332 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



opposition to, other beings i.e., through its finite nature 

 and limitation. Against this Lotze maintains that this 

 process of division, of opposing the Self to a not-self, is 

 indeed a necessary and inevitable event in the life and 

 development of finite existences who live, act, and re- 

 act in a world consisting of many other beings similar 

 to themselves, but that the fuller idea of personality 

 is gained rather through the mental process of continu- 

 ally referring our own past experiences to the unity 

 of our own consciousness. Hence the fuller and larger 

 personality would not require continual stimulants from 

 outside through which it differentiates its own self and 

 then becomes again conscious of it. This fuller and, 

 a fortiori, a complete and perfect personality would 

 find within the sphere of its own existence endless 

 inducements for creating and maintaining its spiritual 

 life and activity, and would certainly not be condemned 

 to that state of inactivity and eternal quiescence which 

 form the inevitable characteristics of all pantheistic con- 

 ceptions of the world-ground. For Lotze, therefore, the 

 position exactly reverses itself. Instead of having less 



within us through that complex of | indicating the power which they 



ideas or feelings to which the 

 psychical mechanism has, for the 

 moment, given a preponderating 

 influence. Still less do we exist in 

 time ever wholly for ourselves. For 

 memory loses much, but most of all 

 the record of our own gradually 

 waning individual moods. Many 

 trains of thought familiar to us in 

 our younger days appear to us in 

 advanced years as alien events ; 

 powerless to find a road back to 

 sentiments in which we once revelled 

 we hardly behold a faint afterglow 



once possessed over us. Aspirations 

 which once seemed to constitute the 

 most inalienable kernel of ourself ap- 

 pear to us on the other paths along 

 which life has led us as inexplicable 

 mistakes for which we have long 

 since forgotten the incentives. In- 

 deed, we have little reason to speak 

 of the personality of finite beings ; 

 it is an ideal which like all ideals is, 

 in its fulness, possessed only by the 

 Infinite, but bestowed upon us, like 

 all good things, only conditionally 

 and imperfectly." 



