Page:Philosophical Review Volume 8.djvu/620

602 the very outset. We have extracted ourselves from the ruins of Hartmann's stupendous philosophy of the Unconscious by the reanimating perception and conviction that, instead of relying upon the operation of some transcendent force to lift us above the pain and struggle of life, we ought to strengthen ourselves in our devotion to immediate duty and its discharge as that upon whose performance the very continuance and further development of the world of men and things may, in all sobriety and truth, be said to depend. We have tried to place the sphere of duty in some phase of our own life (our pleasure or our reason), and upon something in humanity (its development or what not), and upon the earth (cosmic evolution), and upon something 'above the earth' (a "dim far off event," a remote 'God'), and upon something "beneath the earth" (the unconscious), but all in vain. We have gained the conviction that we are implicated somehow (by our moral will and its relation to the will or force of the world) in the very constitution and essence, the very existence and continuance of the world of nature and the world of humanity, and we have, by an indirect method, by the elimination of all other 'possibilities,' been forced to feel and see that the imperative of duty, the supreme principle of morality, is presented to us most surely and most immediately in our nature and in the obligation we feel to make ourselves real by the discharge of duty. Hartmann has, in other words, been more concerned about the matter of morality than about the form of morality. And it is in regard to the matter of morality that our conceptions may grow and progress; while our consciousness of the form of morality, the obligation to realize duty, whatever duty may be, is eternal and unchangeable—bound up with the very consciousness and conception of personality.

There is a sense in which Hartmann's long study of the attempt to found morality upon a great many things in man or outside of man can be considered a complete success only in so far as it is the history of a complete failure. Morality cannot be placed upon anything in man or nature about which man's con- ceptions may change or grow, but only in man's very nature itself, and in its tendency to truly assert itself in the very life and