156 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



more than the ignorant, for the same reason that fools are generally 

 happier than people of sense, and the savage happier than the civilized 

 races. Happiness, in fact, is in an inverse ratio to the quantity of ex- 

 istence, and the more developed, the less coarse, a man's nervous sys- 

 tem is, the more he suffers ; now, the progress of humauity, wealth, 

 culture of mind, multiply man's needs and refine his nervous sensibility. 

 Wretchedness grows, then, with the consciousness of wretchedness. 

 But, thanks to the sovereign wisdom of the unconscious principle that 

 rules the universe, the world will at last arrive, through social cata- 

 clysms and by force of that very conviction of its misery, at annihila- 

 tion, which will be the term of all its woes. 



Hartmann seems, therefore, to concede the position to those who 

 argue that religions and creeds in general are all that has made human 

 life endurable and civilization possible. There will be more minds 

 ready to accept his testimony in favor of the usefulness of illusions 

 than there will be to adopt that Utopia of annihilation which in his 

 view must take their place in the future. Three grand illusions have 

 in turn sustained humanity, up to this day: The first, the illusion of 

 childhood and the ancient world, consisted in the dream that happiness 

 might be actually attained by the individual, and during the present 

 life. The second illusion, which replaced this, was the fancy that the in- 

 dividual will attain happiness after his death, in a life transcending the 

 present. The last is the grand modern illusion, that of progress, which 

 teaches that happiness, as it cannot be the individual's aim, either in 

 this life or in another, must be sought for the species in the future of 

 humanity, in the evolution of the world. To all these illusions suc- 

 ceeds the deception of humanity's old age, reaching the term of its de- 

 velopment of consciousness, and recognizing at last that happiness is 

 nothing else than the absence of pain, and can only be realized by the 

 annihilation of being. 



Hartmann takes care to warn his readers that they deceive them- 

 selves if they look for consolation and hope in philosophy. For such 

 objects, books of religion exist. But philosophy pursues truth exclu- 

 sively, careless whether its acquirement sustains or contradicts the 

 sentiments inspired by the illusions of instinct. Philosophy is hard, 

 cold, insensible as stone. Floating in the ether of pure thought, it 

 gravitates toward the icy knowledge of existence, its causes, and its 

 nature. And if man fails in the moral strength to endure the over- 

 whelming results of his thought, if his heart yields to the spasm of 

 despair, if he gives himself up to desolation, what will philosophy do ? 

 Will it revive his courage ? No ! it will merely note down these facts 

 of despair and desolation as a precious contribution to its materials for 

 physiological observation. And when, on the other hand, meditation 

 upon the truth fills stronger souls with sacred indignation and noble 

 rage, a repressed wrath against this empty masquerade of existence 

 or if that wrath breaks into bursts of Mephistophelian humor, or pours 



