Hermann Lotze and the Mechanical Philosophy 285 



between the two actual impressions at the time of their 

 reception by our sense organs. The idea of pain is not neces- 

 sarily pain, nor that of pleasure pleasure. After all,^ ' things 

 related logically and by general principles have a stronger 

 material affinity than things naturally strange to one another, 

 which only the accident of their being simultaneously per- 

 ceived brought together in consciousness.' 



Our popular psychologists confound the mere animal 

 association of images with logical ratiocination, and they also 

 confound the sort of ' expectation ' to which in animals such 

 associated images may give rise, with the syllogistic process. 

 Lotze protests ^ against this, inasmuch as though such 

 expectations are as serviceable for the practical ends of 

 animal life as would be true reasoning, 'nevertheless the 

 syllogism involves a wholly different intellectual exertion 

 from the instinctive expectation,' for therein we 'justify the 

 combination of the expected with the perceived by the 

 thought of a universal law in virtue of which the two cohere.' 

 However adequately the imagination may serve the ends of 

 merely animal life, there is yet in animals ' an utter absence 

 of one mental operation which forms part of human 

 thought.' ^ We do not at first passively receive combinations 

 of impressions, and later ' the amended selection of these left 

 behind by the self-correcting movements of the psychic 

 mechanism. Our thought, with independent action, breaks 

 up the accidental associations of ideas, and instead of merely 

 leaving intact those w^hich are coherent, puts them through 

 a process of reproduction, after which they appear in forms 

 that at the same time contain an indication of the reason 

 why they are combined.' 



Our author makes many valuable remarks concerning 

 language, and well depicts * its essentially logical nature as 



Vol. i. p. 217. 2 /ji^^ p^ 235. 



Ibid., p. 620. 4 Ibid., p. 622. 



