Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Lotze

“ That the unit for logic is the concept and not the judgment has proved a stumbling-block to those of Lotze’s critics who are accustomed to think in terms of the act of thought as unit. Lotze’s procedure is, indeed, analogous to the way in which, in his philosophy of nature, he starts from a plurality of real beings, but by means of a reductive movement, an application of Kant’s transcendental method, arrives at the postulate or fact of a law of their reciprocal action which calls for a monistic and idealist interpretation. ”

“ These different tasks, which philosophy had to fulfil, mark pretty accurately the aims of Lotze’s writings, and the order in which they were published. He laid the foundation of his philosophical system very early in his Metaphysik (Leipzig, 1841) and his Logik (1843) , short books published while he was still a junior lecturer at Leipzig, from which university he migrated to Göttingen, succeeding Herbart in the chair of philosophy. But it was only during the last decade of his life that he ventured, with much hesitation, to present his ideas in a systematic and final form. ”

“ Lotze’s historical position is of much interest. Though he disclaims being a follower of Herbart, his formal definition of philosophy and his conception of the object of metaphysics are similar to those of Herbart, who defines philosophy as an attempt to remodel the notions given by experience. In this endeavour he forms with Herbart an opposition to the philosophies of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, which aimed at objective and absolute knowledge, and also to the criticism of Kant, which aimed at determining the validity of all human knowledge. ”

“ A valuable series of “Outlines” of the Philosophy of Hermann Lotze has been undertaken by Prof. Ladd, of Yale College. A leading philosopher of Germany, Lotze’s works have been sealed to all English readers, save those who were able to overcome philosophical German. This series will furnish an opportunity long desired by those interested in German thought to make themselves familiar with Lotze’s ideas. “Outlines of Metaphysics” [Q] is the first work issued.
Mrs. Jackson’s “Ramona” [R] takes rank at once in the highest class of fiction. ”

“ In this endeavour Lotze discards as useless and untenable many favourite conceptions of the school, many crude notions of everyday life. The course of things and their connexion is only thinkable by the assumption of a plurality of existences, the reality of which (as distinguished from our knowledge of them) can be conceived only as a multitude of relations. This quality of standing in relation to other things is that which gives to a thing its reality. ”

“ 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 ”

“ No man—no King,—no Emperor of all the world, could ever have loved Lotys as I loved her! These great waves waiting to devour us—dead and living together—are not more insatiate in their passion for us than I in my passion for Lotys! ”

“ Lotze (1817–1881) elaborated a very different noumenal idealism, which perhaps we may express by the name “Panteleologism,” to express its conclusion that the known world beyond phenomena is neither absolute thought nor unconscious will, nor the unconscious at all, but the activity of God; causing in us the system of phenomenal appearances, Lotze. which we call Nature, or bodies moving in time and space; but being in itself the system of the universal reciprocal actions of God’s infinite spirit, animated by the design of the supreme good. ”

“ But this formal agreement includes material differences, and the spirit which breathes in Lotze’s writings is more akin to the objects and aspirations of the idealistic school than to the cold formalism of Herbart. What, however, with the idealists was an object of thought alone, the absolute, is to Lotze only inadequately definable in rigorous philosophical language; the aspirations of the human heart, the contents of our feelings and desires, the aims of art and the tenets of religious faith must be grasped in order to fill the empty idea of the absolute with meaning. ”

“ With Lotze the ideal that at last the forms of thought shall be realized to be adequate to that which at any stage of actual knowledge always proves relatively intractable is an illuminating projection of faith. He takes courage from the reflection that to accept scepticism is to presume the competence of the thought that accepts. He will, however, take no easy way of parallelism. Our human thought pursues devious and circuitous methods. ”

“ Considerations of this latter kind will naturally present themselves in the two great departments of cosmology and psychology, or they may be delegated to an independent research under the name of religious philosophy. We have already mentioned the final conception in which Lotze’s speculation culminates, that of a personal Deity, Himself the essence of all that merits existence for its own sake, who in the creation and government of a world has voluntarily chosen certain laws and forms through which His ends are to be realized. ”

“ 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 ”

“ In fact, the assertion that a way of thinking which is necessary to the mind on account of its nature, must be inapplicable to the knowledge of things, is, from first to last, in no respect more certain or more probable than the contrary assertion. He who takes the latter view stands on the probable conviction that the unity of the world has determined thought and being for one another; he who prefers the former, leans onesidedly on the superficial antithesis which subsists between the thinking subject and the object of his thought ”

“ Lotze. very clearly informing the reader what is being done, and in the end he is unmistakably idealist. While a pronounced theist-though not a church Christian—he is hardly less an assailant of traditional theism than Kant (e.g. his Outline Lecture headings] on Philosophy of Religion) . He dissents as a realist from the Cosmological argument in the form [61] in which it concludes from “contingent” to “necessary” being. We do not wish to find our way to a being who “ must be.” That is an idle dream. We must keep to real and assured facts. ”

“ The universal substance, which we may call the absolute, is at this stage of our investigations not endowed with the attributes of a personal Deity, and it will remain to be seen by further analysis in how far we are able—without contradiction—to identify it with the object of religious veneration, in how far that which to metaphysics is merely a postulate can be gradually brought nearer to us and become a living power. Much in this direction is said by Lotze in various passages of his writings ”

“ 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. ”

“ If ‘rational synthesis’ of things is what we seek, it is surely more reasonable to say with Lotze: ‘What lies beneath all is not a quantity which is bound eternally to the same limits and compelled through many diverse arrangements, continuously varied, to manifest always the very same total. ”

“ PIERRE LOTI LOUIS-MARIE-JULIEN VIAUD, "Pierre Loti," was born in Rochefort, of an old French-Protestant family, January 14, 1850. He was connected with the. French Navy from 1867 to 1900, and is now a retired officer with full captain's rank. Although of a most energetic character and a veteran of various campaigns—Japan, Tonkin, Senegal, China (1900) —M. Viaud was so timid as a young midshipman that his comrades named him "Loti," a small Indian flower which seems ever discreetly to hide itself. This is, perhaps, a pleasantry, as elsewhere there is a much more romantic explanation of the word. ”

“ The world projected out of the creative mind by the fiat, and existing in detachment from its author, is a sphere of being where the parts realize themselves only singly. If the divine value of them is evident only when they are collectively looked at, then, Lotze rightly says, the world surely becomes poorer and not richer for God's utterance of the fiat. He might much better have remained contented with his merely antecedent choice of the scheme, without following it up by a creative decree. The scheme as such was admirable; it could only lose by being translated into reality. ”

“ We naively assume, he says, a relation between reality and our minds which may be just the opposite of the true one. Reality, we naturally think, stands ready-made and complete, and our intellects supervene with the one simple duty of describing it as it is already. But may not our descriptions, Lotze asks, be themselves important additions to reality? And may not previous reality itself be there, far less for the purpose of reappearing unaltered in our knowledge, than for the very purpose of stimulating our minds to such additions as shall enhance the universe's total value. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Lotze’s logic then represents the statical aspect of the function of thought in knowledge, while, so far as we go in knowledge thought is always engaged in the unification of a manifold, which remains contradistinguished from it, though not, of course, completely alien to and unadapted to it. The further step to the determination of the ground of harmony is not to be taken in logic, where limits are present and untranscended. ”

“ In opposition to the foregoing mode of apprehending the subject, philosophy is wont with great vivacity to explain: ‘Standing in relations’ can be asserted only of that which exists previous to such relations. Accordingly, the ‘Being’ of things can consist neither in their relation to us, nor in their relation to one another; it must rather be thought of as a perfectly pure and simple ‘position,’ ‘affirmation,’ or ‘putting,’ which excludes all relations, but forms the ground of the possibility of becoming related at all. ”

“ The absolute idealist who takes up the problem at this point will find himself forced into the same continuous seesaw, the same scheme of alternate rude robbery and gratuitous gift, that Lotze engaged in. ”

“ Lotze’s metaphysics is thus distinguished from the theism of Newton and Leibnitz by its pantheism, and from the pantheism of Spinoza by its idealism. It is an idealistic pantheism, which is a denial of all bodily mechanism, a reduction of everything bodily to phenomena, and an assertion that all real action is the activity of God. ”

“ The others and the second-in-command are still the same; they often speak to me of you and ask me for news of you.
"The captain has called upon me to act as boatswain since we buried poor Marsano, of Nice, who was found dead one morning in his hammock at the réveillé. And I like the work very much.
"Dear brother, the men have twice been allowed to go ashore, at San Francisco, and you will be glad to know that, with you away, I have not even given in my name to go with them. As a matter of fact, on the second night, the topmen had a great row with some Germans, and knives were used. ”

“ The formal conception of pure logic, then, is modified by Lotze in such a way as not only to be compatible with a view of the structural and functional adequacy of thought to that which at every point at which we take thinking is still distinguishable from thought, but even inevitably to suggest it. ”

“ This time we have taken rooms almost in the country, at Recouvrance, on the way to Pontaniou.
"Dear brother, I have to tell you that little Pierre was taken ill with colic as a result of eating too many berries in the woods, on that last Sunday when we were at Toulven; but he got over it. He is becoming a dear little chap, and I spend hours playing with him. In the evening all three of us go for a walk together; we never go out now unless we go together, and when one returns the other two return also!
"Dear brother, if only you were back in Brest, I should have everything I want ”