Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/370

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
354
THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.
[Vol. I.

between individual and individual familiar to many in the early seventeenth century. Such were the Scottish Covenant and the covenant made by the emigrants on board the Mayflower when they found themselves off "the northern parts of Virginia," where there was no existing government under whose authority they would come. For the purposes of political philosophy, the history of the social contract theory ends with Rousseau. Kant and Fichte only repeat the theory in Rousseau's form, with a rather more complete consciousness of what it implies. History does not refute a theory which is unhistorical, but the growth of the historical spirit makes such a theory less and less attractive. The idea of organic growth has become a commonplace. But a merely historical account of what has been in the past is no sufficient philosophical explanation of a political society. Fouillée has endeavored to express the truth of both ways of regarding society by saying that the highest form of it must be an "organisme contractuel" The time has come when we can be just to Montesquieu and Burke without being unjust to Locke and Rousseau.



METAPHYSICAL AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL.


Zum Begriff der unbewussten Vorstellung. E. v. Hartmann. Phil. Mon., XXVIII, 1 and 2, pp. 1-25.

Representation [Vorstellung is translated thus throughout] includes, qualitatively, sensation, intuition, and concept, and as to the source of the activity, perception, recollection, and phantasy. The question is which of these kinds of the genus representation is possible in the sense of an unconscious representation. Unconscious sensation is impossible, for where sensation exists it implies a consciousness. Unconscious sense intuition is also impossible, as it is built up out of sensations. An unconscious concept is perfectly impossible; it is the conscious understanding which abstracts. Unconscious perception or apperception, and unconscious recollection, and unconscious phantasy are also impossible. We can't introduce the character of unconsciousness into representation through feeling; feeling is either conscious or it is nothing. But is there no other kind of representation than the kinds enumerated? Unconscious representation of course, if it exist, must be incapable of being experienced, but we can't conclude from this that it does not exist; that it can't be experienced is a negative support of (the hypothesis of) unconscious representation. Positively, then, unconscious representation is determined as 'intellectual intuition' [intellectuelle Anschauung]. Intellectual intuition and unconscious representation are different expressions for the same concept. One can