Rudolf Hermann Lotze

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Mathematics has framed for definite classes of problems its ingenious methods of procedure which, in their application to every individual case, are accommodated to its peculiarities. Mechanics has in the same way formed its selection of plans, which it scruples not to use over and over again when the same class of work is desired, though with adaptations to the requirements of the individual tasks. But there has never been any talk of a universal method of solving all mathematical problems, or of the construction of a machine for every conceivable and, it may be, as yet undeclared purpose. ”

“ Even opinions which we rightly charge with enthusiasm and caprice were yet led to all the dreams they contain by nothing but the contemplation of the actual course of the world. They sought, by a series of fictitious links, to bring the deeply-felt, but ill-understood, defects of the world into harmony with what appeared to them to be the office and task of all true reality. ”

“ He who desires to acquire a theory of knowing before entering upon the work of philosophy, strictly so-called, will raise here the objection that if such a theory were obtained, its business would necessarily lie in the exposition and collection of these universal and intuitively evident principles of judgment of which we have been speaking; and, perhaps, he would further desire to see them all deduced from one solitary and highest principle, in order, at last, to produce in reality that philosophia prima of which men have raved since the days of Aristotle. ”

“ When, in an examination, we put a definite question to the person examined, we may reasonably expect an answer. But if we were to ask him to tell us in one answer all he had learnt during his whole life, he would either not know how in the world to begin, or, like those who rescue things from a fire, he would tell us important and unimportant alike without any arrangement, and both very imperfectly. ”

“ We are once more bidden to hunt after truth, without knowing where we are to seek it; or, at most, we are furnished with a token which permits us to distinguish the true from the false among the thoughts which accidentally come before us. And even this token is not sure, as Descartes’ own example teaches, for when, trusting to his good luck, and no longer guided by a method, he looked around him for the fundamental thought, which must of necessity be true, he was entirely forsaken by that good star which had illuminated his mathematical investigations. ”

“ If now a halt is not to be made at the simple change of perceptions, but if, on the contrary, a correct knowledge is also to arise about the connections which bind the various parts of real existence to one another, then the impression which the reality of one moment makes upon us must not be suffered to disappear as that reality itself does when it makes place for the reality of the next moment. The one impression, remaining still preserved in memory, must be combined with the other in the unity of a single consciousness through a connecting operation. ”

“ It seemed to me that only a Spirit who stood in the centre of the universe which he himself had made, could, with the knowledge of the final aim which he had given to his creation, make all the particular parts of it pass before him in the majestic succession of an unbroken development. But we finite beings do not sit at this living root of all existence, but somewhere among the branches which have spread out from it ”

“ Much goes on within us which even our thinking intelligence follows and contemplates only from without, and whose peculiar contents it cannot exhaustively represent, either in the form of an idea or through a union of ideas. He, therefore, who is animated by the conviction that real existence cannot be impenetrable to the mind, cannot with equal confidence assume that thought is the precise organ which will be able to comprehend the real in its innermost essence. ”

“ For the world itself—the great subject of our investigations—I had no hesitation in presupposing this unity which drew all the individual particulars of real existence out of a common source; but it appeared to me to stand quite differently with philosophy, i.e., with the human endeavour, from the standpoint on which we find ourselves placed in the world, to work out for ourselves an insight into that all-embracing system. ”

“ I will revert a little later to the exact sense of these expressions, and I will at present explain their meaning merely by recalling the multitude of those who maintain that they experience that which is the highest in the world, perfectly intellectually, in faith, in feeling, in presentiment, in inspiration, and who yet acknowledge that they do not possess it in knowledge. We shall define our standpoint towards this view at a later stage, but we shall make to it one concession here in advance. All science can, of course, only operate with thoughts, and must follow the laws of our thinking ”

“ The human reason has always had the living self-assurance that, while it cannot attain to all truth, it yet possesses in that which is necessary to its thought, not merely necessary belief, but truth likewise. It has always believed in such a rationality of the world as that thought and reality correspond to one another, and that the former enjoyed a moderate, but not misleading, access to the latter. ”

“ For the last two centuries Descartes has been the starting-point of an intellectualism whose most general purport has been always a partly acknowledged, partly denied presupposition of all philosophizing. For its most general purport consists only in this, that every man who carries on any investigation necessarily attributes to himself the possession of grounds of decision for his judgment; that he who wishes to answer any particular question needs to have a special principle whose soundness is in some way guaranteed, under which he subordinates it ”

“ In opposition to this latter belief I express the conviction I have already avowed, that one can only decide as to the validity of a representation on the ground of its psychological origin, when one already knows the true bearings of the object to which it refers; for only the knowledge of this, which is the end and aim of the representation, can enable us to judge whether it will reach or miss that aim by the particular way of representing the reality it has actually taken. Within these limits psychology, no doubt, can supply a critique of our various kinds of knowledge. ”

“ For it is a very common prejudice that a process of thought cannot be correct, of which we believe that we have seen how it has developed itself out of the subjective nature of our mind. The insight into its origin appears to be, at the same time, the proof of its invalidity. On this prejudice I may be permitted to make a few observations. Granted, that a higher power has actually had the intention to guarantee to us a knowledge which does not indeed understand all things thoroughly, but yet does not necessarily err in the little it comprehends of them ”

“ Ideas of the infinite, however, cannot be produced by the finite out of itself; and so, while these fundamental principles, which he applied, in a moment of necessity, without having first collated them, were indeed the inmost essence of the highest truth that guided him, they yet, all the same, lacked, at least in part, the clearness and certainty which he recognised as the token of truth. If we try to supply this want, we fall upon that distinction between the matter and the form of knowledge through which Kant re-shaped this intellectualism. ”

“ Whenever we perceive a case of what we call operation, we invariably find that the result which issues from the operation assumes different forms, when the same so-called cause enters into relation with different objects, and that it is consequently as much determined by the nature of that member in the relation which we regard as passive or receptive as by the nature of the other member, which appears to us to be more especially active. This is a thought which is never left out of sight in the investigations of natural science. ”

“ For there is no ground for thinking that every single discipline possesses a special fruitful method which enables it, and enables none of the others, to answer a given question; and, accordingly, if one knows how to answer the question, it is difficult to see why he should not treat of it in the place where natural connections of thought suggest it and make its solution desirable; and if, on the other hand, he cannot answer it, then it is only labour lost to refer to other disciplines which will give no enlightenment either. ”

“ And therefore, since it must be so in every case, the proof of such a subjective origin of our knowledge can, for that very reason, neither decide for nor against its truth; and he who believes that it decides against it, only takes the first step in the error which idealist views carry out more extensively. For when the question is only whether our representations have reference to an external world whose existence we therewith presuppose, Idealism urges with perfect justice that the representation of the external world is only a representation of ours and nothing more. ”

“ The manifold conditions which interpenetrate in the course of things, force us often to use something which is, in this way, only half known as a principle from which we start in judging of that which is still less known. And, finally, the limitation of experience which always presents to our perception only one definite character out of many possible ones, misleads us into seeing necessity in connections where there is really nothing but actuality without a contrary example. ”

“ So also those in the highest degree universal truths, which we regard as an innate possession of our mind, do not stand before its consciousness from the beginning onwards as a complete well-ordered series. We first become conscious of each of them in the moment when a perception occasions their application. Their systematic collection for the construction of a theory of knowledge would, therefore, not be a possible beginning for the work of philosophy, but only for the student who has to repeat in himself a work already completed. ”

“ If we are not to know all at once, but to learn this now, and that again, whether it be because in reality one thing follows upon another, or because the parts of that which in existence is simultaneous became objects of consciousness for us only one after another, the event of experience must always distinguish itself from that of non-experience, by means of a relation in which the object of our knowledge now stands to us, and in which it did not stand before. ”

“ Reason is to decide upon the accuracy of its general methods of procedure, and yet it can use as the motive of its decision nothing but these same necessary principles upon which it is to decide. Its labour can accordingly consist in nothing but an approval of itself and a careful reflection upon its own action. In practical life we are compelled by our needs to form a judgment upon many matters of fact whose true import is known to us only very imperfectly, and whose many connections with other things are known to us even worse. ”

“ To the question whether everything is not, in the last analysis, quite different from what we believe we know it to be, and from what we must necessarily think it to be, there is no scientific solution; but a doubt of this nature neither directs itself specially against our conviction of innate truth, nor can it be confined to the question as to the correctness of the application which we make of judgments necessary for thought to the contents of reality. ”

“ Psychology, even if we possessed it in complete perfection, can never be the foundation of our whole philosophy. It is much rather the case that we should only then come to possess psychology in this perfect state, when it had been first completely established according to what principles of self-evident truth we had to judge of the nature and the mutual influences and operations of all things ”