PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS. BY EDUARD VON HARTMANN. SPECULATIVE RESULTS ACCORDING TO THE INDUCTIVE METHOD OF PHYSICAL SCIENCE. Authorised Translation BY WILLIAM CHATTERTON COUPLAND, M.A. B.Sc. IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON: TRÜBNER & CO., LUDGATE HILL. 1884. [All rights reserved.] 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 |