72 HUMANISM iv 



possible worlds, some commensurable, the immensely 

 greater number not If so, it would be possible to con 

 ceive the world as constituting itself out of a fortuitous 

 concourse of the atoms which happened to be congruous 

 or commensurable, while those which were not would 

 simply stay out, and appear in the actual results as little 

 as the countless variations which did not survive. In 

 both cases the essence of the argument would be the 

 same, and consist in destroying the unique peculiarity of 

 the actual result by regarding it as one out of an indefinite 

 number of possible results. Against the atheism thus 

 implicit in the Darwinian method Lotze s argument seems 

 to afford no adequate protection. He cannot show that 

 the inference he draws to an underlying unity of the 

 world is the only one conceivable. The supposed origin 

 of a commensurable world out of an indefinite number of 

 commensurable and incommensurable elements is thinkable. 



Whether, to be sure, it is also tenable is another 

 question, which, personally, I would answer by a strenuous 

 negative. For if the immense majority of things were 

 really incommensurable with us and our world, they would 

 be unknowable. Hence we could have no positive ground 

 for affirming their existence. And we have no right to 

 affirm unknowables merely for the sake of discrediting 

 the known. Hence this bare possibility could not, to my 

 mind, be actually propounded as an explanation of the 

 order of nature, nor held to detract from the purposiveness 

 we actually find there. But this protest does not help 

 Lotze ; the bare possibility of thinking such a process is 

 enough to set aside his contention that his own solution 

 is alone conceivable. 1 His argument moved wholly in 

 the region of abstract metaphysics, and as an abstract 

 possibility the Darwinian plea seems just as sound. We 

 have not, I hold, the right to apply it to our actual world, 

 but Lotze s argument is in no better case. 



Altogether, then, it would seem as if not proven was 

 the most lenient verdict that could be passed on Lotze s 

 derivation of the Unity of Things. 



1 Cp. Microc. ii. p. 598. 



