The usual see-saw of absolutism appears here. The individual is endowed with personality, only that it may be wrenched from him-this, indeed, is the condition of his ever being able to have it. Man, as we have just found Hartmann saying, is to be in the divine Being. Yet there is the other side. "The reality of suffering, and thereby the reality of man and of the persons and things that work upon him, is the indispensable postulate of the religious consciousness, without which the latter can only attempt to maintain itself by self-contradictions."

This, however, is a portion of the metaphysics of religion. These are succinctly summed up when it is said that man as such has an essential power of selfdetermination. But this essence is part of the absolute spirit, though without prejudice to the actuality of selfhood. In this way, on the human side, man is laden with responsibility for God; while, on the divine side, God is enabled to make demands of man. Always, notice, the emphasis is upon the realistic principle. The fact that religion implies certain functions, human and divine, proves God's existence. Analysis of human nature in relation to the external world, analogically reveals the kind of God's existence. Finally, the historical development of morals and religion exhibit God's purpose with the world, and point to the nature of the redemption for which each is to work. If the world and all its conscious inhabitants be racked by pains, God, because he is wholly what they are partly, must be infinitely more tortured. Consequently the religious consciousness postulates "eudæmonological pessimism" and "teleological optimism." But with teleology we are in the ethical sphere. Accordingly,

in the third division-the Ethics of Religion-Hartmann tries to show how religion must end in a redemption from evil in which both the separate persons and the All- one cannot but participate. He takes the former first, and traces the subjective growth of moralised religion. This consists in a gradual realisation by man of the nature and needs of immanent spirit. He recognises God in himself, he comes to know the divine necessity intimately, and so he dedicates himself as a willing instrument. Atonement is the negative state which implies deliverance from experienced pain, which is sin. It does no more for a man than remove unhappiness; nothing new is substituted. Redemption, in other words, is not a gift from God to man, it is the subjective side of a process which can only be completed when it actualises itself objectively. Man must do something with this subjective state of his-must do something for God.

Here at last we are presented with the new Religion of Spirit. Its main characteristic is its vagueness. Rites and symbols, acts of adoration and places of worship, will be improved away. "It is the task of the highest stage of religious consciousness (that of the religion of immanence) to separate in worship also what is essential from what is unessential, and to realise what has hitherto been aimed at in a roundabout fashion, by means of externalities and illusions, in a more perfect way, by applying directly to that which is the kernel of the matter." The New Jerusalem of the Scriptures is to be realised after a manner on earth: "I saw no temple there." But when one looks into the matter a little closely, the ordinary 1 Cf. Rel. des Geistes, p. 282 sq.

vice of the latter-day system-maker quickly discloses itself. Such a "religion" is possible, because man has recognised that he is inhabited by the "Eternal Word." God is part and parcel of his nature, nay, he is the reality of human life. Hence each must serve deity by worshipping the revelation which he bears in himself. This is the essence, and it requires neither sacrifice, prayer, nor devotion. Being filled with the Unconscious, man finds the true ethic of religion in recognising his own fulness, and in trying to give objective effect to the subjectively perceived ends which this, his ultimate selfhood, imparts to him. The Religion of Spirit will be complete when, by the devotion of his creatures, who are himself, the Absolute has, along with them, ceased to be. The end, that is, cannot be realised, being organic to a continuous process, which, in order to achieve completion, must vanish into vacuity.

VI. The Defects of Hartmann's Theory.

No one will feel surprise that a callous and unrelieved atheism of this sort should have called forth many indignant protests and contemptuous references. "Miserable nonsense;" "merely a deepened phase of the materialistic spirit;" "frivolity and pretence;" a pre

posterous attempt to construe the absolute by mere pictorial thinking;" "the grotesque absurdity of what we may call the Blister or Poultice Theory of the Universe," are a few of the choicer epithets with which it has been saluted. But a system of such scope and pretension is not to be shivered in a sentence. It is easy to carp at Hartmann: he is to be answered only

by an investigation of the principles which he regards as fundamental to his Weltanschauung.

Before attempting to indicate several cruces of his system, one may admit without loss of advantage that it is not entirely devoid of good points. Emerging at a specific stage in the progress of ethical culture, it is an attempt to solve the problem of the universe on certain premisses, and as such it has served to clear the philosophical air. Pessimism in general, and a deftly articulated scheme like Hartmann's in particular, will ever be as balm to those oppressed with the mystery of life. It does not wound the amour propre of the sad. For, in effect, the insolubility of their difficulty is affirmed by the allegation that there is no mystery about it. The harsh facts of the work-a-day world are ostensibly taken as the basis of a theory which dogmatically declares that they explain themselves. Life is; let it not be, and all will be well. The problem is thus abolished without ceremony. For those unfitted by temperament to accept a more joyful philosophy, this theory is not altogether without value. To some egoists "a sad mood opens a wider mental horizon than joy." Rousseau's contemporary representatives had far better live to lessen the agony of the Unconscious than spend their hours in morbid self-analysis.

Turning now to another consideration; if the philosophy of the Unconscious have this historico - social advantage, its service to theoretical inquiry is at least as important. Hartmann has in any case helped to dispel misunderstandings concerning the three great problems of philosophy — God, the world, and man. He has demonstrated what even Strauss, in his later period, dared not face. For he has not feared to show

that, if the Absolute Being be impersonal, the gospel of despair necessarily follows. Pessimism has taken its place as the inevitable sequel to a theology which finds deity in Will, or in the Unconscious, in Force, or in any principle devoid of selfhood and rationality. It appears, not only that no man can see God and live, but also that no man can be truly human without seeing God-and dying. For, as Jean Paul has said, "No one in Nature is so alone as the denier of God. He mourns with an orphaned heart, that has lost its great Father, by the corpse of Nature, which no World-Spirit moves and holds together, and which grows in its grave; and he mourns by that corpse until he himself crumbles off it." Hartmann has demonstrated the truth of this saying with a fertility and conclusiveness that are not likely to be equalled. Secondly, he has shown, as regards the world, that the old, old story— the patriarchal notion of the Jews-of a perfection to be found within the limits of the life terrestrial, can only issue in contradiction. The modern Job, he takes the same ground as his unknown prototype, and comes to the same conclusion: "Let the day perish wherein I was born. Why died I not from the womb? . For now I should have lain still and been quiet." If this life come from nothing and be fated to return thither again, its utter vanity and emptiness cannot be hid. It is a fragment that circles far from any unity into which it may be fitted. If God be nature and nought else, if the record of history be the only theophany, then the failures of the past are the essence of the present, and its inherited defect, in turn, is the measure of such promise as the future bears. It were infinitely better to make an end of all. The best is bad, and the