it may appear, is indeed nothing else but the transcendental expression of the generally accepted and presupposed relation of freedom to a concealed necessity, which is called now fate, now providence, without anything being clearly thought by the one or the other; that relation, in virtue of which human beings, through their free action itself, and indeed against their will, are compelled to be causes of something which they never willed, or conversely in virtue of which something must fail and go wrong, which they have willed with freedom and with the exertion of all their energies" (Ibid. p. 598). "But this necessity itself can only be conceived by means of an absolute synthesis of all actions, from which everything that happens, thus also all history, is developed, and in which, because it is absolute, everything is so weighed and calculated beforehand, that all that may happen, however contradictory and inharmonious it may appear, yet has and finds in it its point of union. This absolute synthesis itself, however, must be placed in the Absolute, which is the intuitive and eternally and universally objective in all free action." Whoever has well understood this passage, of which it may be said that it represents the view of all philosophers since Kant, and the substance of which has been reproduced in detail by Hegel in the introduction to his "Lectures on the Philosophy of History," for such an one I have nothing to add.-To any one who prefers to stop at the conceptions Fate or Providence, one can only object that he can therewith frame no clear idea how my act, whether it is the work of my freedom, or the product of my character and the efficient motives, how this my deed is to actualise another than my will, say of a God enthroned in heaven. There is only one way in which this demand is capable of fulfilment, if this God descends into my bosom, and my will is to me in an unconscious way at the same time God's will, i.e., if I unconsciously will something quite different to what my consciousness exclusively thinks to will; if, further, consciousness errs in

the choice of the means to its end, but the unconscious will appropriately chooses this same means for its purpose. Otherwise is this psychical process not at all thinkable, and as much as this is said in the first half of the passage from Schelling.-But now, if we cannot do without an unconscious will in addition to the conscious will; if, on the other hand, we add the long known clairvoyance of unconscious representation, why bring a transcendent God in addition into the affair, when the individual is sufficient of himself with the faculties familiar to us? What then is this fate or providence but the rule of the Unconscious, the historic instinct in the actions of mankind, as long as just their conscious understanding is not yet mature enough to make the aims of history their own? What is the impulse to form a State but an instinct of the masses like the linguistic instinct, or the gregarious impulse of insects, only mixed with more infusions of the conscious understanding?

If, in the animal, as we have seen, instinct always appears just when a need is not to be satisfied in any other way, what wonder if also in all branches of the historical evolution the right man is always born at the right time, whose inspired genius perceives and satisfies the unconscious needs of his time? Here the proverb holds good: When the need is most, the help is nearest.

Why should we trouble a god who stands without and pushes and guides from the outside in the case of the historical instinct of man, when we have not found it necessary in the case of all the other instincts? Only then, if in the progress of the inquiry it should appear, that the unconscious in the individual has nothing individual in it except the reference of this its activity to this definite individual, then will Schelling be right also in the second part of the quoted passage, that the Absolute is the percipient (clairvoyant) in all such action, and its absolute synthesis (inweaving), or as Kant once expresses it (Works, vii. 367), that "Instinct is the voice of God,"

but now of the God in one's own breast, the immanent God.

If we have found the stopping short at the idea of a fate or a providence to be inadmissible, it is not to be understood, that these ways of looking at the matter, just as that of the exclusive self-activity of individuals in history, are in themselves illegitimate, but only, that they are one-sided. The Greeks, Romans, and Mohammedans are quite right in their idea of eiuapμévn or fate, so far as this signifies the absolute necessity of all that happens in the thread of causality, so that every link of the series is determined, predetermined by the foregoing, thus the whole series by the commencing link.

Christianity is right in its idea of Providence, for all that happens happens with absolute wisdom, with absolute fitness, i.e., as means to the fore-seen end, by the never-erring Unconscious, which is itself the absolutely logical. At any moment only one thing can be logical, and therefore always only one thing can, and this the one logically demanded, must happen, just as fitly as necessarily (comp. further on C. Chap. xv. 3). Lastly, the modern rationalistic empirical conception is right, that history is the exclusive result of the self-activity of the individuals determining themselves according to psychological laws without any miracle of an incursion of higher powers. But the supporters of the first two views are wrong, in denying the spontaneity, those of the latter, in denying fate and providence, for only the union of all three points of view is the truth. But this very union was selfcontradictory, as long as one assumed merely conscious self-activity of the individual. It is the cognition of the Unconscious which at once makes this possible and evident, by bringing into scientific clearness the hitherto only mystically postulated identity of the individual with the Absolute, yet without effacing their difference, which is a no less one than that of metaphysical essence and phenomenal existence (comp. C. Chap. vi.-viii. and xi.)

XI.

THE VALUE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS AND OF CONSCIOUSNESS FOR HUMAN LIFE.

I HAVE hitherto made sufficiently conspicuous the value of the Unconscious, so that it might appear that I was desirous of exalting the Unconscious in comparison with consciousness. To repel such a charge, to recall the value of conscious thinking, and to compare the worth of the conscious and unconscious and their respective offices, is the object of the present chapter.

Let us first consider the worth of the Conscious, of conscious reflection, therefore, and of the application of acquired conscious knowledge for mankind.

The fundamental question would be this: "Can reflection and knowledge determine action and character, and in what manner?" The affirmative answer, with which common sense would not be backward, might be placed in doubt through the consideration, firstly, that the specific will, from which action proceeds, springs from a reaction of the character on motive, a process which remains for ever closed to consciousness; and secondly, that volition and ideation are incommensurable things, because they belong to quite different spheres of mental activity. Their heterogeneity and incommensurability are however limited by this circumstance, that an idea forms the content of the will, and an idea its motive or exciting cause, and the eternal unconsciousness of the process engendering the will would only make any knowledge of the connection of motive and desire entirely impossible, if either character were in itself quickly alterable, or there were no necessary

uniformity in the process of motivation, but a freedom of the will in the sense of the Indeterminists. As neither condition obtains, the possibility is open to every one, like the physician with those drugs, whose physiological effect is incomprehensible to him, to collect an empirical knowledge of what desire is called forth by what motive and in what degree. So far as human characters resemble each other in general, this cognition will be general empirical psychology, but so far as characters are different, it will be special knowledge of self and man (Science of Character). If we combine with this the knowledge of those psychological laws according to which the excitability of the different kinds of desires is temporarily changed, as, e.g., the laws of our moods, of passion, of habit, &c., and if we secure ourselves in the manner shortly to be considered from the illusions of the intellect, that are produced by passions, then if all these conditions are ideally satisfied, we shall be able to predict any moment the kind and degree of the resulting desire in respect of any motive, and the errors regarding the issue of the unconscious will-producing process mentioned in Chapters III. and IV. will disappear of themselves.

Now as every motive can only take the form of the idea, and the revival of ideas is subject to the influence of the conscious will, by voluntarily calling up an idea known as motive of a certain desire, there follows from what has been said the possibility of indirectly arousing this desire. Further, as the will is nothing but the resultant of all contemporaneous desires, and as the union of all the components into the one resultant has the simple form of an algebraic sum, because indeed all the components in respect of a future action can have only two directions, positive or negative, there follows further the possibility of influencing the resultant by arousing one or more new desires through a voluntary representation of the appropriate motives, or by strengthening those already present. The same means is also available for suppress