A critical account of the philosophy of Lotze, the doctrine of thought

Front matter

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CHAPTER I The Main Problem of Lotze's Philosophy- - i CHAPTER n

General View of Lotze's Doctrine of Thought 37

CHAPTER HI

Thought and the Preliminary Processes of

Experience 73

CHAPTER JV The Theory of Judgment 119

CHAPTER V

Lotze's Doctrine of Inference and the Systematic Forms of Thought - - - - 173 xvi

CONTENTS

CHAPTER VI

PAGE

Examination of Lotze's Ascent from Sub-

SUMPTIVE TO Systematic Inference - - 223

CHAPTER VII

The Subjective World of Ideas and the Subjective Processes of Thought - - - 268

CHAPTER VIII

The Principle of Reality in Thought and its

CHAPTER I

THE MAIN PROBLEM OF LOTZE'S PHILOSOPHY

JT is an unmistakeable mark of greatness in a man that he irresistibly attracts the attention of thinkers and makes the task of endeavouring to comprehend him inevitable. He may not claim such attention at once. He may for a time be a voice in the wilderness, and the message he utters may travel in the void. If he be a philosopher he must, as a rule, wait for the age that can comprehend him. The truths which he leaves as an inheritance to the world generally fall in the first place into the hands of rival schools which divide the heritage between them, each of them seizing a mere aspect of his doctrine, and, while following it out into its abstract consequences, sacrificing the principle which gave it vitality. The true heir of the inheritance appears in him who is able to

itt A collect together the scattered and conflicting aspects and to grasp them in their unity.

But the greater gods appear rarely. Vital revolutions of human thought are not frequent. Many must labour to understand the thoughts of the few. And, amidst the conflict of opposing systems, we must welcome those men who co-ordinate the truths though they may lack the strength to combine them. For, although co-ordination merely shows the need of an ordering principle without revealing what it is, and sets the problem rather than solves it, it nevertheless places us at the point of view from which alone solution is possible.

Such, I believe, is the service which has been done in recent times by Hermann Lotze, Without either the originality or the constructive power that brings reformation through revelation and heralds a new age with a new truth, he nevertheless commands the homage of our time. It is doubtful if any writer on philosophy has occupied so much attention in recent years as Lotze. And the modern developments of philosophy and religion, both in this country and in Germany, are so marked with his influence that the task of comprehending his significance cannot be easily or wisely set aside.

It cannot be denied that circumstances more or less fortuitous in character have combined with the intrinsic worth of his writings to lend them importance. He has received from translators such particular favour that all his greater works are in the hands of English readers. He has given a popular, as well as a scientific exposition of his views, and thus helped materially in making them a common possession ; and he is intelligible to an ordinary reader. He gains also in all these respects from his contrast to his predecessors in Germany, of whose thoughts he is a vendor ; and he gains still more by the impression — which the student of the earlier German metaphysicians often misses — that he is a " sound " thinker both as to matter and method. Instead of their speculative boldness, he has substituted an exposition of details which is extraordinarily careful, a cautiousness which often amounts to hesitancy, an admirable habit of arguing questions on both sides, and the still rarer merit of admitting the limitations of his own theories, and the cogency of other views with which he has little sympathy ; so that he seems to sit free from his own system.

But it need hardly be said that no combination of such extraneous circumstances could of itself account for his influence. His power over the age springs from the fact that he is dealing with problems which it recognizes as vital, and his popularity from the fact that he solves them in a manner which, on the whole, accords with our convictions. For, unlike his predecessors and the majority of his contemporaries, he does no violence to the views of ordinary educated persons on any of the graver matters of morality or religion. On the contrary, he seems to have restored to us possessions which Kant and his immediate followers had made insecure, and which the Materialists and the Pessimists had rendered untenable. In the service of these convictions he has, at least for the time, stemmed the tide of Idealism and given pause to that ambitious Monism which seemed to have confused the old boundaries of thought, mingling together nature and spirit, good and evil, things and thought, the human and the divine. In the same interest he has also " stayed the Bacchic dance of the Materialists," who had occupied the place left vacant by the spent Idealism. So that it is no matter for surprise that some readers of philosophy, and, more especially, theologians of a reflective type should consider that they owe it to Lotze above all others that, after the reign of chaos, there is once more *'a firmament in the midst of the waters, dividing the waters from the waters." To many such he is, if not the last refuge, the latest hope.

Nor is he of little value to the few who are more interested in the pursuit of truth than in the defence of convictions already acquired. That is to say, the writings of Lotze demand the attention of men whose interests are philosophical rather than directl}- ethical or religious. This is true, although he can scarcely be said to have looked upon the world from a fresh point of view, or erected a new system. Indeed, he rather set himself to show why the reflection of the world of reality in a philosophical theory is an aim that transcends the powers of man, and sought to cool men's ardour for new systems. So far from deriving all things from a single principle, there is scarcely any writer of his magnitude who leaves his students in such doubt as to his regulative thoughts. He rarely gives utterance to decisive convictions ; when he does, he generally admits that he cannot prove them — particularly if they are positive — and he often seems to contradict them in other parts of his writings. His caution, his care for details, his obtrusive fair-mindedness, have obscured his main conceptions. It is difficult to say whether he is an Idealist, or Realist, or both ; and he has, quite naturally, been taken for a Materialist, for a champion of Orthodox theology, and also for an enlightened Agnostic. Hartmann, his best critic, tries to make out that Lotze never says a *'Yea" without a "Nay"; some, even of his followers, admit that he has no system — his centre like his circumference being everywhere.

But though Lotze's thoughts lack the unity of a system explicitly governed by a single principle, they have that other unity, which is frequently not less suggestive and valuable, that comes from being occupied with one problem. He is by no means a mere eclectic, or gatherer of simples. His contributions to special departments of philosophy have been too weighty, and his criticism of certain metaphysical doctrines too penetrating, to be the outcome of an unsystematic mind. Sporadic thought could not wield the power he has shown ; and the magnitude of his influence proves beyond dispute that his speculation has one impulse and one aim. That aim has been obscured, partly by the number of the one-sided theories held in his day, and devoted to the development of abstract views with all of which he had some sympathy, and partly by the predominance of the critical over the constructive tendency in Lotze's own mind.

Erdmann, who estimates Lotze very highly, says that " the reader of Lotze must make up his mind to find much which appeared to him indisputable truth described as uncertain, and, in the same way, much which he held to be indisputably false represented as at least possible." Now, the faculty of rendering disputable what seemed certain is the distinctive mark of the genuine critic. He suspends our decision, he assists our progress by first seeming to retard it ; he forces thought to turn back, so to speak, for aspects of truth that have been neglected during the excitement that comes with the consciousness of advance. With the necessity and directness of instinct the critic sets himself in antagonism to the aggressive movements of the systematizing thought of his day, and protests against the tendency to superinduce on the wealth of phenomena a rash and abstract simplicity.

We find these characteristics on almost every page of Lotze's writings. Like the true critic, he escapes the contagion of both of the great modern enthusiasms, and endeavours to Hmit at once the scientific and the ideaHstic interpretations of the world to the spheres within which they are respectively valid. While rejoicing in the conquests of modern science, he is filled with distrust of its importunate persuasiveness " ; while sympathizing deeply with the spiritual view of the world which Idealism seeks to establish, he has the strongest antipathy to its over-confidence and a keen sense of its difficulties and of the existence of facts which refuse to be fitted into its system. Yet he is not a sceptic, except in the older and better sense of the term. His interest is not in negation. " Man," he says, " must make the best of what he has, and not decline valuable knowledge merely because it does not offer him the whole truth which he wishes to know." Unlike the sceptic, Lotze believes where he cannot prove, and finds experience itself to be richer than any theory of it. His antagonism to the generalizations of science, and especially to Idealism, in which, as I believe, lies the key to his significance, has its roots in positive convictions which, as he conceived, have been either ignored altogether or mutilated in order to be fitted into systems. In fact, he sets himself against the two great constructive movements of modern thought on behalf of the contents of the ordinary consciousness. This double attack ultimately resolves itself into a single one. His conviction that "the fundamental ideas of Physical Science are inadequate, disconnected, and frequently inconsistent " could only be justified by subjecting them to philosophical criticism. For it is only when a science aspires to be a metaphysic, and seeks to make its principles universal in their application, that its inadequacy is revealed ; the ultimate justification or refutation of the constructive hypotheses of science is the task of philosophy — or, if the phrase is less displeasing, of a science of first principles. Besides this, Lotze possibly divined a truth which is ever becoming clearer, that there is a close afiinity between natural science and Idealism, that modern science when it understands itself is idealistic in temper and tendency, and that the attempt of philosophers to establish a universal synthesis by means of the principle of evolution differs from the work which is done by men of science only in the extent of its sweep and in the breadth and generality of its results. It is not Idealism with its spiritual construction of the world that is at war with the inner spirit of science, but the scepticism which, in our day, conceals its true nature under the names of Dualism and Agnosticism. Hence the interest of Lotze's strictures on both of these modern movements, his attempt to limit the spheres within which they are cogent, centres round his criticism of Idealism.

Lotze's opposition to Idealism was based not so much on his antagonism to its positive doctrines as upon his antipathy to its system. It would not be strictly true to say that Lotze adopts each of the main tenets of Hegel while rejecting the wJwle, but such a statement would be a fair summary of his general attitude. His view of Nature, Man, and God is not fundamentally different from that of Hegel, but he strenuously criticizes Hegel's attempt to reduce them all into pulsations or dialectical movements of a single principle of thought. To the essentially critical spirit of Lotze, a system, simply because it is a system, seems to tyrannize over its component parts. The reflective characteristic of modern thought, manifested in science no less than in philosophy, seemed to him to raise universal conceptions to such a despotic position that it was no longer possible to assign their due place and rights to the rich contents of the world and to the endless variety of its particular phenomena. His philosophy is a persistent defence of perception against reflection, of the concrete particular against pale and vacant general ideas ; it is a powerful protest against injustice to the individuality and uniqueness which he found at the core of every real fact. Thought, with its abstract conceptions and unsubstantial universals seemed to him poor and thin as compared with the facts and events of the real world ; every general law appeared to him to fall short of reaching the core and essence of anything actual. How lO much more, therefore, must a system of general laws — such as a philosophy must be — fall short of the infinite variety of the facts of the world within and without man, and the endless play of its events.

It is thus easy to see how the Idealism of Hegel, which was at once the most recent and the most bold attempt to exhaust the contents of the world of objects by means of thought, should draw upon itself the most uncompromising opposition from Lotze. It seemed to him to reduce the world to a " solemn shadow-land " of general conceptions, to convert the infinite variety of its chances and changes into a system of logical notions at once empty and ruled by necessity. In a word, Idealism appeared to him to be an attempt to establish a universal mechanism, which was not the less fixed and relentless because it was called "spiritual." " On such a view," he says, " individual, living minds really count for nothing in history; they are but sound and smoke, their efforts, in so far as they do not fall in with the evolution of the Idea, have no worth and significance in themselves, their happiness and peace are not among the ends of historical development. The course of history is as the great and awful and tragic altar on which all individual life and joy is sacrificed to the development of the Universal Idea of Humanity."^

It is this opposition to system that distinguishes ^ Mikrokosmus^ Bk. vii., chap. ii.

Lotze's criticism of Idealism from that of such writers as Schopenhauer and Hartmann. In the case of these latter writers the criticism of Idealism is preliminary to an attempt to erect a new system. Starting by rejecting the " Panlogismus " of Hegel, and by denying that thought could perform the constructive functions attributed to it, they then assigned to it a subordinate position, and sought to derive it and its activities and products from some more fundamental ontological principle, whose materialistic nature they disguised by calling it the "will" and the ''unconscious." Instead of the " self-conscious spirit " of Hegel, they set on the throne a blind power ; instead of a system whose principle is intelligence, they established a mechanism to which ideas and the consciousness which produced them were more or less contingent, and completely unfortunate, additions.

The constructive efforts of these philosophers have rendered their attack on Idealism comparatively harmless, at least so far as the popular and theological consciousness is concerned. They have diverted attention from the weaknesses of Idealism and centred it on their own systems, which, being materialistic, have all the defects of Idealism in addition to their own ; which are weak in their logic, and which violate in a new way the current moral and religious convictions of the modern world. But Lotze enjoys the immunity from attack which is always the peculiar privilege of the pure critic ;

for no camp can be burned till it is pitched somewhere, and no opponent can be overthrown till he takes up some position of his own. In this fact, I believe, is to be found the true secret of the impression that Lotze has made on both German and English thought. Far from contributing a new rival system of his own, his effort culminates in reestablishing popular ethical and religious convictions, purifying them only of their grosser contradictions. Not that Lotze's agreement with the broad opinions of the ordinary consciousness is in itself a defect. On the contrary, I should say that prima facie it is a grave argument against a philosophy that it contradicts the principles which the world has found valuable in practice. In one respect at least, common sense is truer than any philosophy, and serves as its criterion. And it is a positive achievement for a philosopher to be " orthodox," provided his orthodoxy is philosophical. For he has not to invent the world of art, or morality, or religion, but to understand it. He comes neither to invent nor to destroy, but to fulfil ; he rises above the fundamental convictions of mankind not by rejecting, but by comprehending them.

But he must comprehend them ; and to comprehend them means that he holds them in a manner fundamentally different from the ordinary consciousness. He must not only acknowledge the different aspects of the truth, he must also bring them together by revealing within them the operation of a single principle of unity and simplicity. He may, like the ordinary consciousness, maintain the necessity of nature, and the freedom of man, and the omnipresence of God ; he may give man all his own way which is essential to morality, and God all His own way which is essential to religion, and thus permit both these forces which mould the higher destinies of mankind to exist together. But he must also strive to reconcile them. Truth for him must not be a thing of aspects and phases merely ; he must not agree with the common consciousness in its fragmentariness. This, I believe, is the cardinal defect of Lotze. He spares no effort to expose the errors and omissions of the systems which he criticizes, and he thereby performs a service whose value it would be hard to estimate too highly ; nevertheless he not only leaves the difficulties where they were, he also directs his main attack against the very attempt to resolve them into a higher principle. He has exercised, and exercised with uncommon power, the function of a mere critic ; but he has failed to escape the implicit dogmatism which always lies in wait for the mere critic. For the mere critic is always dominated by an unconscious conservatism which only makes a show of passing its convictions through the crucible of doubt. While seeming to pursue truth, he is really engaged in defending what he has from the first taken to be indubitable. This, as I shall try to show, is what Lotze has done in appealing from the systems of philosophers to experience. His justification for doing so lies in the fact that practice is and will remain wider than theory, and that the world is greater than our best construction of it. But the appeal must be made on behalf of that construction, and the facts of experience must be regarded as problems, and not as truths already known and certain. Otherwise philosophy has abdicated its function in favour of the dogmatismi and fragmentariness of common sense. There is thus a higher service to truth than that of gathering up its fragments ; it is not enough that " there was a noise, and a great shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone." There must be "breath in them"; and the primary business of philosophy is, after all, to be the witness to this breath and

life, to find an expression for the Qng which

pervades all the manifoM differences _qL phenomena and makes the3^orld_a_unity. The philosopher who is satisfied with exposing the abstractness and inconclusiveness of earlier systems may effectively point out the labour that remains to be achieved by others, but he does not perform it himself. But Lotze, in so far as he has confined himself to criticism and the restoration of ordinary convictions, will not give rest to any, except to those who find in the failure of philosophies an excuse for taking traditions for truth and for giving up the endeavour of the intellect.

It may seem to be a hard saying " that Lotze has set himself against the constructive movements of modern thought on behalf of the co?ttents of the ordinary conscionsnessl' and it certainly demands both justification and limitation. Taken absolutely it is not true. For the critical tendency which predominated in him was itself guided by the consciousness of a single problem which ordinary experience seems somehow to solve, although philosophy has not been able to reveal the principle which brings the solution. That problem is the reconciliation of reasoned or systematic knowledge with the unscientific consciousness of spiritual reality which is expressed in religion and morality." ^ It is the problem which vexes the modern spirit and constrains it to reflection. And it is this fact — that Lotze has avoided the one-sided developments of abstract views, placed himself at the point of collision of the primary interests of human life, and thereby taken upon himself our burden — which at the same time gives him the sway he exercises over our time, and puts him in the line of succession from Kant.

For that problem was, of course, first stated by Kant, and the main features of his statement remain unchanged to our own day. He had found that human experience was divided against itself, and that human reason, in the endeavour to interpret it, was called upon to consider questions which it could not decline, and which it could not

^ See Caird's Critical Philosophy of Kant ^ Vol. i., p. 4i_/*^ answer. It could not decline them because they sprang from the very nature and essence of rational experience, and it could not answer them because every answer it could furnish did violence to the material on which it was directed, converting the unconditioned into the conditioned, the infinite into the finite, the real into the phenomenal. Experience contained elements which at once challenged knowledge and transcended it ; and reason, in its attempt to meet the challenge, seemed to fall into intolerable contradictions. Kant was, therefore, constrained to examine " the pretensions of pure speculative reason " to deal with the practical interests which hinge upon the supersensible ideas on which morality and religion rest. The result of the examination was to deprive it of these pretensions. " / must, tlm^efore, abolish knoivledge to make room for belief is his strong expression of the immediate results of his First Critique. And although he found in his Second Critique another " absolutely necessary use of pure reason — the moral use," which promised to restore to us the possessions to which man as a purely cognitive being had no right, and although in his Third Critique he came still nearer the unification of the elements of experience which seemed at first irreconcilable, the history of modern thought amply shows that the solution he offered was incomplete.

A commentator speaking of Lotze has remarked that " he never went back to Kant," implying

MAIN PROBLEM OF LOTZE'S PHILOSOPHY \j thereby that he had no need to do so, because he was from the first engaged in the same manner with the same difficulties. Nor is there any doubt 'J that Lotze's speculative effort derived its original impulse from the same contradiction between natural knowledge and spiritual beliefs, and that it was guided throughout by analogous views as to the nature both of human thought and of the experience which thought has to comprehend. Those \^»<^ who are fortunate enough really to know Kant have little need of Lotze. But to most students of philosophy there can be hardly any better help to the understanding of Kant than the study of Lotze. None betray the vulnerable points of a master's doctrine so surely as his devoted disciples, and hardly any single writer shows more clearly than Lotze does the unsatisfactory character of the Kantian compromise between faith and reason. And besides, Lotze was able to study Kant's thoughts in the light of the labours of those who succeeded him. Hence, although the problem remains the same, and, in its main features, the solution also, the processes by which that solution was attained are deeply modified by both of the great movements of thought which had only begun to appear in Kant's day and in Kant's own writings, namely, the Scientific and the Idealistic movements.

One of Lotze's works, his Mikrokosnius, while, owing to its popular form it has of all his writings the least strictly scientific value, has the double

B i8 merit for his students of being the completest expression of his general views, and of revealing most clearly the motives and convictions which guided his speculative endeavour.^ In the opening paragraphs of that work Lotze indicates with considerable accuracy the problem which he had set himself to solve, and the purpose which in the main was dominant throughout the whole wide range of his speculation. Between spiritual needs and the results of human science there is," he says, " an unsettled dispute of long standing. In every age the first necessary step towards truth has been the renunciation of those soaring dreams of the human heart which strive to picture the cosmic frame as other and fairer than it appears to the eye of the impartial observer." These convictions, springing from the heart, have from one point of view, as he proceeds to show, little claim to be " set in opposition to common knowledge as being a higher view of things." They are only "indefinite yearnings ignorant of their goal " ; and " though they have their source in the best part of our nature," they are infected by doubts and reflections and subject to the " influences of transmitted culture and temporary tendencies," and even to the natural changes of mental mood which take place in men,

^ An article on " Philosophy in the last Forty Years," published in the Co7itempora7y Reviciv^ January, 1880, and, republished in Lotze's Klehie Schrzften, Vol. III., has considerable value for the second of these reasons.

and are different in youth from what they are after the accumulation of manifold experiences." It cannot, therefore, be seriously hoped that such an obscure and unquiet movement of men's spirits should furnish a juster delineation of the connection of things than the careful investigations of science, in which that power of thought, which all share in, is brought into action." We might, therefore, conclude that we must give up belief to make room for knowledge. But, on the other hand, the renunciation of these beliefs in response to the demands of systematic cognition is impossible without distorting and maiming experience in its essential features, and without stultifying the very purpose to attain which such a renunciation is made. For even if truth were attained by such a process, and even if that truth were not partial but complete, it would have, thus set by itself as the sole ideal of human effort, little value. " If the object of all human investigation were to produce in cognition a reflection of the world as it exists, of what value would be all its labour and pains, which could result only in vain repetition, in an imitation within the soul of that which exists without it } What significance could there be in this barren rehearsal — what should oblige thinking minds to be mere mirrors of that which does not think, unless the discovery of truth were in all cases likewise the production of some good, valuable enough to justify the pains expended in attaining it?"^ If, on the one hand, the yearnings of the heart, "the spiritual demands," cannot be satisfied unless their objects are real, and if our beliefs have no right to convince unless they are true ; on the other hand, the mental picture even of these objects, if it could be attained, would be nothing but a subjective imitation of their reality, and would have no innate worth. " Taking truth as a whole, we are not justified in regarding it as a merely self-centred splendour, having no necessary connection with those stirrings of the soul from which, indeed, the impulse to seek it first proceeds." ^ Animated by this double conviction Lotze resists, on the one side, the tendency to "cling with immediate belief to that view of the world, which seems to have its truth corroborated by its consonance with our wishes." He will not "put science as a whole on one side, as if it were a maze in which cognition, detached from its connection with the whole living mind, has become entangled." He refuses, that is, to extrude the intellect on behalf of the spiritual convictions that arise from the heart. But, on the other side, he resists with even greater earnestness the other tendency more prevalent in his day, of renouncing as unreal everything that is not capable of being assuredly known or is not susceptible of systematic exposition and proof. He will not allow man " to revel in this faith of the world of feeling," nor will he agree ^ Mikrokosinus^ Introduction. '^Ibid.