Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/124

Lotze’s Antithesis between Thought and Things. II. A. Eastwood. Mind, I, 4, pp. 470-489.

We have seen that Lotze proposes to neglect at first any inquiry into the content of the ultimate and concrete truths of philosophy. He will merely investigate "the grounds on which, in a subjective sense," the certainty of those truths "for us reposes." The immediate effect of the modesty of his endeavor is to raise a presumption against the objective validity of knowledge. And, apart from this danger, is it possible to discuss the nature of ideas as though it had nothing to do with the nature of objects? E. dwells on this particular fallacy because he considers it typical of Lotze's usual method of argumentation. How is it possible to understand knowledge, when we have made it representative of something which we do not yet know? This difficulty Lotze endeavors to surmount by his famous "metaphysical postulate." However "metaphysical" such a postulate may be, it can only demonstrate its supremacy over the "circle of ideas" in so far as it is logical. Lotze's fault consists in forgetting that the category of causality, which he makes the basis of explanation of "knowledge in the widest sense," is itself the work of the mind. Indeed, he has an uneasy feeling that he has not been doing justice to the unique character of thought. Thus, when raising the question how the thinking subject is "operated upon" by the object of knowledge, he observes that thought must be treated as an object which is "receptive" of certain particular "stimuli to its spontaneity." Against this supposition it must be urged that the knowing subject qua subject has no objective nature at all. But Lotze goes further toward making thought independent and at the same time an object or "thing." After an external stimulus has called forth its activity, thoughts, he tells us, may "have their origin in the constitution of the mind alone." Here, again, he is converting good "common-sense" into bad metaphysic. And now let us turn to the other side of the antithesis between thought and "things," and come to close quarters with this "something more" which is perpetually casting its shadow upon Lotze's "ideas." This is supposed to be necessary in order to account for a posteriori knowledge. Lotze seems to forget that, in trying to supply data or grounds as the causes of the data of experience, philosophy is committing itself to an endless regress. Idealism is doing nothing preposterous when it denies the existence of things per se independent of thought. Ye ought to correct Lotze's assertion, that change "completely dominates reality," thus: Being predicable of things only in so far as they are brought under the unity of thought, change is completely dominated by thought. Change is one of the essential aspects in which reality presents itself as a phenomenon; thought, the presupposition of all phenomena, cannot itself