OF THE SOUL. 287 



thought to look upon the will, the active principle, as 

 the determining factor of all mental life which as I 

 stated above plays an important part in what was once 

 erroneously considered its purely receptive side. Still 

 less purely psychological or realistic is the philosophy 

 of Eduard von Hartmann. He considers the purely 

 scientific mode of proceeding to be insufficient, and resorts 

 to the assumption of an unconscious power which makes 

 itself felt throughout the whole physical and mental 

 world, and by which all the chasms left in our empirical 

 knowledge of nature and mind are filled up. The terms 

 and conceptions by which we in ordinary language describe 

 the more mysterious sides of physical and mental life, 

 such as instinct, natural selection, association of ideas, 

 voluntary impulse, individual genius, and creative power, 

 are all traced back to the working of the Unconscious. 



The principles of von Hartuiann's philosophy, which has 

 had great influence abroad, especially in extra-academic 

 circles, will occupy us in some of the following chapters. 

 In the meantime it is interesting to note how von 

 Hartmann himself has given an exhaustive review of 61 . 

 modern German psychology. In this review he tries to conscious in 

 show how modern German psychology, which he dates 

 from Fechner and Lotze, is slowly but inevitably 

 approaching recognition of the unconscious element. 

 The main points of interest in modern psychology he 

 considers to be the importance and scope of the doctrine 

 of the unconscious, its relation to conscious mental 

 processes, and the part it plays in all the principal 

 psychological problems, such as, e.g., the relation of 

 willing to other mental processes, the problem of the 



