Meanwhile, supposing that Hartmann's philosophy may be a mistake, and a sceptic must be willing to entertain that possibility, although it has every probability on its side, since the instinct of self-preservation, the first condition of life, consists in the removal of pain, which is the first motive-power,—we must seek to explain historically how this philosophy has come to the birth and spread. Superficial observers like the mystic Caro, do not hesitate, inconsistently enough, to attribute it to bodily ill-health. The socialists, who wished to arouse the expectation that their teaching was practicable, explained it as the foreboding of overthrow in a class, of whom Hartmann was the representative. But Hartmann believes in socialism and the new social system, although only as transitional forms. He is not despairing, not even melancholy. He seems to be the first philosopher who, quite independently of Christianity, European culture and idealism, tries to explain the world's progress from the purely materialistic point of view. He states facts and processes exactly as they are. From unconscious minerals we have developed into globules of albumen, acquired conscious nerve-centres and finally brains with ever-increasing self-consciousness. The more highly organised the life, the greater the capacity for pain and susceptibility to impressions. Not till our time did the cosmic brain succeed in arriving at clear perception and, accordingly, at divining the order of the world. Hartmann can therefore be regarded as one who arrived at the highest degree of consciousness, and he will be remembered as the great unmasker before whose keen gaze the bandages fell away. It is consequently a mistake to call him "the prophet of despair." Idealists may feel empty and despairing when confronted by the naked truth, but the meliorist feels an inexpressible calm. Man will be modest when he takes the measure of his littleness as an atom of the cosmic dust. He will no longer build his happiness on a future life, but will be impelled by pessimism to order the only life he has as well as he can for himself and for others. He will see how useless it is to lament over the misery of existence; he will accept pain as a fact, and alleviate it as well as he can. Hartmann is a realist, and the title "pessimist" in its old significance has been fastened on him out of malice. He shudders at the misery of the world, but does not even call it misery. He only shows that life is not so great and beautiful as men like to make out, and pain in his view is not a mere bodily ailment, but an impelling motive. His is a sound and healthy view of things in contrast to which socialism may sometimes look like idealism, since it wishes to remodel society according to its desires, not according to the possibilities of the case.
Meanwhile the review article on Hartmann had a quickening effect on John. There was then a system in the apparent madness of the universe, and his consciousness had rightly foreboded that the whole scheme of things was something very insignificant. But a new philosophic system is not absorbed by a brain in a day. It only left a certain deposit and gave a keynote to his thoughts. As a theoretical point of view it was still obscured by his idealistic education, darkened by his inborn and acquired hatred of the upper class, and his natural tendency to seek his point of equilibrium somewhere outside himself. Taken on the large scale, life was meaningless, but if one wanted to live, one had to come to grips with reality, and adopt an everyday point of view, which alas! one very readily did. Enormous difficulties stood in the way of earning a living or making a name. Honour, viewed absolutely, was nothing, but in relation to the petty circumstances of life it was something great, and worth striving for. The Philistines did not understand that, and derived much amusement, when they saw him, pessimist as he was, toiling after distinctions. They, with their clock-work brains, thought this inconsistent, since they did not understand that the term "honour" has two values, an absolute and a "relative."
[1] In his pamphlet "The Conscious Will in the World-history" (1903), Strindberg takes the opposite view to that expressed here.