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 ils 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 



witliin us through that complex of i indicatiug the power which they 



ideas or feelings to which the [ once possessed over us. Aspirations 



psychical mechanism has, for the which once seemed to constitute the 



moment, given a preponderating mostinalienable kernel of ourselfap- 



influence. Still less do we exist in \ pear to us on the other paths along 



time ever wholly /or onrscZces. For j which life has led us as inexplicable 



memory loses much, but most of all ; mistakes for which we have long 



the record of our own gradually since forgotten the incentives. In- 



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 



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 



we hardly behold a faint afterglow i and imperfectly." 



