TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. THE author of the following work has so clearly explained its purport, both in the course of the work itself and in the prefatory remarks, that few words are required by way of introduction from a foreign pen. It is true the class of books to which the "Philosophy of the Unconscious" belongs is all but unrepresented in our literature, but the absence of similar home-productions can no longer be held to imply either an inability to comprehend their scope or an indifference to their results. To what shall we attribute the welcome accorded of late to certain reproductions and elucidations of the master-works of modern Transcendentalism, if not to the awakening of a long-repressed desire to re-examine the foundations of a spiritual fabric, for whose stability an instinctive confidence alone made answer? To many two attitudes of mind have become insupportable that of total unconcern about fundamental truth, and that of unthinking acquiescence in the admission of merely juxtaposed and uncommunicating spheres of positive knowledge and impenetrable nescience. What would you have, says the scientist, but an ever-widening view of Nature's operations?-is it not enough, cries the theologist, to be sure that there is a God, although "His ways are past finding out?" To questions so different in substance, but so alike in their flavour of self-complacency, this book is in effect an answer. That Von Hartmann appreciates the gains of positive inquiry no reader of a work replete with illustrations from all the sciences will for a moment doubt; but, on the other side, he is an unfaltering ontologist, and believes no less firmly that he that hath eyes to see can divine the riddle of the universe, and that there is no peace for the intellect and heart until Religion, Philosophy, and Science are not merely "reconciled," but are seen to be one, as root, stem, and leaves are organic expressions of one same living tree. The English reader may wish to know something of the author himself, and the circumstances of the production of this book. More than enough has been written on this subject in Germany, but all that need be said on the matter here may be told in a very few words. Dr. Eduard von Hartmann is a retired military officer, compelled almost at the outset of his career to abandon his profession through a serious affection of the left knee-cap. Constrained to alter his plan of life, the width and varied nature of his attainments (mostly independently acquired) caused him not a little embarrassment. After some wavering, and after casting many longing looks on the fair realms of art, in some of whose departments his talents would. doubtless have commanded success, he obeyed the whispers of his most powerful genius, and yielded himself up once and for all to the calls of a career of philosophical authorship. It will be noticed by the reader with what keen satire he speaks of the professed students and teachers of the Science of Sciences. In this he is at one with his immediate forerunner, and a far older and more potent name. But the circumstances of modern life are quite other than they were in the age of the Sophists; and positions that did not cramp the genius of a Kant, a Schelling, and a Hegel, can hardly of necessity be the fortresses of orthodox opinion the modern free-lance would have the world believe. At the same time we can well imagine that the atmosphere of a University would hardly have been favourable to that direct intercourse with the mind. of the people which the literary spirit of our author craved; and Von Hartmann, like Socrates, doubtless took good counsel of his "Dæmon," when he went straight to the public, and confided in his own intellectual strength to give him a wide and attentive hearing. In the spring of 1868, when in his twenty-seventh year, Eduard Von Hartmann placed in the hands of a well-known Berlin bookseller the original draught of the work now translated, with the title "Philosophy of the Unconscious, Popular Physiological-PsychologicalPhilosophical Inquiries on the Manifestation and Essential Nature of the Unconscious, and the Origin and Meaning of Consciousness." The publisher, with unusual penetration, saw the value of the work, and in November 1868 the book appeared in one volume, the first words of the proposed title alone being retained. Since 1868 Von Hartmann has been an untiring and voluminous writer. The full list of his publications extends to about a score of volumes, some of them running to 700 or 800 pages, to say nothing of magazine articles and such like trifles. Any one who would pronounce an adequate judgment on the author's philosophical powers would have undoubtedly to make acquaintance with the more. important of these; and, in justice to the author, I append a few words of his own concerning the book which has made his reputation. "It is not the product of reflection and maturity, but the bold experiment of juvenile talent, presenting all the defects and qualities of the work of youth. Fifteen years have passed since the manuscript first went to press, and I should conceive many things differently to-day than I presented then." This unripeness has been in a measure corrected by the Appendix and supplementary notes, and the reviewer should bear these in mind when exercising his critical function. That the work is open to criticism of various kinds the present translator does not for a moment doubt; but, when criticism has done its worst, he believes that there will be |