LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 115 



Hartmann is now at length well ashore on the 

 familiar coasts of Schopenhauerland. This World- 

 child of clairvoyant virgin Idea and darkling brutal 

 Will is no product of far-sighted love, endowed with 

 an exhaustless future of joy. It is the offspring of 

 violation, of a chance burst of passion, and its being 

 carries in it the germs of misery ever expanding. 

 This gloomy theme Hartmann now pursues statis- 

 tically over all the provinces of experience, seeking 

 to prove that suffering everywhere outbalances 

 happiness, that "he that increaseth knowledge in- 

 creaseth sorrow," the pitch of anguish rising higher 

 and higher as Nature ascends in the scale of con- 

 sciousness, and especially as man enlarges and 

 quickens that intelligence whose chief result, from 

 the nature of the case, must be the keener and 

 keener sense of the deceitfulness of life. 



Nor, continues Hartmann, let any one hope to 

 evade this conclusion by theories of possible com- 

 pensation. Men no doubt usually live in one of 

 Three Stages of Illusion in regard to this essential 

 misery of life. They either think that even in this 

 world the sum of joy so far exceeds the sum of sor- 

 row as to make existence here substantially good ; 

 or, if sobered out of this by inexorable experience, 

 they take refuge in the Hereafter, in the prospect of 

 an endless opportunity beyond the grave, — a refuge 

 of lies, for the one Unconscious is the sole basis 



