265 
Greek mind had long passed the zenith of its virile power, did 
not, to my knowledge, reach any such extreme of nonsense as 
this. If the original One was made transcendent above all 
categories of human thought, it was because of a reverent and 
ecstatic feeling of the utter impotence of human language to 
express the blessed perfection of the Eternal. But here the 
modern announcer of a “ new gospel ” (as one of Hartmann’s 
admirers has in substance termed him), the child of what the 
Germans term “ the city of intelligence,” out-doing the gross- 
est fetish-worshipper, adores, instead of the living God, an 
abstraction utterly dead and without existence, possessing only 
a potential will and an inactive intelligence. And what is the 
attempt to explain the derivation of the world from such an 
abstraction but flying directly in the face of the favourite 
maxim of physical speculators, “ ex nihilo nihil ” ? 
And yet the motive of Hartmann in his speculation concern- 
ing the genesis of the world is in so far philosophically justi- 
fiable, as he aims to show the primacy of the ideal over the 
material. This view is expressed in the Bible in the assertion 
that God made the world out of nothing, i.e. there was no pre- 
existing material, co-eternal with God, out of which God could 
frame the world. First in the order of existence is spiritual 
substance, not material. But when we thus speak of spirit, we 
mean self-possessing intelligence, a rational agent, a supreme 
personality, however much, by reason of its exaltation above 
the limits of human personality, it may transcend the latter in 
degree and perfection. Unless the stream may be greater 
than the fountain, unless motion may exist without a mover, 
or an effect without a cause, philosophy must always insist that 
the Cause of all causes shall possess at least the equivalent of 
what is known to men as conscious personality. Now Hart- 
mann, stripping off the conscious and personal elements, has 
nothing left but the abstract form of spiritual life, a potential 
will and a blank idea. 
Will is conceded by Hartmann to be inseparable from idea. 
The ante-cosmic will was vacant, hence inoperative, hence no 
true will. Uneasily it sought to assert itself, but, having no 
ideal content, guided by no idea, its action could only be 
irrational. The will translates the ideal into the real, and so 
the will of “the Unconscious” forced the idea into reality, 
brought the world into existence by its own irrational self- 
assertion. This result once accomplished, the idea awoke to 
the necessity of self-assertion on its part, and set about to make 
the world as logical, i.e. as good as it may be. It were better 
that the world, the product of the illogical action of the will, 
