OF THE UNITY OF THOUGHT. 603 



on the road indicated by Herbart, desired to return. 

 This return was more pointedly proclaimed by a 

 school of thinkers who were little influenced by Lotze's 

 speculations and did much to divert philosophical in- 

 terest into other channels, postponing for a time the 

 treatment of the central philosophical problem the 

 unification of Thought. 



As the latter was clearly before the mind of Lotze as a. 



Relation of 



the last and highest problem of philosophy, he felt as 

 he has told us himself more sympathy with the ideal- 

 ism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, than with the exact 

 treatment of isolated philosophical problems which had 

 been started by the followers of Herbart and of Fries, and 

 by the Neo-Kantians. In his various writings through 

 which he gained a wider reputation, notably in the 

 ' Microcosmus,' the systematic interest is indeed, to a 

 large extent, pushed into the background, coming for- 

 ward only in a tentative manner in the third section 

 of the last volume, where he treats of the " connection 

 of things." His scientific and medical studies had con- 

 vinced him that a unification of thought could only be 

 arrived at on a much broader basis of facts, that these 

 had to be collected from the wide regions of science 

 and history, of artistic and poetical literature alike. 

 When he, after giving this general survey, attempted 

 to put his conclusions into a systematic form, he had 

 to admit that such did not profess to be a systematisa- 

 tion similar to that which the great thinkers of the 

 first half of the century had attempted, but that it 

 could consist only in a general indication how the 

 different lines of reasoning which he had made use 



