OF THE UNITY OF THOUGHT. 663 



Many trains of thought familiar to our youth appear to 

 our advanced years as foreign events : powerless to find 

 a road back to sentiments in which we once revelled 

 we hardly behold a faint afterglow indicating the power 

 which they once possessed over us ; aspirations whicli 

 once seemed to constitute the very essence and kernel 

 of ourself, appear to us on the other paths which life 

 has led us as inexplicable mistakes of which we have 

 long since forgotten the motives. Indeed we have little 

 reason to speak of the personality of finite beings. It 

 is an ideal which, like all ideals, is possessed in its 

 integrity only by the Infinite, but bestowed upon us like 

 all good things conditionally and imperfectly." 



The idea of personality as the only adequate conception 41. 



Personality 



which we can form of the truly Keal or the Absolute a central 



•^ idea. 



is the central idea of Lotze's system. It is however 

 not a leading or unifying idea like the idea of mind 

 — as expressed in the dubious term Geist — in 

 Hegel's system. The conclusions of the purely meta- 

 physical and logical train of reasoning require an inter- 

 pretation, and this interpretation is derived from an 

 independent source ; from the idea of the highest Good 

 which is allied to the ideas of Truth and Beauty, and 

 has its reality for us in the Ideal of personal Holiness. 

 The fact that we form our judgments under the guidance 

 of such ideals demonstrates the existence of a region 

 different from that of the phenomena which surround 

 us : it is the world of Values or "Worths." The former, 

 the world of things, must indeed be considered as in 

 some way connected : not only logically through a 

 system of regularities which we term the laws of nature 



