of romancing with notions (Begriffsromantik), involves, with scarce an exception worth naming, a strictly natural-scientific treatment of everything given us by sense. . . . Every falsification of fact is an assault upon the foundations of our intellectual life. As against the metaphysical poetising that arrogates the power to penetrate to the essence of Nature, and determine from mere conceptions that which experience alone can teach us, materialism as a counterpoise is therefore a real benefaction.” But on the other contrary again, idealism met a want that mere empiricism cannot supply. “The endeavour,” he adds, "is almost as universal to overcome the one-sidedness of the world-view arising from mere fact. . . . Man needs a supplementing of this by an ideal world created by himself, and in such free creations the highest and noblest functions of his mind unite.”
In these words Lange's general position already reveals itself. If Hartmann calls his view the Philosophy of the Unconscious, and Dühring his the Phillosophy of the Actual, Lange’s might in analogy be named the Philosophy of the Ideal. He prefers, however, to speak of the Ideal not as a philosophy, but only as a standpoint; because he wishes to include in philosophy not only the means for satisfying the craving after ideality, but the means for closing with the demand for certainty. The aim of
