Page:Philosophical Review Volume 8.djvu/618

600 cannot be the last word about life. It is negative merely of the happiness philosophy and of a God external to human life, and all unconscious at that.

(II.) We reject then the ontology of Hartmann's nihilism as based upon many confusions, a confusion between human struggle with imperfection and the evolution of universal nature (or the 'teleology of the world for God'), a confusion between unconscious nature and the 'eternal consciousness' (Green) that is implied in all personality and all 'objective existence,' a confusion between Christian and hedonistic ideas, etc. We retain as an outcome of his philosophy of the Unconscious the idea that in the moral life we may be obliged to follow out many ends that are prescribed to us, more by the unconscious logic of our nature than by our conscious reason, and also by the unconscious logic of nature or of history—of the but gradually revealed necessities of human development. It is the duty of man in his conscious state to rethink and become cognizant of the facts and truths that are stored up for him in his instincts (in unconscious experience), and in his organic memory of the past evolution of the world, and stored up, too, for him in the institutions, customs and traditions (theological, political, economic) of society. We must make the thousand and one 'unconscious' instincts and tendencies of our lives, and all the laws of the inorganic and organic worlds, and all the institutions and traditions of civilization, tributary and subservient to the still higher developments in the realm of character and personality, to which we feel ourselves stimulated by the moral ideal that is within us. Hartmann is wrong in speaking and writing as if the conscious should be made subservient to the unconscious. This could be shown along the lines of the philosophy of Kant (a thinker to whom Hartmann does less justice than to nearly any other philosopher) and also along the lines of positive psychology, which clearly show that nature herself has instituted the unconscious (or the 'habitual' and the 'automatic') always as a help to further conscious development.

(III.) What, then, of Hartmann's four forms of the Metaphysic