If we wished to express in the fewest words what Hartmann really has to tell us from his mephitic tripod of unconscious irony, it would be something like this: our time could only remain as it is, if men should become thoroughly sick of this existence. And I fervently believe he is right. The frightful petrifaction of the time, the restless rattle of the ghostly bones, held naïvely up to us by David Strauss as the most beautiful fact of all--is justified by Hartmann not only from the past, _ex causis efficientibus_, but also from the future, _ex causa finali_. The rogue let light stream over our time from the last day, and saw that it was very good,--for him, that is, who wishes to feel the indigestibility of life at its full strength, and for whom the last day cannot come quickly enough. True, Hartmann calls the old age of life that mankind is approaching the "old age of man": but that is the blessed state, according to him, where there is only a successful mediocrity; where art is the "evening's amusement of the Berlin financier," and "the time has no more need for geniuses, either because it would be casting pearls before swine, or because the time has advanced beyond the stage where the geniuses are found, to one more important," to that stage of social evolution, in fact, in which every worker "leads a comfortable existence, with hours of work that leave him sufficient leisure to cultivate his intellect." Rogue of rogues, you say well what is the aspiration of present-day mankind: but you know too what a spectre of disgust will arise at the end of this old age of mankind, as the result of the intellectual culture of stolid mediocrity. It is very pitiful to see, but it will be still more pitiful yet. "Antichrist is visibly extending his arms:" yet it _must be so_, for after all we are on the right road--of disgust at all existence. "Forward then, boldly, with the world-process, as workers in the vineyard of the Lord, for it is the process alone that can lead to redemption!"