sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious, to the inconsequent conclusion, that there are beings with nothing but unconscious perceptions; and by a similar non sequitur, because there is the idea of an end in will, he argues that there must be an unconscious idea of an end in instinctive, in reflex, in all action. Again, in his Grundproblem der Erkenntnisstheorie (1889) he uses without proof the hypothesis of psychological idealism, that we perceive psychical effects, to infer with merely hypothetical consistency the conclusion of noumenal metaphysical idealism that all we can thereby know is psychical causes, or something transcendent, beyond phenomena indeed, yet not beyond mind. But, according to him, this transcendent is the unconscious (Kraftvolles unbewusst ideales Geschehen). He calls this epistemology “transcendent realism”; it is really “transcendent idealism.” On these foundations he builds the details of his idealistic metaphysics. (a) He identifies matter with mind by identifying atomic force with the striving of unconscious will after objects conceived by unconscious intelligence, and by defining causality as logical necessity receiving actuality through will. (b) He contends that, when matter ascends to the evolution of organic life, the unconscious has a power, over and above its atomic volitions, of introducing a new element, and that in consequence the facts of variation, selection and inheritance, pointed out by Darwin, are merely means which the unconscious uses for its own ends in morphological development. (c) He explains the rise of consciousness by supposing that, while it requires brain as a condition, it consists in the emancipation of intelligence from will at the moment when in sensation the individual mind finds itself with an idea without will. Here follows his pessimism, like to, but differing from, that of his master. In his view consciousness begins with want, and pain preponderates over pleasure in every individual life, with no hope for the future, while the final end is not consciousness, but the painlessness of the unconscious (see Pessimism). But why exaggerate? The truth of Nature is force; the truth of will is rational desire; the truth of life is neither the optimism of Leibnitz and Hegel, nor the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, but the moderatism of Aristotle. Life is sweet, and most men have more pleasures than pains in their lives.
4. 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. The Metaphysik of Lotze in its latest form (1879) begins with a great truth: metaphysics must be the foundation of psychology. He saw that the theories of the origin of knowledge in idealistic epistemology are unsound. Like Aristotle, then, he proposed anew the question, What is being? Nevertheless he was too much a child of his age to keep things known steadily before him; having asked the metaphysical question he proceeded to find a psychological answer in a theory of sensation, which asserted the mere hypothesis that the being which we ascribe to things on the evidence of sensation consists in their being felt. He really accepted, like Kant, the hypothesis of a sense of sensations which led to the Kantian conclusion that the Nature we know in time and space is mere sensible appearances in us. Further, from an early period in his Medicinische Psychologie (1852) he reinforced the transcendental idealism of Kant by a general hypothesis of “local signs,” containing the subordinate hypotheses, that we cannot directly perceive extension either within ourselves or without; that spatial bodies outside could not cause in us spatial images either in sight or in touch; but that besides the obvious data of sense, e.g. pressure, heat and colour, there must be other qualitative different excitations of different nerve-fibres, by means of which, as non-local signs of localities, the soul constructs in itself an image of extended space containing different places. This hypothesis of an acquired perception of a space mentally constructed by “local signs” supplied Lotze and many succeeding idealists, including Wundt, with a new argument for metaphysical idealism. Lotze concluded that we have no more reason for supposing an external space like space constructed out of our perceptions, than we have for supposing an external colour like perceived colour. Agreeing, then, with Kant that primary qualities are as mental as secondary, he agreed also with Kant that all the Nature we know as a system of bodies moving in time and space is sensible phenomena. But while he was in fundamental agreement with the first two positions of Kant, he differed from the third; he did not believe that the causes of sensible phenomena can be unknown things in themselves. What then are they? In answering this question Lotze regarded Leibnitz as his guide. He accepted the Leibnitzian fallacy that unity is indivisibility, which led to the Leibnitzian analysis of material bodies into immaterial monads, indivisible and therefore unextended, and to the theory of monadic souls and entelechies. Indeed, from the time of Leibnitz such attempts either to analyse or to construct matter had become a fashion. Lotze agreed with Leibnitz that the things which cause phenomena are immaterial elements, but added that they are not simple substances, self-acting, as Leibnitz thought, or preserving themselves against disturbance, as Herbart thought, but are interacting modifications of the one substance of God.
In the first place, he resolved the doubt of Leibnitz about bodies by deciding entirely against his realistic alternative that an organic body is a substantia realizans phaenomena, and for his idealistic alternative that every body is a phenomenon and not a substance at all. Secondly, he accepted the Leibnitzian hypothesis of immaterial elements without accepting their self-action. He believed in reciprocal action; and the very essence of his metaphysics consists in sublimating the interaction of bodies into the interaction of immaterial elements, which produce effects on one another and on the soul as one of them. According to the mechanics of Newton, when two bodies collide each body makes the other move equally and oppositely; but it has become a convenient habit to express this concrete fact in abstract language by calling it the conservation of momentum, by talking of one body communicating its motion to the other; as if bodies exchanged motion as men do money. Now Lotze took this abstract language literally, and had no difficulty in showing that, as an attribute is not separated from its substance, this supposed communication of motion does not really take place: nothing passes. But instead of returning to the concrete fact of the equivalence of momentum, by which each body moving makes the other move oppositely, he denied that bodies do reciprocally act on one another, and even that bodies as mutually resisting substances press one another apart in collision. Having thus rejected all bodily mechanism, he had to suppose that reciprocal action somehow takes place between immaterial elements. This brought him to another difference from Leibnitz as well as from Newton. According to Leibnitz, while each immaterial element is a monadic substance and self-acting secondary cause, God is the primary cause of all. According to Lotze, the connexion required by reciprocity requires also that the whole of every reciprocal action should take place within one substance; the immaterial elements act on one another merely as the modifications of that substance interacting within itself; and that one substance is God, who thus becomes not merely the primary but the sole cause, in scholastic language a causa immanens, or agent of acts remaining within the agent’s being. At this point, having rejected both the Newtonian mechanism of bodily substances and the Leibnitzian automatism of monadic substances, he flew to the Spinozistic unity of substance; except that, according to him, the one substance, God, is not extended at all, and is not merely thinking, but is a thinking, willing and acting spirit.
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. At the same time it is a curious attempt to restore mechanism and reconcile it with teleology by using the word “mechanism” in a new meaning, according to which God performs His own reciprocal actions within Himself by uniform laws, which are also means to divine ends. It is also an attempt to reconcile this divine mechanism with freedom. In his Metaphysik (1879), as in his earlier Mikrokosmus (1856–1864), Lotze vindicated the contingency of freedom by assigning to God a miraculous power of unconditional commencement, whereby not only at the very beginning but in the course of nature there may be new beginnings, which are not effects of previous causes, though once started they produce effects according to law. Thus his pantheistic is also a teleological idealism, which in its emphasis on free activity and moral order recalls Leibnitz and Fichte, but in its emphasis on the infinity of God has more affinity to Spinoza, Schelling and Hegel. Hence his philosophy, like the Hegelian, continually torments one with the difficulty that its sacrifice of the distinct being of
