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which conditions the character of opinions and actions, lies in the deepest night of the Unconscious. Consciousness may perhaps influence actions by emphatically presenting those motives which are adapted to react on the unconscious ethical, but whether and how this reaction. follows, consciousness must calmly await, and first learn when the will proceeds to action, whether such will agrees with the conceptions which it entertains of moral and immoral.

It is hereby proved that the process of origination of that to which we assign the predicates moral and immoral lies in the Unconscious. We must now, in the second place, show that these predicates denote qualities which do not inhere in their subject in and of themselves, but which express only relations of the same to a quite definite standpoint of a higher consciousness, i.e., that these predicates are only creations of consciousness, and never can belong to the Unconscious in itself. It immediately follows from this that it would be wrong to talk of a moral instinct, since it is true the actions of mankind as such flow from the unconscious or instinctive part of character, e.g., through the instincts of compassion, gratitude, revenge, selfishness, sensuality, &c.; but this unconscious production can never have anything to do with the notions moral and immoral, because they are only engendered by consciousness, and a conscious instinct would be a contradictio in adjecto. The latter remark should protect me from being credited with maintaining an instinctive conscience; on the contrary, I hold conscience to be no simple fact, but a very complex one, the development of which from the very numerous factors of consciousness can never be definitely proved.

We also call lifeless natural phenomena, wind, air, portents, good and bad; further, we assign these predicates to animals and savages or young children, but they only pass into moral and immoral when we make beings responsible for their operation. But we then, again, hold beings

responsible for their actions when their consciousness is developed to such a degree that they can themselves understand the notions of moral and immoral, and make them responsible only for those actions which their consciousness was not prevented from measuring by its own standard. Thus it comes to pass that we call one and the same action moral or immoral in one being but not in another. For example, the strict sense of property which we find in many animals within their own species and narrow community (e.g., among wild horses within the herd in respect to pastures and provender) we do not designate a moral, but only a good quality. Thus we cannot call it immoral when wild peoples offer even their wives to their guests; on the contrary, as a part of hospitality, this might be called moral, because their consciousness is at any rate developed up to this stage, but not to the comprehension of modesty in sexual intercourse. In a little child, we can, at the most, only term bad those malignant outbreaks which at a riper age would cause the same character to be condemned as immoral. Revenge for bloodshed would among ourselves be called immoral; among peoples of less culture it is a moral institution; among quite rude savages a mere act of passion which can be styled neither moral nor immoral. These examples may suffice to prove that moral and immoral are not qualities of the persons, or of their actions in themselves, but only judgments on them from a point of view taken by consciousness-relations between those beings and their actions on the one hand, and this standpoint of a higher stage of consciousness on the other; that thus Nature, so far as it is unconscious, does not know the distinction of moral and immoral. Yes, Nature is in itself not good or bad, but is ever nothing else but natural, i.e., self-adequate. For the universal natural Will has nothing outside itself, because it includes everything and is itself everything; thus there can for it be nothing good or bad, but only for an individual will; for a relation between a will and an

external object is already necessarily presupposed in the notions good and bad.

In all this we by no means desire to disparage the value of the critical point of view adopted by consciousness; we only seek to avoid the error of supposing conceptions to be possible outside this specific point of view which only arise in relation to it. Certainly, if a consciousness be assumed external and prior to Nature (in a personal God), one may also, from the point of view of this consciousness, measure the world by the standard of these conceptions; but if—as we shall be constrained to do for reasons hereafter to be assigned-we reject a consciousness outside the union of mind and matter, the possibility also disappears of applying the standard of those conceptions to the whole unconscious world,-a point on which much unprofitable labour has been expended. But all this by no means lowers the value of those notions, for as, in spite of all partiality and limitation, consciousness for this world of individuation surpasses in importance the Unconscious, so, in the last resort, the moral stands higher than the natural; indeed, consciousness being ultimately also only an unconscious product of Nature, the moral also is not an antithesis of the natural, but only a higher stage of it, to which the natural has risen through its own energy and the instrumentality of consciousness.

I must here content myself with these brief indications, as an ethic worked out in this spirit would require a treatise to itself. I have also deemed it necessary to forego explicitly considering why and how judgments, with the predicates moral and immoral, must arise at a certain stage of consciousness, and what the content of those notions is. I thought I might the more readily do this as the general understanding of those conceptions met with in ordinary life appeared sufficient for the purpose of our present inquiries.

V.

THE UNCONSCIOUS IN THE ESTHETIC JUDGMENT AND IN ARTISTIC PRODUCTION.

WITH regard to the perception of the Beautiful there have been current from early times two extreme opinions, which, in the various attempts at compromise, have obtained very different recognition. One party, taking its rise from Plato, rely on this, that in Art the human mind transcends the beauty revealed in Nature, and hold this to be impossible unless there indwell in the soul an idea of the beautiful, a certain aspect of which is termed an Ideal, and which serves as a criterion of what is and is not beautiful in Nature, so that the æsthetic judgment is à priori and synthetic. The other party point out that in those creations of art which approximate most closely to the alleged ideals there are contained no elements which Nature herself does not offer to the view; that the idealising activity of the artist only consists in an elimination of the ugly, and in the collecting and combining of those elements of beauty which Nature exhibits apart; and that æsthetic science has in its progress more and more demonstrated the psycho-genesis of the æsthetic judgment from given psychological and physiological conditions, so that we may confidently expect a complete illumination of this province, and its purification from all à priori and supernatural conceptions.

I hold that each side is partly right, partly wrong. The empiricists are right when they affirm that every æsthetic judgment must be founded on psychological and physiological conditions; and accordingly it is, strictly

speaking, they alone who create scientific Esthetics; whilst the idealists, by their hypothesis, cut away the foundations of such science, and in strictness have only advanced Esthetics so far as they were at the same time more or less consciously empiricists, i.e., substantially limited the science through empirical reception of the matter afforded by experience. But suppose the empiricists had obtained their end, and had completely analysed the aesthetic judgment, they would only thereby have proved its objective connection with other spheres-its world-citizenship, as it were, in the realm of spirit as a natural existence, but would have left untouched its subjective origin in the individual consciousness, or would have maintained something altogether false by their implicit assertion that the objective connection and the process of origination in the subjective consciousness are identical, which is contradicted by all unprejudiced introspection, and the testimony of the simplest as of the most cultivated taste. The idealists are far nearer the truth when they allege that this process is something lying beyond consciousness, antecedent to the conscious æsthetic judgment, consequently something à priori in respect of the latter. They are again in the wrong, however, when they annihilate all process in this à priori by their ready-made ideal, which is derived God knows whence, of whose existence consciousness knows nothing, whose objective connection with other psychical phenomena must remain for ever incomprehensible, and whose rigidity stamps it as insufficient when we consider the endless variety of its illustrations.

As soon as æsthetic Idealism wishes to do more than set up its principle in general, as soon as it enters more intimately into the wealth of the given manifold, it sees itself compelled to confess the untenability of the abstract ideal, which is a vague unity, and to admit that the Beautiful is only possible in the most concrete particularity, because individually intuited (e.g., the human ideal as masculine and feminine; the former again as ideal of

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