120 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



sentimentalists who make up the body of Hartmann's 

 admirers. In contrast with the Germany that 

 responded to the sober and invigorating views of a 

 Kant, a Fichte, or a Hegel, these people are a 

 curious and disheartening study. Apart from the 

 revulsion that minds of moral vigour must feel at 

 such results, the lack of critical logic exposed in the 

 acceptance of such a net of contradictions is a tell- 

 ing evidence of the decline in theoretical tone among 

 the "cultivated classes." Limp as this doctrine 

 hangs, with its astonishing attempt to construe the 

 Absolute by means of pictorial thought, by adjust- 

 ments of components set in serial concomitance (the 

 duplicate worlds of object and subject), by a temporal 

 antecedence to the world of Nature (the Unconscious 

 in its "privacy," before the world arose), in short, by 

 means of categories in reality mechanical, flung on 

 the screen of Space and Time, — to say nothing of 

 its vain struggles to bridge the chasm between con- 

 sciousness and the Unconscious, of its Absolute at 

 once unconscious and conscious, of its proving the 

 reality of transcendent knowledge by the imma- 

 nence of the Unconscious in the duplicate worlds and 

 therefore in the world of cognition, when it had 

 already assumed this transcendency of knowledge to 

 establish the existence of the Unconscious, — despite 

 all this, there seems to be a sufficient multitude to 

 whom it gives a satisfaction, and who are even will- 



