570 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



promise, to establish a monistic view, it sacrificed, as it 

 seemed to the one side, mathematical rigor, and, as ,it 

 seemed to the other, spiritual depth. In the middle of 

 the century nobody saw this more clearly or expressed 

 it more emphatically than Lotze ; and the formula by 

 which he explained the position has not lost its validity 

 even at this day, though materialism has considerably 

 modified its fundamental assumptions. What Lotze 

 20 endeavoured to show was " how universal but, at the 

 same time, how subordinate is the part which mechanism 



regarding . 



mechanism, plays in nature. 



But even with regard to the wider problems which 

 legitimately belong to natural science and natural 

 philosophy, materialism itself did not greatly assist in 

 their solution ; though, in the course of the controversy, 

 a gradual but slow clearance of ideas took place. 

 Among these problems two stood out as of paramount 

 interest and importance. The first refers to nature 

 as a whole : this we may term the cosmological 

 problem. The second refers to the system of ideas by 

 which we try to comprehend nature. So far as the 

 first of these problems is concerned, there is no doubt 



21. that the writings of the materialistic school, and fore- 

 success and 

 failure of most those of Blichner, tended to spread among the 



Materialism. 



reading public a large amount of useful knowledge 

 referring to the discoveries which science had made in 

 the course of the first half of the nineteenth century, 

 by which great regions of knowledge had been opened 

 out or remodelled, and which were especially interesting 

 and useful in the departments of biology and medicine. 



