Absolute popping up as if shot out of a pistol,” since it is now construed in terms vouched for by actual experience. Moreover, the conception is here found that will embosom the system of Hegel himself: the “logical Idea” (das logische Idee) falls as a mere constituent into the vaster being of the Unconscious. For what is the Unconscious, as revealed in experience, but that which works by the incessant interplay of representation and will? And just as will in its essence is only blind Struggle, so is representation in its essence nothing other than luminous Idea — the all-embracing logical bond that grasps the vague of sensation into distinct objects, and these objects again into genera, and these genera at last into a single organised whole of being.[1] The Unconscious, then, is primordially Will and Idea; and from the connexion of these arises the twofold world of finitude, pouring forth from the Unconscious in the counterpart streams of object and subject, of sensible world and conscious perception.
- ↑ A one-sided and superficial construction is here put upon Hegel’s theory. Justice to Hegel requires us to remember that his Idea (Idee) is never represented as a bond merely “logical,” in contradistinction from the “will,” but always as the “negative” or “sublating” unity of intellect and will — a unity that takes up and solves the antinomy that appears between them when their distinction and contrast is taken abstractly; taken, that is, in neglect of their correlative union, and so viewed partially instead of in the whole. Hartmann’s leap, too, from idea as representation (Vorstellung) to the hegelian Idea (Idee) is, to say the least, a bit sudden and violent.
