590 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



power of abstract human reasoning which characterised 



34. it. To the same school belonged likewise Eduard von 



As alsa Von 



Hartmann. Hartmann, and, although it cannot be claimed for his 

 philosophy that it has had any direct influence on 

 European thought outside of Germany, it would be 

 unjust, in this connection, not to take note of this last 

 brilliant attempt to bring the fruitful and original ideas 

 which are contained in the idealistic systems of Schelling, 

 Hegel, and Schopenhauer into some connection and 

 harmony. In the middle of the century there had 

 been created, and there continues to extst, among many 

 thinking persons outside of the schools, the desire for a 

 comprehensive and reasoned creed in which some funda- 

 mental principle is shown to pervade, and to afford an 

 interpretation of, all nature, mind, and history. It 

 seems natural that the great world-problem which both 

 Hegel and Schopenhauer attempted to solve by specula- 

 tion, and which Schelling never lost sight of, should not 

 have been entirely abandoned without a last and supreme 

 effort to solve it ; and this with due recognition of the 

 enormous change which had come over modern thought 

 through the rapid development of the natural sciences. 



35. At the time when Hartmann published his first great 



The philoso- 



" h uncon he WOI> k (1869), the leading ideas just referred to still 

 formed, if not active convictions yet certainly very living 

 reminiscences in the minds of many thinking persons in 

 Germany, nor was the expectation absent that some 

 new system would arise affording a rational and com- 

 prehensive answer to the foremost problems of life, 

 mind, and society, which had become more pressing 



