amism, of the idea (Heraclitus, Fichte, Buddhism) that God Himself is in the world process both 'to will and to do.' We are still impatient to get at the what of this very immanent or evolving purpose. We seem to be 'ever learning' a lot of formal characteristics of the ethical end, but never arriving at the truth of what it really is. Through some eight hundred pages of Hartmann have we toiled and moiled in search of this absolute principle of human conduct. We are literally dying with impatience to know the will of God. With Philip we might almost exclaim: "Show us the Father and it sufficeth us." As most readers of Hartmann would probably admit, these feelings and expressions are at this stage perfectly natural and inevitable, for of all the strange pages in the history of philosophy, the last thirty or forty of Hartmann's treatise upon ethics (the pages that like the fabled tortoise should be able to bear the weight and strain of the elephantine argumentation of the bulky book) are among the strangest and most astounding. They are so for the reason that they exhibit at one and the same time—a combination of dialectic strength and evasive weakness and fallacy a combination of what is critically and crucially important with what is almost manifestly absurd and farcical.[1] Never was there collapse of balloon or flying machine more complete or more dismal and flat than the fall, in the last few sections of his work, of Hartmann's whole philosophy, upon a few of the most ordinary but yet most important facts of life and conduct. I must, however, try to describe the essays of his attempted flight before speaking of the metaphysic that is implied in it as an attempt.
IV. The Morality of Salvation. The very title is somewhat precarious, yet its daring will not altogether take by surprise those who have read Spinoza or Schopenhauer in addition to their Dante. The end of all action we remember from the preceding section, is the purpose of God as at work in the world—the purpose of the world for God. After a word of final encouragement to us about taking the crowning and most indispensable step in the argument, or 'giv-
- ↑ And yet Hartmann is a man whose undoubtedly great dialectic ability suggests Hegel (he often compares the internal relations of his different writings to those of the works of Hegel), and whose scholarship suggests that of a Wundt or Spencer or Helmholtz.
