realise the good that is in us, not by passive intellectual contemplation, but by actively striving with every faculty to be the best that it lies in us to become. Schopenhauer's ideal has admittedly certain formal excellences, but his conception of the manner in which they may receive material application effectually ensures their eternal unreality.

Finally, if these manifest weaknesses did not undermine confidence in the doctrine as a competent theory of the world and of man, it might easily be shown that the entire system is founded upon several gratuitous assumptions. A philosophy of an extremely dogmatic type, it lays down inherently indispensable principles with a confidence which might well make the ultraCalvinist green with envy. It assumes, for example, that personality, freedom, and God are non-existent. There can be no impervious individual selfhood if the absolute reality be Will. There can be no freedom, and therefore no moral responsibility, if blind force, “striking out at random," be the mainspring of the universe. And Schopenhauer, for reasons perfectly sufficient from his point of view, declares that there is no God. Once more, his wonderful doctrine of pleasure and pain has already been abandoned by pessimists. It is opposed to all psychology. Yet the persistence of pain, and the negative nature of pleasure, are urged by him, with assurance equalled only by a disregard of the facts which positively amounts to genius. Nor unreasonably; without this dogma, his theory would fall to the ground. And, as if trespass sufficient had not already been made upon good-nature, the scheme quietly appropriates a third assumption. The all-inclusive Will which, strange to tell, is as dissatisfied as Carlyle's shoeblack,

enslaves intellect to fulfil its blind desires. The practical portion of the system has this assumption for pivot. But the doctrine that Will is the lord of intellect, and of all that intellect implies, has about as much foundation as the parallel statement, that pug is the lord of dog. The species cannot stand in place of the genus which includes it. Pessimism, according to Schopenhauer, is meaningless when reduced to its bare terms. For the reasons already adduced, among many others which might be cited, it may fairly be characterised as thoroughly unsatisfactory. It conforms to scarcely one of the requirements of a monistic theory; and this is the more certain, that it has been repudiated in essentials by later sympathisers. Suicide by metaphysics is the end which it proposes to man; it is itself a metaphysical felo de se, and as such may be taken either for dead or unaccountable.

III. Hartmann's Position.

Superior to Schopenhauer in many respects, though clearly inferior in literary style and perhaps in analytic perception, Hartmann is more representative of the most modern Pessimism. The earlier thinker, it may be admitted, responded to certain needs of his age, as well as to the calls of his own gloomy nature. He gave tolerably systematic expression to the reaction from perfervid hope to blank despair which so many finer minds experienced after the French Revolution. Inflated expectations had been generated then, and the slow, but ceaseless, contraction was fraught with widespread spiritual misery. But even at this, 'The World as Will and Representation' is hardly more than an

outwork of the pessimistic citadel. Hartmann is often called a disciple of Schopenhauer, and many allege that his divergence from his reputed master is slight or superficial. It would be fairer to say that he is Schopenhauer's descendant. So far from being his disciple, he rather stands related to him as did Hegel to Kant. Indeed the gulf between the two leading pessimists is wider than that between the two great idealists. For Hegel saw Kant through the medium of Fichte and Schelling, all four were of the same school,-whereas Hartmann sees Schopenhauer refracted, as it were, through Hegelianism—that is, through a fundamentally different philosophy. Further, the new set of historical influences to which he was subjected have not been without result in his system. The Weltschmerz, classically so called, has died down; positive science has accomplished, as he himself says, "stupendous achievements"; population has increased, and along with this, the rapid rise of the middle class, and the incentives to a certain modicum of education, have crowded the "genteel," and often half-cultured, professions; even among nations the struggle for existence is keener, and military service or warlike credits press heavy upon the people. These and other historical facts cannot but have given new direction to Hartmann's thoughts. But it can also be shown that his more important divergences from Schopenhauer are in greater part due to the rich philosophical material which he found ready to hand. Indeed, from one point of view, it would be as correct to term him a follower of Hegel as of Schopenhauer. If he denounce the dialectic method of the one, he also scouts the blind Will of the other. If the Philosophy of the Unconscious' be in some

degree a commentary upon Schopenhauer, the 'Phenomenology of the Ethical Consciousness' has Hegel for text. Nay, in the former Hartmann strays farther from Schopenhauer than he does from Hegel in the latter. Perhaps it would not be an exaggeration to declare that his system draws its strength from Hegel. Where it is weak one may mark the influence of Schopenhauer; where it is suggestive, and more particularly where it betrays strong historical sense, there Hegel is at work. Hartmann, then, is to be regarded as the protagonist of systematic pessimism, because philosophical progress has afforded him opportunities of which he has not been slow to take advantage, and because he has endeavoured, with remarkable ingenuity, to unite evolutionary optimism with metaphysically decreed misery. Active effort to annihilate pain is the burden of his teaching.

Hartmann's principal philosophical relations to Hegel and Schopenhauer must first be noted. Speaking in general terms, it may be said that his system is the product of an attempt, first, to trace Hegel's Absolute Idea and Schopenhauer's Blind Will to a higher unity; and, second, to prove this proceeding, a posteriori, by judicious selections from the discoveries of exact science -the more recent the better. Under direct inspiration of the evolution hypothesis, Hartmann proceeds to analyse the conception of final cause. In this analysis his attitude, alike to Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Darwin— taking names for movements-is defined with sufficient clearness. According to the more materialistic evolutionists, adaptation of means to ends in organic nature is the result of action and reaction. Just as one billiard-ball imparts impetus to another by impact, and

loses part of its kinetic energy, so the action of surroundings upon, say, the tortoises of the Galapagos Islands, has caused them to vary wonderfully from their relatives on the South American continent. Absence of enemies, for instance, has acted upon the members of the Galapagos species, which again have reacted, and so have attained their present abnormal size. The process, in the one case, as in the other, is mechanical, or at least, for the tortoise, as nearly mechanical as may be. There is no particle of design visible in the unwonted growth. In this view Hartmann, while accepting the fact of development, cannot concur. After careful consideration, consisting in part of inferences drawn from the mathematical theory of probability, he concludes that development cannot be ultimately explained apart from certain conditions. These are, the presence of a Will which desires, and of an Intellect which devises, the observed changes. Intelligent Will is the efficient cause of the world's progress, and the immanent final cause or purpose of universal life. Here the divergence of Hartmann from both Hegel and Schopenhauer at once appears. Hegelian idealism, with its doctrine of mind permeating matter, is grafted on to Schopenhauer's alogical or irrational realism, which finds the cause of all things in an unintelligent and arbitrary Will. But Hegel's dialectic progress by antagonism is set aside, and the i boast is made that conclusions are reached by the more scientific methods of induction and analogy. The idealistic unity of thought and being is also repudiated, and the thing-in-itself is ejected by the machinery of the Unconscious, which, it may be fairly alleged, was primarily invented for this purpose. Further, Hartmann

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