A NEW PHASE OF GERMAN THOUGHT. 155 



The book before us is one full of vigorous discussion, first published in 

 1869, repeated in the fourth edition already, which has made a power- 

 ful impression in Germany, and would assuredly have been heard of in 

 France if the deplorable events of later years had not distracted atten- 

 tion from speculative studies. The book we speak of is the " Philoso- 

 phy of the Unconscious," by Edward de Hartmann. 



Though Hartmann adopts a very different system of metaphysics 

 from Schopenhauer's, he admits having borrowed from that philosopher 

 the point of departure of his system ; his moral views are similar, if 

 not identical ; he has the same fellow-feeling with Eastern philosophies, 

 the same pessimist color in his view of the world and of existence in 

 general. Besides, Hartmann announces himself as a disciple of Schel- 

 ling, and thus links himself with the romantic school. Just as he has 

 a strongly-marked leaning toward eclecticism, and fancies he can rec- 

 oncile the two systems of Hegel and of Schopenhauer, so too he attempts 

 to fuse together optimism and pessimism : but it is for the sake of 

 maintaining that even in the best of possible worlds, which naturally 

 is our own, evil still prevails immeasurably over good. For him, as 

 for Plato, for the old religions, existence is a fall. The human race, 

 like all beings in the universe, is the prey of many miseries while tasting 

 but few joys, and the advance of philosophy consists in gaining an ever- 

 clearer conviction of this sad truth. Meanwhile, man is deluded by 

 instincts that make him cling to life, and urge him to cares for its 

 preservation and reproduction. These instincts are a divine blessing, 

 since they were necessary to keep life going, to make civilization pos- 

 sible, to give man time for climbing toward philosophic intelligence, 

 and in a word to invest triumphant science with the power to unseal 

 his eyes to the wretchedness of his state : man at the outset must needs 

 be sustained by the delusive love of life, that he might some clay win 

 the power of willing, not merely his own non-existence, which Schopen 

 hauer contented himself with, but the non-existence of the whole race 

 too, and even, if we clearly take in Hartmann's doctrine, the annihilation 

 of all real being. When sufficiently enlightened, man will acknowledge 

 the vanity of his desires, and let himself die of disgust. If high intel- 

 lects, great poets, thinkers of genius, are for the most part melancholy, 

 it is because they draw nearer to the truth than the ignorant crowd, 

 ruled wholly by its instincts. The discovery that life is unendurable 

 is pregnant perhaps with awful catastrophes for the future ; the masses 

 will grow more and more restive in their misery ; formerly they felt 

 little of it except when their stomachs grumbled, but the older the 

 world gets, the more threateningly the spectre of pauperism rises. The 

 social question of our time rests, in the last analysis, only on the 

 stronger sense of their sufferings that has seized the working-classes, 

 although their situation is a golden one compared with what it was two 

 centuries ago, when the social question had no existence. And yet the 

 rich are even more to be pitied than the poor, the educated classes 



