Chapter 7 - Page 2

were, of practice and unconsciousness extend? Can any line be drawn beyond which it shall cease to operate? If not, may it not have operated and be operating to a vast and hitherto unsuspected extent? This is all, and certainly it is sufficiently simple. I sometimes think it has found its greatest stumbling-block in its total want of mystery, as though we must be like those conjurers whose stock in trade is a small deal table and a kitchen-chair with bare legs, and who, with their parade of "no deception" and "examine everything for yourselves," deceive worse than others who make use of all manner of elaborate paraphernalia. It is true we require no paraphernalia, and we produce unexpected results, but we are not conjuring.

To turn now to Von Hartmann. When I read Mr. Sully's article in the Westminster Review, I did not know whether the sense of mystification which it produced in me was wholly due to Von Hartmann or no; but on making acquaintance with Von Hartmann himself, I found that Mr. Sully has erred, if at all, in making him more intelligible than he actually is. Von Hartmann has not got a meaning. Give him Professor Hering's key and he might get one, but it would be at the expense of seeing what approach he had made to a system fallen to pieces. Granted that in his details and subordinate passages he often both has and conveys a meaning, there is, nevertheless, no coherence between these details, and the nearest approach to a broad conception covering the work which the reader can carry away with him is at once so incomprehensible and repulsive, that it is difficult to write about it without saying more perhaps than those who have not seen the original will accept as likely to be true. The idea to which I refer is that of an unconscious clairvoyance, which, from the language continually used concerning it, must be of the nature of a person, and which is supposed to take possession of living beings so fully as to be the very essence of their nature, the promoter of their embryonic development, and the instigator of their instinctive actions. This approaches closely to the personal God of Mosaic and Christian theology, with the exception that the word "clairvoyance" [89] is substituted for God, and that the God is supposed to be unconscious.

Mr. Sully says:-

"When we grasp it [the philosophy of Von Hartmann] as a whole, it amounts to nothing more than this, that all or nearly all the phenomena of the material and spiritual world rest upon and result from a mysterious, unconscious being, though to call it being is really to add on an idea not immediately contained within the all- sufficient principle. But what difference is there between this and saying that the phenomena of the world at large come we know not whence? . . . The unconscious, therefore, tends to be simple phrase and nothing more . . . No doubt there are a number of mental processes . . . of which we are