solute Moral Principle or the teleological character of the world for the Absolute; and (4) the Moral Principle of Redemption or the 'Negative-absolute-eudæmonistic' (!) principle.[1] A short study and criticism of these four forms of the supreme principle of morality will do much to emphasize some facts of the highest importance to moral philosophy, and at the same time to signalize some striking features of Hartmann's metaphysic and their relation to problems of contemporary philosophy.
I. As regards Monism, he begins with his usual semi-Hegelian enumeration of possibilities and elimination of impossibilities. Monism is, as we know, an attempt to simplify the question of the relation of human to universal development by boldly proclaiming the unity and identity, in the one absolute substance, of all separate or individual existence. Its purest form is that of Spinozism—which philosophy as essentially too blankly abstract, as subversive of the independent reality of anything 'outside' the absolute substance, as in fact Akosmism (as both Hegel and Schopenhauer call it), and as negative of all action and progress, is easily passed over and condemned by Hartmann. The theistic form of Monism, again, Hartmann has as little respect for as has Schopenhauer. We may perhaps agree with him that theism by itself has never exercised any very great controlling force over large sections of the human race; it has always, when operative, been associated with a belief in things and agencies other than a mere personal God, such as the revelation of the will of such a God to prophets or particular peoples; and, logically speaking, it has a meaning only in relation to other religious systems or philosophies such as Polytheism, Henotheism, Pantheism, Trinitarianism,[2] etc. In any case (Hartmann would say), at the close of the Middle Ages and throughout modern times, we witness the "substitution of an autonomous morality on a metaphysical
- ↑ Before addressing myself to my ostensible task, I wish to insist that the idea of some possible 'transcendental' end to all human development is not merely a thought that has presented itself in consequence of the unsatisfactory efforts of Hartmann of which I have spoken in my first paper. It is an inevitable thought that arrests every man at some moment or other in his career.
- ↑ See my Schopenhauer's System in Its Philosophical Significance (Blackwood, Scribner), Chapter VIII.
