226 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



mind should investigate the extent and validity of its 

 own reasoning powers. To get out of the dilemma, 

 Lotze reverts to a conviction of the ultimate truth 

 underlying the whole of the idealistic philosophy of 

 Germany, the reality of Spirit to which he gives, with 

 Plato, the ethical character of the Good. Sidgwick on 

 the other side inclines more towards the position of 

 common- sense, of experience, a position taken up before 

 him both by Eeid and Butler.^ 



There is a third point upon which we find an agree- 

 ment between Lotze and Sidgwick, though the idea is 

 differently expressed. Lotze cannot conceive the be- 

 ginning and centre of all human action to be anything 

 else than something which affects the individual soul, 

 filling it with interest and joy or the reverse. Sidg- 

 wick's criticism of different ethical theories leads him 

 back to the Self, to what must still be called Hedon- 

 ism, but a Hedonism made " universalis tic " as distin- 

 guished from " egoistic " by the intuition that its being 

 achieved by this rather than that person makes no 

 difference to the value of the end in itself : the moral 

 process seeming to consist in removing the centre of 

 interest from the narrow field of the moment and the 

 individual, to a prospective and wider field of social 

 interests. Through this reconciliation of the intui- 



^ But Prof. Seth points out that 

 Sidgwick's " attitude to cominon- 

 sense must he carefully distin- 

 guished from that of the Scottish 

 School, which refuses to go behind 

 the explicit statements of common - 

 sense or to systematise these state- 

 ments by reducing them to their 

 ultimate presuppositions. In Sidg- 

 wick's own terminology, the true 



attitude to the intuitions of the 

 ordinary conscience is not the 

 dogmatic, but the philosophical 

 attitude" {loc. cit.,p. 175). This 

 reminds one of Lotze's definition 

 of the formal task of philosophy as 

 quoted at length, supra, vol. i. p. 

 65, n., and frequently referred to 

 in subsequent passages of this 

 History. 



