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NEW BOOKS. 123 drift of German thought is, he thinks, favourable to such an enterprise. After the neo- Kantian school has come a nee-Romantic movement, and why should not this in turn be succeeded by something like neo- Hegelianism? In point of fact Hegel is beginning to attract some attention, even in Germany, thanks largely to Kuno Fischer's recent volume ; but his system is too much out of touch with modern science to suit our present needs (a word to the wise at Cambridge and else- where 1). On the other hand modern science is too dispersive, too fragmentary, permanently to satisfy our deepest cravings. And here is the Philosophy of the Unconscious ready to fill up the gap : why not then accept it, at least provisionally ? Even a pessimist may be too hopeful ; and Prof. Drews, though pre- sumably a young man, has, I think, mistaken his age. The stream of tendency that once gave Hartmann's philosophy such vogue is rapidly sweeping it into oblivion. To begin with it is based on pessimism, and pessimism is out of date whether overcome by Nietzsche or by Edmond, Rostand or by Browning matters little in the present connexion. Enough that the will to die survives only among belated elderly mediocrities or among Italian veristi who ought rather to be called falsisti. Whoever doubts this need only be referred to the most modern literature, especially the new poetry of Germany, France and England, or to the later as compared with the earlier utterances of our older poets. Hartmann is himself of course a sort of optimist, combining what he is pleased to call evolutionary optimism with eudsemonological pessimism. But long words set no bones. To say that pleasure without pain is the only ultimate value, and that life yields, from the nature of the case indeed must yield, a large surplus of pain over pleasure, is to pronounce life not worth living. But Hartmann finds the value for it in a sort of transcendent altruism, and that is what he calls evolutionary optimism. Our lives, he tells us, are, so far as they go, the predestined means of liberating the Absolute from the unspeakable torment of an everlastingly unsatisfied will, the creation of finite worlds being a wholly inadequate outlet for the infinite will of willing. For the longer the process of evolution goes on, in other words the more voluminous and intense consciousness becomes, the more acute and hopeless must be the sum total of suffering until a conviction is borne in on the cosmic will that the only hope of relief lies in the determination to unwill itself, in self-annihilation. This surely is pes- simism of the deepest dye much blacker than Schopenhauer's. And it can hardly appeal to those who have convinced themselves that volition is in itself a source not of pain but of pleasure. Nor does it seem a very promising foundation for morality and religion. Your genuine pessimist will hardly submit to an increase of misery for himself and for those whom he loves in order to redeem a highly problematical God from a still more problematical hell. He will see him left there first. If Hartmann's theory of life is out of date still more so is his meta- physics. Even a third of a century ago there was a singular audacity in reviving the speculative methods of Schelling and Hegel ; and the tendency of criticism since then has been to discredit them, if possible, still more deeply. When we find a serious writer gravely reported by a serious interpreter as saying that ' the Logical creates space by setting the single dimension of time at right angles to itself ' (p. 815), our first impulse is to dismiss the book as better fitted for notice in the pages of^ our esteemed contemporary MIND! than in our own, our second to consider the case in connexion with the psychology of a dreamy recluse living in the society of an adoring wife. In this instance, adoration is not limited to the domestic circle. Prof.