It is to Hartmann’s credit, though the fact has not been sufficiently appreciated by professional thinkers, that in a time averse to speculation he has devoted his energies to the highest problems of metaphysics, and in their elaboration has approached his task with scientific earnestness and a comprehensive and thorough consideration of previous results.  Thus the critique of ethical standpoints in the historical part of the Phenomenology of the Moral Consciousness, especially, contains much that is worthy of consideration; and his fundamental metaphysical idea, that the absolute is to be conceived as the unity of will and reason, also deserves in general a more lively assent than has been accorded to it, while his rejection of an infinite consciousness has justly met with contradiction.  It has been impossible here to go into his discussions in the philosophy of nature—­they cannot be described in brief—­on matter (atomic forces), on the mechanical and teleological views of life and its development, on instinct, on sexual love, etc., which he very skillfully uses in support of his metaphysical principle.

%3.  From the Revival of the Kantian Philosophy to the Present Time.%

%(a) Neo-Kantianism, Positivism, and Kindred Phenomena.%—­The Kantian philosophy has created two epochs:  one at the time of its appearance, and a second two generations after the death of its author.  The new Kantian movement, which is one of the most prominent characteristics of the philosophy of the present time, took its beginning a quarter of a century ago.  It is true that even before 1865 individual thinkers like Ernst Reinhold of Jena (died 1855), the admirer of Fries, J.B.  Meyer of Bonn, K.A. von Reichlin-Meldegg, and others had sought a point of departure for their views in Kant; that K. Fischer’s work on Kant (1860) had given a lively impulse to the renewed study of the critical philosophy; nay, that the cry “Back to Kant” had been expressly raised by Fortlage (as early as 1832 in his treatise The Gaps in the Hegelian System), and by Zeller (p. 589).  But the movement first became general after F.A.  Lange in his History of Materialism had energetically advocated the Kantian doctrine according to his special conception of it, after Helmholtz[1] (born 1821) had called attention to the agreement of the results of physiology with those of the Critique of Reason, and at the same time Liebmann’s youthful work, Kant and the Epigones, in which every chapter ended with the inexorable refrain, “therefore we must go back to Kant,” had given the strongest expression to the longing of the time.

[Footnote 1:  Helmholtz:  On Human Vision, 1855; Physiological Optics, 1867; Sensations of Tone, 1863, 4th ed., 1877 [English translation by Ellis, 2d ed., 1885].]