Page:Philosophical Review Volume 8.djvu/614

596. The world of our social activity is the helping to shorten this path of passion and salvation."

This closing display of fireworks makes us forget that both God and man were stranded on an invisible thread woven of fallacies. As a statement it may be true, or untrue, but it is in any case an ignoratio elenchi—a form of irrelevancy. We have a deeply suggestive and fine sounding name for reality, but we have not yet found outside of ourselves any real foundation for morality not any transcendental ground for morality, the object of our search in all this section.

It is for many reasons difficult to read much positive meaning into this salvation-morality of Hartmann's. For one thing it is set forth only in the last two pages of his colossal work, and these are so dark with excess of light that discrimination is out of the question. The element of fact, however, in the idea that we are to throw ourselves into the world process in the hope of delivering God, is perhaps that educated men morally educated and experienced men (homines libri)—can help to redeem humanity by freeing it from the 'happiness-notion,' from the idea that life exists to make us happy. The reason that Hartmann does not seem to see this so as to be able to state it simply and plainly, the reason that he cannot think of it without an almost complete inversion of the relations that man has hitherto believed himself to sustain to God, is to be found in his presupposition about the Unconscious.

C(I) All the confusions and obscurities in Hartmann's ethical philosophy are due to the lack on his part of any systematic attempt to think together, to separate, or to relate, the various ways in which he manifestly allows himself to think of the Unconscious. There are in his Phenomenology of the Moral Consciousness at least three different meanings given to the notion of the Unconscious: (1) the Unconscious in nature and in history, (2) the Unconscious as desire, (3) the Unconscious as evil—both negative (failure, illusion, suffering, etc.) and positive (sin, wickedness, badness). Had he adhered to the idea of the Unconscious as the 'great not-ourselves' that makes for