the animal and human creation; i.e., God must get more pain than pleasure from the life of mankind, and to be relieved from this pain is not a positive result merely the removal of something that should not be.[1] (5) This idea of helping God out of his misery may as well be called Salvation—das Moralprincip der Erlösung.[2] (6) The object of Sittlichkeit, the object of social evolution, the supreme principle of morality is therefore to "save God"! This is to be done by bringing the world to an end, for God (the poor creature!) has had to assume the pain of this painful world in order to escape from some pain or woe more awful still.[3] (7) Hartmann closes his book by an ontological statement, a statement about the nature of reality. "The world as a whole (das reale Dasein) is the incarnation of the Godhead; the process of the world is the history of the passion of the God that has become flesh, and at the same time the path to his salva-
- ↑ On this point three remarks must be made: I. It is as a result in contradiction with claim no. 2 (above). Hartmann, in consequence, surrenders claim no. 2 (that God's end must be positive) without compunction. I do not think that he should do this so easily. In his defence, it may be said that in some of his other books he enters upon an elaborate dialectic to show that the world-end must be a negative one. I shall below refer to this dialectic, although I think it unsatisfactory. 2. This weak position that God's end is a negative one, is by Hartmann supported by the irrelevant position that all true religion and all true experience teach us that life brings no happiness but resignation. The result, however, of my life may be negative (resignation, say) without its following that God's 'end' is negative. But we can never catch Hartmann in reference to 'end' or 'purpose,' because he identifies and separates God and man just as it suits him to do so. 3. The same weak position that God's end can only be negative, is further supported (?) by the argument (a Petitio Principii, again) that the spectacle of a weak and suffering God elicits man's pity, and by the argument (Argumentum ad Hominem) that a man who thinks that the idea of helping God out of his misery is too ' lofty' and too 'refined,' is simply revealing his own pettiness of soul!
- ↑ Another Petitio Principii—a form of the question-begging epithet, by which you seem to prove the existence of something by giving it a remarkable or an appealing name.
- ↑ We bring the world to an end by developing (as in Schopenhauer) in mankind a perception of the fatuity of all effort and aim that fall short of the one aim of saving God. I have no time to examine this here. It has been done elsewhere by men like Professor Sully, the late Edwin Wallace, Professor Wenley, and others. I confine myself to again pointing out the fact that we have been arguing in a circle. We had recourse to God's existence to guarantee the reality of human development, and we have ended by having recourse to human development to save God's very existence.
