uard von Hartmann (born 1842; until 1864 a soldier, now a man
of letters in Berlin) aims at a synthesis of Schopenhauer and Hegel; with
the pessimism of the former he unites the evolutionism of the latter, and
while the one conceives the nature of the world-ground as irrational will,
and the other as the logical Idea, he follows the example of Schelling
in his later days by making will and representation equally legitimate
attributes of his absolute, the Unconscious. His principal theoretical
work, _The Philosophy of the Unconscious_, 1869 (10th ed., 1891; English
translation by Coupland, 1884), was followed in 1879 by his chief ethical
one, _The Moral Consciousness_ (2d ed., 1886, in the _Selected Works_); the
two works on the philosophy of religion, _The Religious Consciousness of
Humanity in the Stages of its Development_, 1881, and _The Religion of
Spirit_, 1882, together form the third chief work (_The Self-Disintegration
of Christianity and the Religion of the Future_, 1874, and _The Crisis of
Christianity in Modern Theology_, 1880, are to be regarded as forerunners
of this); the fourth is the _Aesthetics_ (part i. _German Aesthetics since
Kant_, 1886; part ii. _Philosophy of the Beautiful_, 1887). The _Collected
Studies and Essays_, 1876, were preceded by two treatises on the philosophy
of nature, _Truth and Error in Darwinism_, 1875, and _The Unconscious
from the Standpoint of Physiology and the Theory of Descent_, published
anonymously in 1872, in the latter of which, disguised as a Darwinian,
he criticises his own philosophy. Of his more recent publications we may
mention the _Philosophical Questions of the Day_, 1885; _Modern Problems_,
1886; and the controversial treatise _Lotzes Philosophy_, 1888.[1]

[Footnote 1: On Hartmann cf. Volkelt in _Nord und Sued_, July, 1881; the
same, _Das Unbewusste und der Pessimismus_, 1873; Vaihinger, _Hartmann_,
_Duehring und Lange_, 1876; R. Koeber, _Das philosophische System Ed.
v, Hartmann_, 1884; O. Pfleiderer, critique of the _Phaenomenologie des
sittlichen Bewusstseins (Im neuen Reich)_, 1879; L. von Golther, _Der
moderne Pessimismus_, 1878; J. Huber, _Der Pessimismus_, 1876; Weygoldt,
_Kritik des philosophischen Pessimismus der neuesten Zeit_, 1875; M.
Venetianer, _Der Allgeist_, 1874; A Taubert (Hartmann's first wife),
_Der Pessimismus und seine Gegner_, 1873; O. Pluemacher, _Der Kampf ums
Unbewusste_ (with a chronological table of Hartmann literature appended),
1881;