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conscious of the operations which that entity called the 
Unconscious ” carries on in us, therefore that entity is itself 
unconscious ! 
The “Unconscious,” we are told, is not subject to disease or 
a j 6 ' i S mc | e P en dent of sense in its thought, does not hesitate 
and, doubt (like Cudworth’s plastic nature, it is “ never at a 
loss ), being provided with a sort of intellectual intuition which 
enables it without reflectiou to foresee and provide for the end 
irom the beginning. Hence, also, it never errs; it neither 
possesses (since it is without a brain !), nor has it need of 
memory ; in it will and idea exist in inseparable unity, so that 
as nothing can be willed without being thought,” so also 
nothing can be thought without being willed.” It is omni- 
potent, omniscient, omnipresent, and possesses perfect wisdom 
I Ins is that homme majus to which in all times and climes men 
have turned as to the constant source of their life. But it is 
not God. It is not personal, nor free, nor endowed with moral 
perfections. It is the purest abstraction, and the attempt to 
derive the world from it is the most patent attempt to combine 
natural realism with an utterly vacant idealism, which modern 
times have witnessed. 
Hartmann had asserted,— namely, in the first edition of his 
work p. 607, that before and after the world there was and 
will be nothing. This was calculated to impress a Philistine 
understanding, attached to the logic of common minds, and 
which had followed in good faith the author's account of the 
successive processes in the ante-cosmic “will,” whence the 
universe was alleged to have resulted, as in flat contradiction 
with the implied sense of that account. Ante-cosmic processes 
would seem to imply, as existing before the universe, a real 
being of some sort, in which the processes could go on But 
the fancied discoverer of contradiction would have shown him- 
self at fault in not appreciating Hartmann's ideas, and in 
supposing that where descriptive language is used there must 
necessarily be something described. This is not disproved bv 
the mew form given to the passage referred to in the sixth 
edition, p. 724. Here we read that before and after the world 
there neither was nor will be “anything actual whatever 
anything but passive ( ruhende ), inactive, self-included 
essence without existence (or, a nature without entity IVesen 
ohne Daseiri) ” ; so that, after all, before and after the world is 
nothing, i e. “nothing actual,” only non-existing essence or 
as it is elsewhere termed, a “ metaphysical essence ” And 
this is the august source of the universe ! The most extreme 
persomficr of abstractions among the Neo-Platonists, when the 
