Unconscious Memory

chapter upon instinct in Von Hartma

tmann. Giving him all credit for the pains he has taken with an ungrateful, if not impossible subject, I think that a sufficient sample of Von Hartmann's own words will be a useful adjunct to Mr. Sully's work, and may perhaps save some readers trouble by resolving them to look no farther into the "Philosophy of the Unconscious." Over and above this, I have been so often told that the views concerning unconscious action contained in the foregoing lecture and in "Life and Habit" are only the

if the repetition of an act tends ultimately, under certain circumstances, to its being done unconsciously, so also is the fact of an intricate and difficult action being done unconsciously an argument that it must have been done repeatedly already. As I said in "Life an

ons come to be performed. If, however, it is once conceded that it is the manner of habitual action generally, then all à priori objecti

his is all, and certainly it is sufficiently simple. I sometimes think it has found its greatest stumbling-block in its total want of mystery, as though we must be like those conjurers whose stock in trade is a small deal table and a kitchen-chair with bare legs, a

tem fallen to pieces. Granted that in his details and subordinate passages he often both has and conveys a meaning, there is, nevertheless, no coherence between these details, and the nearest approach to a broad conception covering the work which the reader can carry away with him is at once so incomprehensible and repulsive, that it is difficult to write about it without saying more perhaps than those who have not seen the original will accept as likely to be true. The idea to which I refer is that of an uncons

ully

. . The unconscious, therefore, tends to be simple phrase and nothing more . . . No doubt there are a number of mental processes . . . of which we are unconscious . . . but to infer from this that they are due to an unconscious power, and to proceed to demonstrate them in the presence of the unconscious through all nature, is to make an unwarrantable saltus in reasoning. What, in fact, is this 'unconscious' but a high-sounding name to veil our ignorance? Is the u

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our feet are clogged at every step. We are encircled by the merest play of words, the most unsatisfactory demonstrations, and most inconsistent inferences. The theory of final causes has been hitherto employed to show the wisdom of the world; with our Pessimist philosopher it show

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is for what conclusion? Not, as in the hands of the natural theologians of the eighteenth century, to show that the world is the result of design, of an intelligent, beneficent Creator, but the manifestation of a Being whose only predicates are negatives, whose very essence is to be unconscious.

ween this and the lecture given in the preceding chapter, beyond the fact that both touch upon unconscious actions. The extract which will form my next chapter is only about a t

in the least doubtful to the same gentleman who revised my translation of Professor Hering's