well-being, best represented, we are told, by Mill's essay on “Utilitarianism,” is discussed. The greatest enjoyment for the greatest number would be increased by the decay of culture, which is the chief enemy of general happiness. If admitted as a principle it would lead to mediocrity, commonplace comforts, belief in whatever was most agreeable or convenient, and, in short, to universal reanimalization. Public and private weal, individual and general happiness, instead of being in any sense the same, are antagonistic at every point, and we are almost encouraged to ask whether Mill was not guilty of a pious fraud in telling us that the happiness of other people is identical with our own. Social democracy, which takes the principle in earnest, is animated by what Hartmann in the Philosophy of the Unconscious has designated as the third or materialistic stage of optimistic illusion, viz., the hope of positive ultimate happiness for mankind on this earth. It takes no account of the metaphysical unity of the race. Imaginary satisfaction and real barbarity reconciled by Jesuitism would be the result. The present party conflict in Germany is thus essentially ethical. A higher moral principle is that of the evolution of culture. The quest for happiness now appears as it really is, viz., as a means of developing culture. This is the raison d'être of humanity. As individual enjoyment must be often surrendered for the weal of the community, so the happiness of any given society or generation must be subordinated to the future welfare of the race. Upon this new “philosophy of progress,” which it is urged is the only solid basis for any ethical system, Hartmann lays great stress. From it the socialist may learn respect for historical continuity while it widens the horizon of the conscience and goes far to elevate it to the rank of a truly philosophical faculty. In fact, every science of nature or of mind has now become only history. True, the culture of a high civilization necessarily produces misery, poverty and vandalism. It tends to the precocious cephalization of children, excuses competition and even war—but this is well, inasmuch as it is only the most vigorous and virtuous, and, above all, the most intelligent who survive and inherit the earth. The best minds are now turned to the highest problem of thought, viz., the philosophy of history, understood in the widest sense as the genesis of things and the apotheosis of the teleological order. Here appears the principle of a moral world order, in which alone social eudæmonism and culture can be to some extent harmonized. Objective moral principles, as the now at last partially known ends of the world, must be made individual motives or they are unconstraining and foreign, and our purposes must be identified with the purpose of the world or they have no significance. Only as we freely surrender private happiness or any lower end for the welfare of higher ends do our acts become monumenta in the absolute teleology with which our own essence is now not merely actually, but consciously identical. We not only know but autonomously will to follow non-egoistic absolute ends as essentially our own. Only so far as we accept its unconscious ends as our own, can we develop the full consciousness that our will is but a branch of the all-will, whose life process is the order of cosmic development. Evil is too radical in the world and in man to be either explained or overcome save by the introduction of a transcendent principle. Hence we are brought finally to consider (c).

(C) The primal and absolute foundations of morality. These are detailed at length as (1) the monistic principle of essential identity of all individuals, most instinctive in love, most conscious in deliberate self-renunciation; (2) the religious principle of identity with the absolute, where perfect duty and pure religion are seen to be at one; (3) the absolute principle of teleology as our own essence wherein all historic and metaphysico-monistic tendencies are synthesized; and (4) the principle of redemption as negative absolute eudæmonism. Under the last head he urges that if the notion of an Absolute, or of God, is to have any value as an hypothesis, we must conceive him as unhappy before the beginning of things. The final cause of creation was not, as Hegel believed, a self-mirroring of the Absolute. The unfolding of the universe is rather a pathological healing process which goes on within the Absolute. The universe is a “plaster to draw its inner pain outward.” The positive transcendental happiness of God before creation is purely mythic. The divine complacency which pronounced all that was made “very good” expressed no positive joy or satisfaction, but only an amelioration of an inner woe. Cultured piety sees that pity, not love, for God is man's highest duty. The emancipation of the Absolute from its transcendent unhappiness may never be complete. New generations, races, worlds may ever perpetuate the immanent torture, nearing only by asymptotic approaches an equilibrium between universal pleasure and pain. But we must never forget that the world and the Absolute must be redeemed, if at all, together. God can redeem the world only by being redeemed by it. Only the phenomenally selfish individual, who seeks pleasure, fancies that he can find release from the duty of universal coöperation in death, which he is too puny-souled to seek. All the elect understand that the supreme duty of redeeming God from pain, or of “ameliorating the negative eudæmonism of the Absolute” is a duty which will end only with the universe itself. The work closes with the sentence: “Real existence is the incarnation of deity; the world process is the passion-history of God made flesh, and at the same time is the way to the redemption of him who was satisfied in the flesh. To be moral is to lend a helping hand in shortening this way of suffering and of redemption.”

This work exhibits a broader and more philosophical plan of treatment than is found in any modern ethical text-book, even if the author's critical and analytical power does not justify its pretentious title. His transitions are often forced and artificial, his spirit is more dogmatic and often scarcely less mystic than in his earlier writings, while the book, though expressly addressed to lay readers, is far less simple in style. It is impossible to escape the conviction, either in perusing his works or in personal intercourse with the man, that his characteristic positions are matters of feeling and temperament even more than with Lotze. The latter expressly says to the reader, “I offer you my most matured reflections not because I know or can teach you anything, but because I am in ignorance and in doubt like you, and deem it the highest duty of each thoughtful man to do what he can to clear up some doubt, lighten some oppressed heart, and heighten æsthetic pleasure in order that by standing in the nearest and most sacred personal (i. e., speculative) relations to each other we may forget for the time being the oppression of nescience, although we are able to solve no problem—which, indeed, no individual but only an age is in any degree able to do.” Hartmann, on the other hand, seems to consider his system a letter-patent by which the truth of the universe is made in some sense his monopoly. He elaborates with hyper-subtle refinement minute differentiæ between his system and the views of Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, etc., and yet always with a messianic air as though it were praise enough for these men to play the rôle of prophets, dimly and unconsciously heralding the full dispensation of his new gospel. The old philosophic evolutionism is the bottom motive of all his works. In his boyish period (Philosophy of the Unconscious) this was uncritically fused with Schelling's philosophy of a world soul. Matter is “extinct mind,” “organic and inorganic nature reciprocally determining each other,” “the ideality of conscious and unconscious activity,” “history as the self-revelation of the absolute,” “matter as the sleeping vegetable and this as sleeping animal life.” The organization of the world-being is inner evolution following the law of potencies, all strictly teleological. Each of these conceptions is rehabilitated by simply grouping about each stage a very readable array of biological and other facts. In this work Hegel's immanent logical development is very unsatisfactorily applied to the most complex questions of human life.

We cannot quite agree with Drews, the leader of the Hartmann revival, that his religious work is his best contribution, insightful and stimulating though that is. We should place his developmental history of ethics on a higher plane. This, supplemented as it should be by Sutherland's Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct (London, 1898), represents the advent of geneticism into the domain of ethics. Together they are the highwater mark of scientific thinking along this line and are hardly less epoch-making here than the work of C. F. Baur was for Christianity. Henceforth the moral instinct itself and all theories concerning its nature must be considered as the product of evolution and treated accordingly, rather than by the old way of introspection and dogmatism. Morals will gain far more than it loses by this change of viewpoint.

Hartmann was an avatar of the mighty spirit of German idealism, which, after several decades of oblivion in musty tomes and unfrequented lecture rooms, suddenly reappears in the daylight of modern science and challenges the culture and methods of the present in the name of those of the past. It is often said that only Hartmann's pessimism will survive him, but this we are compelled to consider a gloomy poem by a sensitive æsthetic soul whom fame does not comfort for personal misfortune or even for the ills of life. To answer him one must go up and down throughout the whole intellectual world and tediously tear off the labels, “Unconscious” and “Pessimistic,” which he has pasted on most of the prominent facts of history, science, and literature; in other words, one must write several thousand pages, like him. Such a one who has once read him and felt the satisfaction not usually awaiting those who turn the last leaf of a philosophical work, viz., of finishing and understanding all the author thinks through and through, would be least of all disposed to attempt it. He is so superficial and so uncritical, quoting Baumgärtner, who discusses with great array of scientific learning the question whether Adam had a navel, whether the first man lived in water, etc., undiscriminatingly along with Helmholtz and Wundt, that the farther we read the more harmless do his extravaganzas seem. His pessimism calls attention irresistibly to himself. In spite of his sensitive protests, it is impossible at times for a critic, despite the kindliest personal feelings, to regard him otherwise than as a psycho-pathological problem, and to ask what physiological or other reason will explain why an autocratic and vigorous young soldier, suddenly robbed of his career, his associations, his personal comeliness, his fortune and largely, even, of the use of his muscles—those most faithful servants of the will—living in retirement with a wife sensitive, cultivated, and invalid like himself, should find satisfaction in believing and teaching that all happiness is born of ignorance and that the Deity is in need of human pity and help? We have no present wish to discuss this problem, but Herr v. Hartmann should at least not have forgotten, when he told the complacent world that it is miserable in spite of fancied happiness, that it would be apt, before accepting his pessimistic gospel, to ask most searchingly if the unhappiness which he fancied is or should be universal was not really his own?

Hartmann has of late been taken more seriously, especially since his death. Since Descartes consciousness has been accepted as the supreme oracle in philosophy, and when this young unknown outsider challenged its authority and proposed the opposite principle, the Unconscious, for the place consciousness had so long occupied, it seemed like proposing to erect an altar to an unknown god. Professordom was aghast, and no one either accepted or understood it. The Unconscious was derided as a negative adjective used as if it were a positive noun. It was called a metaphysical and poetic fiction, a verbal fetich, at best, as we saw above, a new avatar of Spinoza's substance, Fichte's ego, Hegel's idea, Schopenhauer's will, an apotheosis of the unknowable, etc. Only after his death did Arthur Drews (whose book arguing that no such person as Jesus ever lived lately set the German theological world agog) urge that this first product of Hartmann's genius marked a third epoch in philosophy, one distinctly comparable with those of Plato and Descartes, the founder of the consciousness philosophy. German idealism had identified consciousness and reality. This Hartmann denied and sought to identify reality with unconsciousness, thus making reality unknown and consciousness only phenomenal. All attempts to attain apodeitic knowledge of reality itself are abortive, for reality is forever at bottom essentially uncognizable and unconscious. All so-called certain knowledge of Nature or mind is really only hypothetical. It was the wish for certainty that made rationalism and deduction, and only when we see that such cataleptic conviction as idealism has sought is unattainable is the field for induction open. Now philosophy can call science to its aid and can go beyond it as he expressed in his “Speculative results by inductive natural history methods.” On the other hand, science hesitated to respond to his call to use its results as a spring-board to a higher appreciation of reality. But if reality does not inhere in us and can never be got from consciousness, there remains the question—does it exist and, if so, where? This he calls the basal problem of epistemology. Whether we regard consciousness as content or form, as individual or absolute, or as consciousness überhaupt (Windelband und Rehmke), or as pure experience with Avenarius, it can give us no reality, but always points beyond itself. In later writings (On Kant's Theory of Knowledge and his History of Metaphysics) Hartmann pointed out the absurd propositions, the preposterous methods, nomenclature, and contradictory conclusions of Kant, whom no writer seems to have so bitterly antagonized or so carefully to have studied (Cohen, Veihinger, and the Kant philologues). Only in the last ten to fifteen years, while the Kant cult has so rapidly declined, have the significance and value of this trenchant and destructive criticism of Hartmann's, which fell dead from the press in the day it appeared, been felt. Now the new admirers of Hartmann are saying that he overthrew Kant a quarter of a century ago, and that it was he who put an end to the long Kant-enchantment of Germany, although, like the foes of Cock Robin, others, too, claim to have killed it. To Hartmann, Kant was only an apostle of confusion, the evil genius of modern philosophy, who brought obfuscation and delayed progress and whom he used to speak of in social converse as der alte Confusionsrath. Since categories are not functions of consciousness, their applicability beyond experience need not be denied. Now cause is the chief bridge from immanence to transcendence and over it we can reach the Ding-an-sich. Thus his system is in this sense transcendental as opposed to both ideal and naïve realism. Kant was really naïve in saying that concepts are objects. Our thoughts, feelings, acts of will as given do not reveal ourselves any more than the senses do the ipsissimal nature of things. They only show us how we appear. Hence no experience can possibly be immediate. That it can be so is a fiction on which Wundt has built his entire psychology and metaphysics. Consciousness is only a set of impressions or even sensations. Knowledge is only a “logicization” of experience by means of unconscious intellectual functions. Consciousness brings only the passive condition for the operation of these functions and is not a real subject functioning apodeictically. The Unconscious is so to itself as well as to us. It is the bearer of consciousness and is, in fact, reality. Things in themselves are the causes of sensation and of consciousness and are the atoms, and the energies of the physiological principles of life, a position which he developed later in his “Views of Physics and of Life.”

The energetics of Ostwald and Mach, who hold that the efficiency of nature expresses itself in mechanical, chemical, optical, electrical, and other ways, he rejects, because it makes these qualities, which are merely in consciousness, objective. He prefers the original view of Clausius and Helmholtz and Thompson, that all energies are summations of variously composed mechanical and molecular energies, regarding matter as the center of energies, as a system of central atomic forces. This he calls his dynamism.

As early as 1873, he had urged that life adds no autonomous principle to the mechanics of energies and he took great satisfaction in his later life in having this principle of an inner developmental nisus held as the first expression of neo-Darwinism and neo-vitalism. Force and will are expressions of the same Unconscious, one without and one within. Without will, we can not know force. Feeling is the limitation or inhibition of will and so is commonly painful, and here consciousness arises. Its feeling is directly as its intensity. Nature and consciousness are related as active and passive. So motion and consciousness coincide. Just as atoms are compounded into bodies and cells into plants and animals, so, and by the same unconscious power, atomic feelings are built up into the individual consciousness. The psyche is only one expression of Nature's impulse to organize.

The new psychology was just isolating itself from philosophy and metaphysics and setting up for itself and so becoming purely and solely a consciousness psychology, when Hartmann, like Carus, Fortlage, and J. H. Fichte, insisted that the cause of consciousness lay in the Unconscious. The consciousness psychology that ignores this, according to Hartmann's phrases, is caught in a cage, has castrated itself, cut its own tap-root, is going up a blind alley, etc. No mechanism of the content of consciousness or association, no spiritistic assumption of a real soul per se and a Nature neurologically approached can give us the true psyche. Modern psychologism, with its laboratory empiricism called introspection, is essentially bankrupt—if its books were balanced—and impotent. Hartmann's “Modern Psychology” is not even mentioned by Wundt in his Festschrift contributions to Kuno Fischer, wherein he prints the titles of all the psychological literature of the preceding twenty years.

Consciousness rests on three kinds of Unconscious: (a) Physiological (molecular dispositions of the nervous system, mediate and reflexes); (b) relative, or psychic processes unknown to the central consciousness but penetrable to a local peripheral consciousness of a lower order; and (c) the absolute Unconscious, or the immaterial like life and soul per se. Out of these consciousness is composed. Mœbius' Hopelessness of Psychology (1907) also says there is no way out but to recognize the Unconscious, even if it be only dynamic, and that to consider it as metaphysical only adds to the personal hopelessness of it all. The work of Breuer and Freud and his school, which Hartmann did not know, or at least never evaluated, are in his sense and have contributed to the present Hartmann revival. Drews says that he makes consciousness “a passive reflex of the inhibited activation of the Unconscious,” and if this is pathological, it is far less so than the results of the Freudian wish-repressions. The will is checked from without or within. Hence our nodes of collisions or acts of will we call sensations, which are not like Fichte's objects or non-egos, to which the feeling subject is posited by the will, but to which the feeling subject is passive. These reaction feelings are synthetized. To them the intellect contributes ever more as we ascend the scale of psychic life where activity increases and passivity declines, and so consciousness grows and accomplishes no less marvels than other views ascribe to it. But conscious soul is not primary but derived, and we must either ignore its relation to the body or accept some such mediation between material and psychic as his synthesis. We must adjust between Lotze's interaction and Fechner's parallelism. Hartmann identified soul and vital principle, and so far is an interactionist, yet the Lotzians, he thought, are wrong in deeming interaction immediate and in giving consciousness the active rôle. The parallelists he deems right in denying immediate interaction and the activity of consciousness, but wrong in ignoring a third unconscious action on both sides, and in not seeing the mediation involved in all interaction. For him causality works both ways. Consciousness is not passive because it is a product of arrest, but action on being externally checked is only turned inward and may become conscious. All activity is in itself unconscious and consciousness can only determine its time and direction. Drews says that, so long as we identify consciousness and being, parallelism and interaction are matters of taste. If consciousness is a real, active substratum, why deny its power to act on the organism and vice versa, while, if it is only a passive reflex of material functions, how can it have a function of its own? These views Hartmann mediated, somewhat as Kant did between preëstablished harmony and the theory of physical influx.

As for metaphysics, will and concept are one and inseparable, save by abstraction. In the Unconscious both are united. This is the synthesis of pan-logism and panthelism, or of Hegel and Schopenhauer. One cares for the what, the other for the that of existence. This is both monistic and dualistic. Wundt makes the concept inherent in the will and subordinate to it, but for Hartmann it is a step backward to subsume either one or the other, for each can be known only through the other and the logical and the alogical must coincide. The reverse of Wundt's position is the subjection of the will to the concept, as in gnosticism, with which Hartmann has often been charged. To this he has less objection. His metaphysics seek to unite concrete monism and idealism into ideal realism, for will and concept are attributes of the same absolute substance. This makes him the first pantheist who could accept real evolution with beginning, goal, and end. Will can pass through series of stages and return to its original state of potentialities. The end is an act of consciousness, intelligence determining the will, as in the oriental philosophy of renunciation. Consciousness is the highest immanent end of the world, the transcendental absolute goal. When this is attained, will has no more to do. Knowledge is unrest, and when it is accomplished and complete will sinks to peace, for knowledge is adequate. These eschatological views of his youthful first edition were largely modified later, but he is still judged by their crude first form in all the histories of philosophy that mention him.

His theory of categories is called the most unique since Hegel. He classifies them as those of consciousness, of objects, and of metaphysics. Least objected to is his doctrine of worths. Here he deals with pleasure and pain, and is a frank eudaemonologist and not a pessimist. He is generally regarded as a mere disciple of Schopenhauer, but he really far transcends him. He only condemns the shallow affirmation of the will to live. The world is for him neither worse than none, as Schopenhauer thought, nor is it the best of all possible worlds, as with Leibniz. All progress involves a negative judgment concerning both the past and present. Reason and consciousness always say that blind will is improvable. So he seeks to join eudæmonological pessimism with evolutionary optimism. In his later ethical and religious writings pessimism becomes an ever weaker factor. He held to the prepotence of pain over pleasure, but in the interests of morals and of piety. Kant's pessimism was mundane and his optimism transcendent. Hartmann emphasized pain here and abhorred the idea of transcendental pleasures as rewards of virtue. Neither these nor heteronomous authority could produce true morality. Both have their place, but only for childhood. What he sought was to curb individualism with abandon. This meant unbridled and unscrupulous selfishness and selfindulgence. He condemned Sterner's maximization of the ego, and he also feared the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number as leading to social democracy. All these expressions of the irrational will he would check by admitting pain as a large ingredient in the normal lot of man. As opposed to the then current tendency to give morals their own independent basis, he held them to be absolutely dependent upon metaphysical and religious views of the world.

His Letters on the Christian Religion appeared during the War of 1870, and under the pseudonym F. H. Miller, and so they attracted little attention until his final revision of them in 1905 under the title of The Christianity of the New Testament. This was met by a painful conspiracy of silence, for he said that religionists are unable to meet the present crisis. All his bitter polemic was not in hate but in love for the interests of true religion, as we have seen.

In his 800-page History of German Æthetics since Kant, and in his “Philosophy of the Beautiful” and various essays, Hartmann has developed a somewhat unique viewpoint. Beauty is always phenomenal. It is the appearance of the true Ding-an-sich, and has ideal reality immediately behind it. Thus a work of art is the truest of all phenomena, for it best represents metaphysical reality. It must also make an entirely disinterested appeal to the observer. æsthetic feeling is distinct from ordinary feeling in that it is more generic and less bound down to the concrete and individual. It brings a unique identity between the soul and the noumenal entity it stands for. The illusion transports us to the ideal world of beauty in which the soul delights to bathe and revel, for here supreme pleasure is found and the soul is satisfied, having reached its own true home. Beauty has many grades, and historically for the most part it has progressed up the scale of the æsthetic values. It bottoms upon the logical ideal of purpose in nature and culminates when the Unconscious in the artist utters itself irresistibly and spontaneously, and reveals to the onlooker the highest stages of perfection in the human domain or in Nature when supremely anthropomorphized. The artist thus finishes what the whole evolutionary momentum which is behind him has become and he carries it still higher. His work must be naïve and as unforced as the song of birds. If he plans his effects consciously we are repelled, for we want to see the inmost core of his own soul so as to get the exquisite feeling that human nature, as he reveals it, is sound as well as productive. His production is, in a sense, a superfluity, like the excess of vitality which prompts play. Thus Hartmann has sought a synthesis of the concepts of very diverse writers and schools. From Kant he borrowed disinterestedness; from Hegel, the logical idea of which art is the apotheosis; from Schopenhauer, the identification of subject and object in artistic contemplation; from Groos and Spencer, the play motif. And these elements, which he takes great pains to knit together logically, are further enriched by suggestions from Fechner, Köstien, Fischer, and many others, so that the unity he thinks he attains is not so much that of an immanent development of sequence stages (such as evidently is his ideal in his history of ethical stages) as a finished whole into which all historic factors have been incorporated. A work of art is more generic than actual objects in nature without becoming abstract, for, as it leaves the concrete, it gains more enrichment from the idea it embodies than it loses in departing from actual fact.

While his religious views are now attracting great attention, his æsthetics is still partly unknown even in his own land. Psychological æsthetics is somewhat advancing now in the universities, but his mediation between the speculative classics of idealism and modern empiricism has met with little fevor. His view, however, is free and wide, combining Volket's “significance for man” and Lipps' “personality in life,” yet especially opposing subjectivists and individualists. A work of art embodies a supersensible idea. So far he is with Hegel. For both æsthetics is an integral factor and therefore is of cosmic significance. This principle he carries through in great detail.

Through most of his writings runs a polemic vein, and he had defined his position with about all the chief thinkers of his time in Germany. He is always making more precise the positions of his earlier writings and sometimes modifying them, so that it is sometimes hard to see his final views. His polemic view, however, always has a positive goal, so he is about the very best of the modern philosophical critics. He discusses about every current question, generally with kindness, insight and clearness. His system is the most comprehensive of that of any one since Hegel. He has a clear and consistent Weltanschauung. In his countless essays he discusses the widest range of topics, often those of only current interest. Living in great isolation he, perhaps for this reason, had a passion for keeping in touch with all the great movements of his day and for establishing personal relations with the most diverse men and movements. He wished to bring his philosophy to bear, although he partially failed, if, indeed, he did not repel, by abstruse views and expressions not intelligible to the masses. Still Drews says he might have been a leading journalist or feuilletonist. He wrote for the weekly and even daily press on education, the Jews, feminism, fashions, spiritism, the German duel, taxes, suffrage, teetotalers, music, drama, social, religious, and political questions. He even reported.

Hartmann's proof of the eccentric, penumbral, peripheral, marginal nature of consciousness makes him a modern Copernicus. The erection of the Unconscious as a world principle marks the great revolution of views since the Renaissance, which was its prelude, in emancipating the world from the views of the past. Not those thinkers who throw over all metaphysics and speculation and base everything upon empiricism, but men like Hartmann, are true representatives of the modern spirit, for he conserves rather than ignores the best in the past. He is too high and too hard for most to read and understand. He is not a stylist, but his words are remarkably fit and adequate for his thought. He is very synthetic, often very technical, and feels free to use foreign words. He scorns to be merely interesting or popular. Neither his learning nor his writings attracted much attention, and he died in comparative obscurity, like Spinoza. Professor Stern at Berno pronounced an eulogy and so did Lasson in the little philosophical club of Berlin, but few academic people attended.

He was a product of the very best tendencies of German philosophic tradition, but lived amid the rank revival of naturalism, materialism, indifference, and skepticism that attended and followed the German War of 1870, when applied science and politics attracted the chief attention. He sought to save philosophy and to perpetuate it, that its traditions of 2,000 years be not lost. He refused a professorship on account of both health and the limitation to freedom, and well he did. Reinke's Welt als That is about as near Hartmannism as could anyone's be who did not know him. Modern empirical psychology Hartmann thought sustained by outer power and usefulness, not by its own inner worth and light. If we ever have a new idealism in the world again, it will be somewhat along the lines of Hartmann's Unconscious.

Hartmann's chief significance lies in his advocacy of the Unconscious and his opposition to the “consciousness philosophies,” which have been in academic vogue ever since Descartes. He saw more clearly than did even Comte (who rejected psychology in his hierarchy of sciences because of the fallacies inherent in introspection) their fallacies. To him, even more than to Lotze or even Fechner, Kant was the arch sophist, the Protagoras of modern times, because he taught distrust of the senses, which alone can give us true reality. Only observation and induction can supply the foundations of science and of philosophy as well. It was from their action and data that he inferred an unconscious teleology that pervaded all nature. In conformity to this view he sought to reinterpret epistemology, logic, metaphysics, and even æsthetics. If everything that shows design in the world is a product of instinct, and if all progress is measured by intellectualizing all aspects of nature, life and mind in their stages of evolving up to Fürsich-sein, until mind becomes adequate to nature, the process, though painful and inevitable, is ameliorative. Noetics and energetics should and will ultimately be equated, because only thus does the world find surcease from pain. Thus, for him the sadness and suffering in the world do not lead to quietism or oriental resignation, but are the chief spur to push on to nature and subdue the blind forces of the world and of the soul. To know is to completely envisage, and the norm for knowledge is the intuition of things as they are in Nature and not the construction of the objective by the subjective. Thus we start from sense and not from consciousness, and the former supplies the norm for the latter and not conversely. The great World-Form, or Autos, does not need eyes or consciousness to always do the one and only right thing. It would be less creative if it had them. Its inherency is due to its unconsciousness, and so with the best things in the life of man. But man is unhappy and out of the travail of his dis-ease-ment the noetic impulse is born and he evolves consciousness and science just as the Absolute did the world in order to ease his inner woe, or as a sinner extradites guilt or a Freudian patient an inner trauma by confession. Noesis is only therapy, but is a necessary, a benign palliative. Measured on an absolute scale, no pleasure is positive, but is only the abatement of pain, conscious or unconscious. Only when we know ourselves, not subjectively and introspectively, but objectively, as we do nature, do we redeem ourselves and with ourselves also the Absolute from pain, and thus alone come infinite truth, rest, and peace. The ceaseless, impelling will will cease its striving. The supreme wish, not only of the human race but of the cosmos, will be attained because it will have found its goal and fulfillment. When knowledge is adequate to and equipollent with will, history will end, for man will be a finished being in some superman, whereas he is now incomplete and in the making; and perhaps the most and best history before he attains his final place and poise in the world is yet to be made and written. The equilibrium which man has now lost will then be not only established but stable. Man and his univere will fit each other just as instinct or atomic forces fit their sphere, and thus generations, one like the other, will succeed one another as long as the present world-order lasts. The goal is still far off but every new discovery and law, every subjection of Nature to man's domain, and every new progress in hygiene, every true moral and religious advance contribute something to bring us nearer to it. Art is now largely idealization, and it enraptures us just because it anticipates this great day when it will be an exact photographic reproduction of man when he has attained his ideal in body and soul by a complete harmony with Nature. It now charms us because it is prophecy and suggests a future possibility, but ultimately its highest present form may be transcended, and when we are beyond it will seem reminiscence.

Notes

1. Mein Entwickelungsgang, 1874, in “Gesammelte Studien und Aufsätze.” Also Eduard von Hartmann, von Otto Braun, Stuttgart, 1909, 261 p.

2. Das Lebenswerk Eduard von Hartmann, Leipzig, Thomas, 1907, 67 pp. See also and especially his Hartmann's Philosophisches System, 2nd ed., 1906, pp. 937.

3. Die Naturwissenschaftliche Grundlage der Philosophie des Unbewussten von Oscar Schmidt, Prof. der Zoologie u. vergl. Anat., Strassburg, 1877, 86 pp.

4. See especially Das Ding an Sich und seine Beschaftenheit, 1872, and also Kritische Grundlegung des transcendentalen Realismus, 1875.

5. Pessimismus und seine Gegner. A. Taubert, 1872.

6. Der Allgeist. Grundzüge des Panpsychismus in Anschluss an die Philos. des. Unbew., 1874.

7. Das Unbewusste und der Pessimismus, 1873.

8. Der Gesunde Menschenverstand, 1872, 134 pp.

9. Der Kampf um's Dasein am Himmel.

10. Philosophie der Erlösung, von Phillip Mailander.

11. Beiträge zur Charakterologie, von Julius Bahnsen, 2 vols., 1867.

12. Unzeitmässige Betrachtungen von Friedrich Nietzsche, then a professor at Basle.

13. Phänomonologie des Sittlichen Bewusstseins.

14. See J. B. Baillier, Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, London, 1910, 2 vols., pp. 823, especially in introductory chapter.