208 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



viz., a more detailed definition of what this ethical 

 conception, the Good, really is ; for it is not philoso- 

 phically satisfactory to be merely referred, for the 

 solution of all the higher problems, to a conception 

 expressed by a word which has so many unreconciled 

 meanings : not even in the face of the fact that it 

 has served as an ideal which has governed through 

 thousands of years the speculations of thinkers and 

 the efforts of practical reformers alike, without ever 

 having received a clear definition. This latter task is 

 exactly what thinkers not only in Germany but still 

 more in this country, and latterly also in France, have 

 set themselves to perform, and this not only as a 

 scientific problem but as a growing practical desideratum 

 of the thought and culture of the age. To this age 

 with its more practical tendencies Lotze did not belong ; 

 he still remained with one foot in the purely speculative, 

 or as Germans would say, the purely scientific age of 

 philosophical thought, and spent many years of his life, 

 partly in refuting the errors of scientific materialism, 

 partly in saving from complete loss the great inherit- 

 ance of the idealistic systems of Fichte, Schelling, and 

 Hegel. The moral danger to society which lurked 

 not so much in scientific as in commercial materialism 

 and in pessimism became glaringly visible only when 

 Lotze was half through his academic career. After the 

 death of Schopenhauer in the year 1860 the writings 

 of this thinker and those of Hartmann and later of 

 Nietzsche became for a time the all-absorbing subject 

 of popular philosophical interest. This explains why 

 the philosophy of Lotze has remained more in the 



