pound and consider the many things in Hartmann's writings that would come under the general headings of pain and evil, we must always remember that they (along with those of Schopenhauer) are deserving of attention on account of their attempt to even recognize suffering, pain, evil, and ill-desert as facts of importance to philosophy. As Paulsen[1] reminds us, no philosophy can be complete without a study of these phenomena—whether it be to Christianity alone or to some other religious system that we owe their introduction to the moral consciousness of mankind. I have already quoted from Hartmann to the effect that there is, according to him, a root of radical evil and selfishness in human nature, but the extended recognition given to evil in his ethical writings takes open cognizance of evil, not so much as positive inclination to badness, but rather as the simple tendency of man to take pleasure in merely natural impulse or desire, and to go on willing' one thing after another, without thinking of his life and the thousand objects of his pursuit in relation to the ideal of true spiritual freedom and moral perfection. Such treatment would be thorough-going enough for even the most serious-minded philosophy of religion, for, with its avowal of the practical helplessness of man to rise above blind natural struggle and tendency, the need of 'salvation,' of a radical change in human nature, becomes most apparent. But the unsatisfactory side of Hartmann's treatment of evil, and the side that tends to accentuate the nihilistic and suicidal character of his metaphysic of ethics and religion, is his innate proneness to think of the struggle in man between the 'natural' and the 'spiritual' chiefly in terms of pleasure and pain, and to estimate (despite his deep knowledge of human nature and his Solomon-like contemplation of all aims and all sides of life) the whole outcome of life in the terms of an imagined pleasure-consummation, in the terms of hedonism—a subtle hedonism, perhaps, but still a hedonism. Instead of almost welcoming, as do Robert Browning and Fichte, e.g., the conflict between mere natural impulse and the desire for true self-satisfaction as the very condition of human progress and development, he tends to regard the pain and disappointment and suffering of man
- ↑ System der Ethik, Erstes Buch.
