Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/171

110 monly grouped under the term “reflex action”: facts of somnambulism, trance, clairvoyance, memory independent of conscious perception, and instinctive knowledge — all those “unconscious modifications,” in short, the emphasising of which formed such a memorable dissonance in the thinking of Sir William Hamilton. The recognition of “unconscious ideation” he traces clearly, too, to Leibnitz, to Kant, to Schelling, and to Schopenhauer. The Unconscious is actually here with us, Hartmann holds: there is a something beneath our consciousness, that performs for us, even when consciousness is suspended, all that is most characteristic of life, and that, too, with a swift and infallible surety and precision. What less can we do, then, than accept this Unconscious as the one absolute reality? We accept, and so come by the Philosophy of the Unconscious.

Just here, however, Hartmann is confronted by the warning of Kant. On grounds of a critical determination of the limits of reason, Kantianism forbids the philosopher to undertake the discussion of an object thus removed beyond the bounds of possible experience. This warning must first of all be silenced. So Hartmann now provides a metaphysics to meet the Kantian thesis that knowledge can only be of the phenomenal. Here he unavoidably leaves his favourite basis of facts, and resorts to hypotheses purely