Hartmann is now at length well ashore on the familiar coasts of Schopenhauerland. This World-child of clairvoyant virgin Idea and darkling brutal Will is no product of far-sighted love, endowed with an exhaustless future of joy. It is the offspring of violation, of a chance burst of passion, and its being carries in it the germs of misery ever expanding. This gloomy theme Hartmann now pursues statistically over all the provinces of experience, seeking to prove that suffering everywhere outbalances happiness, that “he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,” the pitch of anguish rising higher and higher as Nature ascends in the scale of consciousness, and especially as man enlarges and quickens that intelligence whose chief result, from the nature of the case, must be the keener and keener sense of the deceitfulness of life.
Nor, continues Hartmann, let any one hope to evade this conclusion by theories of possible compensation. Men no doubt usually live in one of Three Stages of Illusion in regard to this essential misery of life. They either think that even in this world the sum of joy so far exceeds the sum of sorrow as to make existence here substantially good; or, if sobered out of this by inexorable experience, they take refuge in the Hereafter, in the prospect of an endless opportunity beyond the grave, — a refuge of lies, for the one Unconscious is the sole basis
