Rudolf Hermann Lotze

“ For not merely are valid truths like those of mathematics,—even when a reason can be discovered from which insight into them is gained,—produced by no ‘cause’; but not even everything actual requires an act of causation. It is only the change of something actual that requires this. The ‘Being’ of an existence can in itself be regarded as perfectly unconditioned and eternal. It is only the special nature of what exists, that can, on manifold other grounds, excite a doubt respecting its unconditioned existence and an inquiry after its origin. ”

“ Space itself, therefore, cannot be proved to have an independent existence by an appeal to relations which are held to have existed between reality, and yet to have been neither a mere nothing, nor such reality itself. The truth is rather that space furnishes merely the inducement to correct this false idea of the relations, and to become aware that, in fact, nothing can be outside of ‘the Existent’ ”

“ If I may be permitted to state what I regard as the most common fault of philosophizing, it is the want of persistence and tenacity. It satisfies itself too often with the flash of a striking thought which throws an interesting and dazzling light on one part of the world, but leaves others in only the deeper darkness; whereas it is much more important to pursue every fundamental thought one tries into all its possible consequences, in order to ascertain how far its validity suffers no contradiction from reality, and at what point its fruitfulness ceases. ”

“ But at this point philosophy concludes with an unattainable ideal:—that is to say, with the conviction that the universal and necessary laws of thought, in accordance with which we judge of all reality; second, that the primitive facts of this reality; third, that the supreme Ideas of the Good and the Beautiful, which hover before us as the final purposes of the world,—are all perfectly coherent factors of one and the same Supreme Principle, of the nature of God, although we are unable strictly to demonstrate this fact of their coherency. ”

“ While we require that the ‘Thing’ shall be thinkable before its properties, we, for all that, never achieve the actual thought of it otherwise than by means of its properties. While we further require that it must first ‘be,’ in order afterward to experience somewhat or to enter into relations with other things, we, for all that, never in experience find a ‘Being’ whose apparent rest does not itself rest upon uninterrupted motions and actions; nor are we able even in our thoughts to discover a perspicuous conception of what we mean by such ‘Being’ as this. ”

“ Not one, but innumerable principles, place themselves at once at his command. For any part of experience may serve for such a starting-point when it finds itself, in the shape in which it immediately presents itself, standing in contradiction to those innate truths which we desire to see controlling all reality, and which, even in the moment in which the observed fact conflicts with them, force themselves upon our consciousness as indispensable postulates. This is the way in which, setting out from experience, every philosophy has in actual fact arisen. ”

“ But the Cosmology has shown that the universal forms of Space and Time, within whose confines all the aforesaid special forms assumed in combination by the manifold impressions become specifically marked off, are themselves likewise only forms of our intuition; and it is only we who perceive in these forms the graduated reciprocal conditions of Things that are not in themselves subjects of intuition, but are only apprehensible as abstract conceptions. The World of Space and Time is, therefore, ‘phenomenon’; the ‘real Being,’ which answers to it and produces it within us, is dissimilar to it. ”

“ It will be objected, further, that a law appears even much less capable than a quality, of that reality which must appertain to every ‘Thing.’ This objection we might obviate, in so far as it is undoubtedly self-evident that, wherever we design to define in thought the essence of ‘Thing’ the thought-image by means of which we make the attempt, must remain as a mere image distinct from the real Thing. Moreover, we can in no case give such an expression to our thought of the essence of ‘Thing’ as would be the real Thing itself, and not merely a designation for our cognition. ”

“ It is in general quite obvious that there cannot be, in the matter of fact itself and as developments of its own nature, as many movements and turnings as would correspond to the various steps, the separations and combinations, and in general to all the turnings which we must make in thought, in order from our point of view to apprehend the nature of such matters of fact. This is perfectly clear to every one, in case one has to do, for example, with the more intricate artifices of investigation through which we endeavor to discover any secret fact. ”

“ There might be, in the complexity of things, much, whether passing or durable, that remained hidden or obscured; but what was to me quite incredible was the notion of a universe split in two in such a way that the whole intellectual life had always to do with an external reality which was eternally impenetrable to it. But my prejudice in favour of the unity of the world, which the first of these views thus contradicted, was unable to determine me to adopt the second without reserve. Philosophy seeks to be science, and its instrument must therefore be simply the linking together of thoughts ”

“ But space is only an intuition for us; and even for us not primo loco an intuition of an infinite magnitude of extension, but—stated accurately—only the mental representation of that coherent system of places which appertain to the different real elements, by virtue of their supersensible relations to one another in our intuition. ”

“ The name ‘Cognition’ is the expression of a prejudice,—to wit, the assumption that the course of mental representation which originates from external stimuli within the spirit has the problem of reproducing in copy these ‘stimuli’ from which it springs. In science our act of representation naturally serves, in every case, the purpose of ascertaining a matter of fact; but in the totality of the World it has another position. It is a prejudice, that the World exists, without the kingdom of spirits, ready-made and completed in effective consistence of its own ”

“ The essence of a thing, if it merely consisted in a simple quality, would therefore with every change be itself totally changed; that is, a new somewhat would take the place of the old as it vanished, and the ‘Thing’ would have in itself no kind of ‘reserve,’ to which, as to its permanent nature, it could withdraw on the occasion of a change in its quality. ”

“ The Realism of common opinion is wont to regard the world, apart from cognition, as a ready-made matter-of-fact that subsists entirely complete in itself; and cognition as only a kind of appendage by means of which this subsisting matter-of-fact is simply recapitulated for the best good of the cognizing being, but without in this way experiencing any increment of reality. Now Idealism establishes the truth that the process of ideation itself is one of the most essential constituents of the world’s ongoing course ”

“ For, however highly we may think of philosophy, it is yet folly to look upon it as the pinnacle, or as one of the highest potencies in the order of the universe. It is, and it remains, a historical fact in the development of the human mind on this earth, and it fulfils its task when it sets forth the world as it must project itself to us in our present place of observation. ”

“ The above-mentioned Idealism, nevertheless, has failed to get rooted, not barely in the common mode of conception,—for which it is quite too much of a foreign growth,—but also in philosophy. It has been objected to it, that its so-called ‘actions of the Absolute’ could serve as a substitute for ‘Things,’ but still are not actual Things. That there must be Things, however, is firmly adhered to, from a motive very obscure and little analyzed. We want to possess in that Nature which we immediately perceive, something really self-existent and not barely a somewhat apparent to us. ”

“ On the other hand, we do not have merely the empty intuition of infinite space; but we perceive in space different phenomena at places which we cannot perceive in another order at our pleasure, but must see as they are. ”

“ The conception of efficient causation is inevitable for our apprehension of the World, and all attempts to deny the reality of efficient causation, and then still comprehend the course of the world, make shipwreck of themselves. ”

“ For the aforesaid ‘action’ of Fichte we substitute the morally Good, for which the action is simply the indispensable form of actualization; we besides conceive of the ‘beautiful,’ too, and the ‘happy’ or ‘blessedness,’ as united with this Good into one complex of all that has Value. And now we affirm: Genuine Reality in the world (to wit, in the sense that all else is, in relation to It, subordinate, deduced, mere semblance or means to an end) consists alone in this Highest-Good personal, which is at the same time the highest-good Thing. ”

“ Our representation must be subjective, not merely if there were no external world, but it must be subjective also if there is. Even of a real world we could have no other kind of representation than we have, a representation reproduced through our own subjective activity, and the subjectivity of all our knowledge, which is so often emphasized, decides absolutely nothing as to the reality of its object and the accuracy of our representation of it. ”

“ Now as long as a and b have the value of beings independent of each other and self-subsisting,—no matter how similar, comparable, or related their natures may otherwise be,—so long is the above assumption without a reason for its possibility: the states of a have nothing to do with b, and conversely. All the pains-taking, however, to bring these ‘Things’ which are of themselves quite isolated, into some relation in a supplementary way, by means of ideas of the ‘passing-over’ of some influence, have been shown to be perfectly fruitless. ”

“ It is very ready to look upon knowledge as the sole portal through which that which constitutes the essence of real existence can enter into connexion with the mind, and to count the particular forms of connection by which, in our own thought, we apprehend and unite the manifold, to be the nerves, and the only nerves, which also bind together its several elements in the actual nature of things. ”