OF THE UNITY OF THOUGHT. 677 



also no doubt that he anticipated many lines of 

 thought which have been developed in the recent 

 psychological literature of France and England, where 

 the term " Subconscious " has served in many instances 

 to denote what von Hartmann terms the " Unconscious." 

 From all this we gather that Hartmann aimed at a 

 unification of thought and knowledge as a formal de- 

 sideratum of the philosophic mind ; but he does not 

 confine the aim of philosophy to this purely formal or 

 logical task. He has likewise a religious interest, and so. 



Religious 



in this respect he is much more nearly related to the interest 



in von 



idealistic movement of thought in Germany than to the Hartmann - 

 realistic or scientific. With the former he believes that 

 it is the object of speculation to arrive at a reasoned 

 creed, but he characteristically declines to admit that 

 such a creed can rise to apodictic certainty. It is only 

 a question of greater or less probability, such as is 

 gained and increased by the processes of observation and 

 inductive reasoning. But though he denies the exist- 

 ence of any absolute or final authority in matters of 

 belief he does not accept a purely ethical creed. He 

 does not think that a system of ethics can be built up 

 without a religious foundation ; with him this religious 

 foundation is not that of an historical religion or revela- 

 tion : it is metaphysical, and the distinct object of much 

 of his later writings consisted in the construction of a 

 metaphysical creed in which the valuable elements of 

 existing historical religions, including Christianity, shall 

 be brought together and metaphysically supported. 



In a history of Philosophical Thought as distinguished 

 from a History of Philosophy, it is hardly possible to 



