Page:Philosophical Review Volume 8.djvu/613

595 the animal and human creation; i.e., God must get more pain than pleasure from the life of mankind, and to be relieved from this pain is not a positive result merely the removal of something that should not be. (5) This idea of helping God out of his misery may as well be called Salvation—das Moralprincip der Erlösung. (6) The object of Sittlichkeit, the object of social evolution, the supreme principle of morality is therefore to "save God"! This is to be done by bringing the world to an end, for God (the poor creature!) has had to assume the pain of this painful world in order to escape from some pain or woe more awful still. (7) Hartmann closes his book by an ontological statement, a statement about the nature of reality. "The world as a whole (das reale Dasein) is the incarnation of the Godhead; the process of the world is the history of the passion of the God that has become flesh, and at the same time the path to his