64 HUMANISM iv 



in question is well exhibited, e.g. in the chapter on Time 

 in the Metaphysics, and that the disproportionate abrupt 

 ness and the obscurity of its conclusion are similarly 

 conditioned by a temporary lapse of the critical faculty. 



The fullest statement of the grounds on which Lotze 

 asserts the existence of an underlying unity of things is 

 of course to be found in the sixth and seventh chapters 

 of the ^Metaphysics (since the Outlines of the Philosophy 

 of Religion merely accepts it as established in the Meta 

 physics}, and though the argument is well known, it will 

 not be inappropriate to sketch its course in so far as 

 it bears on the present discussion. It will be remembered 

 that Lotze is driven to postulate a unity of things by 

 the metaphysical difficulties discovered in the conception 

 of Causation, taken as the assertion that one thing 

 influences another. The impossibility of explaining such 

 transeunt causation compels to the inference that things 

 are not really separate and independent, but embraced 

 in a unity which is the medium in which they exist, 

 and renders superfluous any further question as to how 

 change in A passes over to become a change in 

 B. Thus by means of this unity, which in the 

 Philosophy of Religion is frankly called the Absolute, all 

 transeunt becomes immanent action, and is held thereby 

 to have been explained. The next step, which it requires 

 careful reading to recognise as an advance at all, is 

 to treat this unity as prior to, and more real than, the 

 plurality of things it serves to connect. Accordingly 

 {Met. 70) it is hypostasised as the single truly existing 

 substance, and it is explained at length how the self- 

 maintenance of the identical meaning of this Absolute 

 may be conceived as producing the world of experience 

 with its regular succession of phenomena. The discussion 

 closes with a vigorous protest against recognising things 

 as anything more than actions of the Absolute upon 

 spiritual beings, which, by being centres of experience, 

 are thereby rendered independent of the Absolute 



( 97, 93). 



It seems on the face of it that the argument ends in 



