Page:Philosophical Review Volume 8.djvu/617

599 as an interruption into the painlessness or placidity either of mere natural existence, or of the God-like life of contemplation in which so many of the philosophers have found the highest good—

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, …… The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, etc."

Despite his very 'Hegelianism' (which ought to have made relative and not absolute for him the opposition between desire and reason, between evil and good, between effort and attainment etc.), he does not see with sufficient clearness and with sufficient scope the very relation of reason to desire, by virtue of which we may arrange the objects of our desire in a system or hierarchy that is expressive of the life of man in its richness and fulness. Of course, there is certainly more in Hartmann than the mere suggestion of disappointment, pain, and suffering—things that may be regarded as remedial and corrective rather than as destructive and punitive. Evil as well as good is no doubt hereditary in human nature, and most men who seek to lead the moral life find themselves engaged in an ever-besetting struggle with tendencies and dispositions that are to them, in this present life, inexplicable. And the truth of the continued incarnation or crucifixion with which Hartmann leaves us as an appropriate name for the tragic reality of human experience, seems to me to consist in the fact that most of us have in this life such hard work to restrain or modify the evil or the selfishness of our natures that we rarely attain to anything that is inherently great and noble and beneficent. The idea that God himself is by Christianity and other great religions represented as endeavoring not so much to develop humanity as to redeem it, affords Hartmann some warrant for his gloomy contention that men can never attain to their highest development until they have, by virtue of inward perfection, risen above the need of the painful discipline to which they are subjected at the present stage of the world's development. The supreme end of conduct was, as he put it in his semi-scholastic way, a negative-absolute-eudæmonological end—an end, to put it simply, that is negative of the idea that we can be absolutely happy or absolutely without pain in our lives. But this negative