268 
And yet notwithstanding the methodological proclamation of the 
title-pa-e, the last part of the book is avowedly metaphysical, 
bein°* entitled ce The Metaphysics of the Unconscious, and 
containing, in the 6th edition, precisely 100 pages more than 
the two other parts put together ! This ending, however, has 
in it nothing which need surprise any oue who is conscious of 
the true import and conditions of the problem involved. The 
fundamental query with Hartmann is really, What is the 
nature of things? Now this nature can only be known, and 
not directly seen . The method of natural science is the lesult 
of the investigation of phenomena, of “things which do 
appear,” and can only fulfil a secondary, confirmatory function 
in the inquiry concerning the fundamental ti uth or abiding 
reality of things, or, in other words, concerning the things 
which are not seen, but eternal. Here, as pointed out in my 
former paper, the true starting-point is man, self-consciousness, 
with all that it includes, and the true method comprehends 
experimental analysis and synthesis— the latter, which involves 
the firm grasp of rational principle, dominating but not 
distorting the former. 
It must cheerfully be confessed that the first two-fifths of 
Hartmann’s work are a powerful statement of the expci imental 
argument for design in nature— only, the designer is here not 
God, but “The Unconscious.” Under this name Hartmann points 
out the presence and agency of ideal causes in the development 
of organisms, in organic processes, in instinct, in the curative 
power of nature, in the human mind, in the love of the sexes, 
in feeling, in character and morality, in aesthetic judgment and 
artistic production, in the origin of language, in thought, in 
the origin of sensible perception, in mysticism, and in history. 
In all these cases the ideal agency is alleged to be unconscious, 
but the argument at most only proves it to be unconscious to the 
subject in which its works are wrought. Yet it is on the basis 
of the facts related in these chapters that Hartmann founds 
the experimental demonstration of the existence of The 
Unconscious,” a substitute for the personal God of Theism, 
an ideal abstraction, the source, sum, and end of all things, 
an ideal quasi substance, of which man and the universe 
are not in any sense spontaneous, but strictly determined, 
necessary phenomena, in which latter, as its name implies, it 
works “ unconsciously.” This is the fundamental fallacy or 
our author. From the (partial) unconsciousness, of the finite 
phenomenon (the universe and its inhabitants) is inferred the 
total unconsciousness of its infinite cause ! Because we are not 
