602 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



that the promised system would only have been a 

 differently arranged exposition of the results arrived 

 at in the ' Critiques.' But Lotze admits also, what 

 is not clear in Kant's own undertaking, that his own 

 as well as the Kantian way of approaching the philo- 

 sophical problem involves an inevitable circle. Human 

 reason is required to pass judgment as to the truth- 

 fulness of its own enunciations, and this by appealing 

 to some of these as the ground for such judgment. With 

 this in view Lotze limits, to begin with, the task of 

 philosophy to an endeavour to bring connection and 

 consistency into the whole of our ideas and observa- 

 tions, and he postpones an answer to the question 

 whether this consistent whole, when attained, possesses 

 any objective truth corresponding to the real nature 

 of things. Kant had in an early part of his first 

 ' Critique ' arrived at the conclusion that the real 

 nature of things, or what he termed the " Thing in 

 itself," cannot be reached by our reasoning powers, 

 inasmuch as our knowledge is based only on a varied 

 and frequently unconnected subjective experience, and 

 is, as such, occupied only with what appears : it is 

 purely phenomenal and not real. 



This result of Kant's early ' Critique ' was that which 

 attracted at the time undue attention, and provoked not 

 only serious opposition but also a strenuous and long- 

 sustained effort to find a way towards that knowledge 

 of the nature of things, or of the " thing in itself," which 

 Kant had pronounced to be unattainable. This involved 

 a neglect of the other and more fruitful side of Kant's 

 speculations, to which Lotze, following to some extent 



