516 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



philosophical career by publishing at the age of twenty- 

 three, as Lotze did, a treatise on Metaphysics ; nor did he, 

 with Herbert Spencer, introduce his completed synthetic 

 system at a mature age by a treatise on First Principles. 

 Having an essentially philosophical interest which would 

 have led him from any field of restricted and special 

 inquiry into that which lies beneath and beyond it, and 

 having taken up the physiological problems which in the 

 middle of the century drove many naturalists on to the. 

 border-land of psycho-physical phenomena, he was led to 

 an inquiry into the first principles of his science, from this 

 to the first principles of all exact science, and further 

 of the mental, moral, and historical sciences. Still later 

 he saw the necessity of giving a satisfactory systematic 

 co-ordination of all his researches and of arriving at 

 a metaphysical result. The answer to the problem of 

 Eeality stands thus at the end of his inquiry : it is a result, 

 not a preliminary as with Spencer, nor an immediate 

 intuitive conviction as with Lotze. To many it would 

 seem as if he arrived at a merely formal answer to this 

 problem, and that the unification which his system 

 affords does not and can never reply to the question : 

 What is the truly Eeal ? 

 53. It thus appears that, alike through Lotze, Spencer, 



Lotze's, . 



spencer's, and Wundt, philosophy has been reduced to phenomen- 



and Wundt's 



inenSism a li sm > w ^ this difference ; that phenomenalism with 

 contrasted. Lo^ze requires for its completion the assistance of some 

 central idea in the light of which the phenomenal world 

 can not only be described and analysed, but also inter- 

 preted and understood ; that with Spencer this under- 

 lying conception is reduced to the empty form of a mere 



