anguish, its outlook was despair. And all the facts of existence, from wheresoever taken in the ascending levels of consciousness, confirmed but too darkly this haggard prophecy of a priori thought: everywhere the overplus of pain, everywhere illusion dispelled in disappointment. There was, and could be, but one avenue of escape — death and oblivion.
Upon this fact rose the whole structure of ethics. The “whole duty of man” was simply: Suppress the will to live. All moral feeling was summarised in Pity, and all moral action in ascetic living, to the end that, the tone of life being perpetually lowered, the Will might slowly sink into quiescence, and so life itself at last fade out into the repose and silence of annihilation.
Such was the philosophy, no doubt at bottom theoretically hollow, but still wearing on its surface a certain tragic fascination, that stirred Hartmann to attempt a new composition of similar tone on the ancient theme of Man. In the minds of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, let it be noted in passing, the philosophic problem takes for its leading question a phase of Kant’s “What may I hope for?” The chief concern for them is. What is life all worth? They are both possessed by a profound sense of the misery of existence; but while, under Schopenhauer’s treatment, the pessimistic strain seems to sound out only at the close, and appears
