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ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY

sentimentalists who make up the body of Hartmann’s admirers. In contrast with the Germany that responded to the sober and invigorating views of a Kant, a Fichte, or a Hegel, these people are a curious and disheartening study. Apart from the revulsion that minds of moral vigour must feel at such results, the lack of critical logic exposed in the acceptance of such a net of contradictions is a telling evidence of the decline in theoretical tone among the “cultivated classes.” Limp as this doctrine hangs, with its astonishing attempt to construe the Absolute by means of pictorial thought, by adjustments of components set in serial concomitance (the duplicate worlds of object and subject), by a temporal antecedence to the world of Nature (the Unconscious in its “privacy,” before the world arose), in short, by means of categories in reality mechanical, flung on the screen of Space and Time, — to say nothing of its vain struggles to bridge the chasm between consciousness and the Unconscious, of its Absolute at once unconscious and conscious, of its proving the reality of transcendent knowledge by the immanence of the Unconscious in the duplicate worlds and therefore in the world of cognition, when it had already assumed this transcendency of knowledge to establish the existence of the Unconscious, — despite all this, there seems to be a sufficient multitude to whom it gives a satisfaction, and who are even will-