Philosophy of the unconscious - 1893 Author:Eduard von Hartmann Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A. THE MANIFESTATION OF THE UNCONSCIOUS IN BODILY LIFE. " The Materialists endearour to show that all, even mental phenomena, are phytical: and rightly; on... more »ly they do not see that, on the other hand, everything physical is at the same time metaphysical."— Schopenhauer. THE UNCONSCIOUS WILL IN THE INDEPENDENT FUNCTIONS OF THE SPINAL CORD AND GANGLIA. The time has gone by when the animals were contrasted with the free man as locomotive machines, as soulless automata. Deeper insight into the life of animals, strenuous effort to understand their language and the motives of their actions, has shown that with respect to mental capacity man differs from the brutes in degree and not in kind, just as the brutes differ among themselves ; that in virtue of this higher capacity he has created a more perfect form of speech, and thereby has gained in the course of generations that perfectibility which is wanting to the brutes, owing to their imperfect means of communication. We accordingly know now, that we cannot compare the educated man of to-day with the animals, without being unjust to the latter, but only the peoples which are but little removed from the state in which they were fashioned by the hand of Nature ; for we know that even our own race, privileged as it now is by higher aptitudes, was once what these still are, and that our present higher qualities of brain and mind have been only gradually attained through the law of hereditary transmission of acquired power. Thus the animal kingdom is presented to us as a finished scale of being, with pervading analogies. The fundamental spiritual faculties must be essentially the same in all, and what in the higher members appear to be new faculties are only secondary powers, which have been developedin certain directions by the hi...« less