Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/686

670 therefore the true explanation of reality. It may be a matter of indifference whether this view is or is not a legitimate deduction from Hegel's philosophy, although v. Hartmann himself calls Hegel 'the unconscious precursor of the philosophy of the Unconscious.' But the theory of v. Hartmann has this peculiar merit that he indirectly restores reality to the individual will through his assertion that self-consciousness is not complete. What Hegel regarded as an absolute climax is for v. Hartmann a new point of departure, which, when we look back upon it, may be seen to contain an idea of freedom only relatively more perfect than that of Greece.

Moreover, psychologists now claim that feeling, in whatever way it is manifested, is not a stage through which self-consciousness passes on its way to thought, but a permanent phase of the highest consciousness, and are also seeking to prove that it is only as the universal has form in the individual consciousness that it is real at all. And many thinkers of our own time, of whom Mr. Bradley may be taken as a representative, are of opinion that something, which he calls "sentience," the direct and complete union of the individual and reality, is the ultimate character of consciousness. Mr. Bradley is persuaded that when the true interpretation of thought and reality is recognized, "thought is so transformed that to go on calling it thought seems indefensible."

These different writers are, in my opinion, expressing a truth. Yet it must be remembered that the reality, into whose presence the individual is now ushered, is not a simple 'presented' or 'given,' in the old sense of these terms, but a reality of which the whole course of nature and history is but the harbinger. To assert that the individual, if he is to be fully free, must not simply identify himself with such a reality, but recreate it, is to give the idea of freedom a new meaning, a meaning which it cannot be made to bear in the philosophy of Hegel. Because, to see the need for recreating the actual reality, here considered as legal, social, national and other relations, is not only to see the reason in things, but, if a