OF THE SPIRIT. 345 



of the underlying spiritual unity as that which is, to us 

 human beings, of supreme interest or value, affording the 

 highest form of intellectual and spiritual pleasure or 

 joy, and which presents itself as alone meriting exist- 

 ence for its own sake, the True, the Beautiful, and 

 the Good. And religion begins for Lotze with the 

 further conviction arrived at by a personal effort or 

 resolution of the character that this valuable content is 

 actually realised in the holy personality of a living God, 

 the supreme Beins;. For without the reference to a 42. 



^ '^ , Relation 



person, those highest conceptions of Justice, Beauty, and ^';^),'^*^";, 

 Goodness lose all reality and become empty abstractions. ^^^^^^^^ 



It might thus seem as if in Lotze's conception of the ^°'^^' 

 two worlds, the mechanical and the spiritual, the world 

 of things and the world of values and their unity, which 

 is partially realised in finite personalities but completed 

 only in the infinite personality of the Deity, a position 

 was gained from which the dualism inherent in other 

 systems of philosophy was overcome, or where a solution 

 is at least indicated. This, however, is not the case. 

 The very fact that Lotze maintains that it is only by a 

 definite struggle, by a moral effort, and not by a purely 

 logical process, that this position can be reached is a 

 proof to us that there is another difficulty to be over- 

 come, a difficulty which cannot be explained away even 

 if the antiquated contrasts of the natural and the super- 

 natural, of the outer and the inner, of efficient and final 

 causes, were overcome. This difficulty is the existence ^ . 43. 



' •' Existence 



of Evil in the world ; comprising under the term not <>*' ^vii. 

 only the human phenomena of sin and guilt but also 

 the widespread suff'ering in animated nature in which 



