4 



288 Hermann Lotze and the Mechanical Philosophy 



a. special organ of which the plant (i.e. the soul) must make 

 use if it is to flourish.' ' When organs of UTider start ding or 

 of reason, instruments of thinking and judging, are spoken 

 of, we confess that we have no idea either what end such 

 theories can serve, or what advantage there could be for the 

 higher intellectual life in all this apparatus of instruments.' 

 *If every several^ atom of the central mass is capable of 

 retaining without confusion numberless impressions, why 

 should the soul alone, like the atom of a simple being, be 

 incapable of doing so ? Why should it alone not possess the 

 faculty of memory and recollection in itself without the aid 

 of a corporeal organ, when we have to concede this faculty 

 directly and without the mediation of a new instrument to 

 every part of the assumed organ? Nay, we must in fact 

 make the contrary assertion that the retention and reproduc- 

 tion of impressions is possible, not to a number of co-operant 

 cerebral particles, but exclusively to the soul's undivided 

 unity.' 



Thus this noted upholder of the mechanical view of 

 nature proves by his latest work that he is none the less 

 fundamentally a supporter of all that to which mechanism 

 is generally regarded as being the most opposed. We will 

 conclude with one more citation, which we think forcibly 

 points out the essential irrationality of Hume's modern fol- 

 lowers' first article of faith. That article of faith affirms that 

 we have not and cannot have supreme certainty of our o\\'n 

 continued personal existence. As to this Lotze remarks : 

 'Among all the errors of the human mind it has always 

 seemed to me the strangest that it could come to doubt its 

 own existence, of which alone it has direct experience, or i 

 take it at second hand as the product of an external nature 

 which we know only indirectly, only by means of the know- 

 ledge of the very mind to which we would fain deny existence. "^ 



1 Vol. i. p. 327. 



