Eduard von Hartmann, almost "an impersonal being," since He regarded Himself so exclusively as the vehicle of His message that His personality hardly came into the question. As time went on, however. He developed a taste for glory and for wonderful deeds, and fell at last into a condition of "abnormal exaltation of personality." In the end He declares Himself to His disciples and before the council as Messiah. "When He felt His death drawing nigh He struck the balance of His life, found His mission a failure. His person and His cause abandoned by God, and died with the unanswered question on His lips, 'My God, why hast thou forsaken me?'"
It is significant that Eduard von Hartmann has not fallen into the mistake of Schopenhauer and many other philosophers, of identifying the pessimism of Jesus with the Indian speculative pessimism of Buddha. The pessimism of Jesus, he says, is not metaphysical, it is "a pessimism of indignation," born of the intolerable social and political conditions of the time. Von Hartmann also clearly recognises the significance of eschatology, but he does not define its character quite correctly, since he bases his impressions solely on the Talmud, hardly making any use of the Old Testament, of Enoch, the Psalms of Solomon, Baruch, or Fourth Ezra. He has an irritating way of still using the name "Jehovah."
Like Reimarus-von Hartmann's positions are simply modernised Reimarus-he is anxious to show that Christian theology has lost the right "to treat the ideal Kingdom of God as belonging to itself." Jesus and His teaching, so far as they have been preserved, belong to Judaism. His ethic is for us strange and full of stumbling-blocks. He despises work, property, and the duties of family life. His gospel is fundamentally plebeian, and completely excludes the idea of any aristocracy except in so far as it consents to plebeianise itself, and this is true not only as regards the aristocracy of rank, property, and fortune, but also the aristocracy of intellect. Von Hartmann cannot resist the temptation to accuse Jesus of "Semitic harshness," finding the evidence of this chiefly in Mark iv. 12, where Jesus declares that the purpose of His parables was to obscure His teaching and cause the hearts of the people to be hardened.
His judgment upon Jesus is: "He had no genius, but a certain talent which, in the complete absence of any sound education, produced in general only moderate results, and was not sufficient to preserve Him from numerous weaknesses and serious errors; at heart a fanatic and a transcendental enthusiast, who in spite of an inborn kindliness of disposition hates and despises the world and everything it contains, and holds any interest in it to be injurious to the sole true, transcendental interest; an amiable and modest youth who, through a remarkable concatenation of circumstances
