CONTENTS OF VOL. II. X. THE UNCONSCIOUS IN HISTORY I PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS. X. THE UNCONSCIOUS IN HISTORY. NATURE and History, or the origin of organisms and the development of the human race, are two parallel problems. In both cases the question runs: particular contingency or universal necessity, dead causality or living conformity to an end, mere sport of atoms and individuals or a single plan and general superintendence? He who has decided the question with respect to Nature in favour of design will have no difficulty in doing the same in regard to history. The only thing likely to mislead in the latter case is the semblance of personal freedom. But I think I may confidently appeal to the general consensus of modern philosophers in respect to this matter of the freedom of the will, to the effect namely that an empirical freedom in any single act of volition in the sense of unconditionality is altogether out of the question, since, like every other natural phenomenon, it falls under the law of causality, and necessarily follows from the state of the man's mind at any given moment, and the motives which are acting upon him. Further, that if a claim be set up for a freedom of the will outside natural causality, this must at best be sought (I do not say, found) in the supersensible sphere (mundus noumenon), in Kant's intelligible character, but can in no case apply to the specific volitional act, since any VOL. II. A such act is always in time, consequently belongs to the sphere of the phenomenal world, and is accordingly subject to the law of causality, i.e., necessity. This, and the reasons why we are liable to the illusion of a belief in the will's freedom, may be studied in Schopenhauer's essay On the Freedom of the Will." But suppose we even admitted the empirical freedom. of the will, if we recognise a purposive evolution in history at all, this could only be the result of the freedom of individuals if the consciousness of the step next to be taken, in its full significance and in all its consequences, were possessed by every one freely co-operating in the historic movement, before he actively intervened. Undoubtedly since the close of the last century we have been making approaches to that ideal state where the human race consciously accomplishes its destiny, but, save ✓for a few superior minds, this is still a remote condition of things, and nobody will maintain that by far the larger part of the way already traversed has been conquered in this wise. For the aims of the individual are always selfish, each one seeks only to further his own well-being, and if this conduces to the welfare of the whole, the merit is certainly not his; the exceptions to this rule are so few that they are of no account in respect of the whole. But the wonderful part of the matter is, that even the mind, which wills the bad, works the good, that the results become, by combination of many different selfish purposes, quite other than what each individual had imagined, and that in the last resort they always conduce to the welfare of the whole, although often the advantage is somewhat remote, and centuries of retrogression seem to contradict it; this contradiction, however, is only apparent, for they serve the purpose of breaking the strength of an old system, that room may be made for a new and better one, or of allowing a vegetation to grow corrupt, in order that it may manure the ground for something fresh and fairer. Even thousands of years of stagnation on one spot of earth |