660 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



40. the same time dualistic. His criticism of the concep- 



Lotze's _ 



monism and tions which Underlie the scientific or mechanical view 



dualism. 



of things leads him to the conviction that a pluralism 

 such as that of Herbart does not furnish a satisfactory 

 conclusion. A world of many things, be they conceived 

 as atoms of the same or of varying nature, cannot 

 possibly exhibit that order and regularity which science 

 postulates and which its progress continually confirms. 

 Such a plurality must be held together by some uniting 

 principle. This Lotze terms the " universal substance." 

 Only through such a uniting bond are definite relations, 

 the laws of nature, and mutual interaction, intelligible 

 to the human mind. With this conception of the uni- 

 versal underlying substance, of which special things are 

 merely manifestations, Lotze comes near to the conception 

 of Spinoza. But Lotze does not maintain that he can 

 inductively arrive at any definition of the nature of this 

 underlying and all - comprising substance. Such can 

 only be got by starting from a different point of view 

 and by an argument based on analogy. 



The self-conscious human mind is, like everything else, 

 a manifestation of the underlying reality, and as such to 

 a certain extent at one with it ; our own self-conscious 

 experience thus gives us a true, though limited, insight 

 into the nature of reality. Now the distinctive feature 

 of the self-consciousness of an individual mind is what 

 we term Personality. It is accordingly this conception 

 which receives further attention in Lotze's analysis ; it 

 results in a statement which is opposed to the dictum of 

 Spinoza, subsequently adopted by Fichte, that person- 

 ality and, more generally, all determination is a limita- 



