232 



relieve his pain, gave birtli, in some unexplained way, to the 

 Universe.* Our sympathy, it seems, is due to these pathetic 

 eflbrts of the Infinite Sorrow to annihilate itself ! But enough 

 of this grotesque blasphemy, which it is to be hoped that the 

 accomplished author will yet live to repudiate. Many of 

 these outrageous paradoxes appear, to a disinterested ob- 

 server, to arise more from a morbid thirst for notoriety than 

 from a sober love for truth. 



It will appear from these statements of the central ideas of 

 the philosophical systems of Schopenhauer and von Hartmann, 

 that they are both Pantheists of an unusually nebulous de- 

 scription. The mere knowledge of this fact is enough to 

 indicate what authority is due to them on moral questions. 

 Those thinkers have no especial claim on the attention of 

 the world whose deepest speculations about Existence and 

 Personality have resulted in a fantastic self-contradictory 

 scheme, founded partly on baseless assumptions, partly on 

 ascribing real existence to mental abstractions, and partly on 

 the most perverse misinterpretation of facts. Those who attach 

 importance to clearness of thought and to consecutive reason- 

 ing, naturally decline to be taught by a man who can confound 

 together the literal and metaphorical meanings of the word 

 Will, and, when he has thus formed an abstract conception, 

 which corresponds to no objective Thing, can ascribe to it 

 real existence, nay, more than that, can assert that it is the 

 only real existence, that which underlies all apparent personal 

 existence. This word-juggling may perhaps be useful as a 

 mental discipline, but from every other point of view it is 

 merely an intellectual curiosity. The same remarks apply to 

 von Hartmann. To combat their views effectively it would 

 be necessary to begin at the very centre and work outwards, 

 to demonstrate the baselessness of any form of Pantheism, 

 and to show how, in its essence, it is always built up upon 

 confusion of thought, upon the fallacy of investing mental 

 abstractions with real existence,t whether it is Neo-platonism, 



* Those who care to see how far the bad taste of the original surgical 

 metaphor employed by von Hartmann is softened down in the text may 

 consult Barlow's Ultimatum of Pessimism, p. 81, note. The influence of 

 Buddhism is here very evident : for Gautama is said to have foregone 

 Nirwana, and suffered ineflably in successive births in order " to attain the 

 Buddhaship, and thereby gain the power to free mankind from the misery of 

 existence." - Globe Uncijclojxedia, sub voc. " BtuldhismP 



■\ Every form of Pantheism is guilty of the vicious process known in the 

 technical language of Mental Science as hypostatising abstractions. See 

 Ueberweg's refutation of Spinoza's system, apparently so logical. — Hist, of 

 Phil., vol. ii. p. 60 et seq. 



