716 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



and an imaginary transcendency of thought. In the 

 former, existing and useful trains of reasoning are simply 

 carried further, but essentially on the same lines ; in the 

 latter they are supplemented by new conceptions, which 

 cannot be adequately represented in reality, but are, 

 nevertheless, useful as ministering to the unifying activity 

 of the intellect. 



The two main transcendent ideas are, according to 

 Wundt, the cosmological idea and the psychological idea : 

 the idea of the World and the idea of the Soul. To avoid 

 the one-sidedness inherent in both, in materialism on the 

 one hand and in spiritualism on the other — systems of 

 thought which are based upon an exclusive application 

 of one or the other of these two ideas — the mind is 

 forced to combine both in a third idea which Wundt 

 terms the ontological. His previous enunciation of 

 material substance and of mental activity permits him to 

 bring both ideas together in the ontological conception 

 of a totality of willing or active beings. The world must 

 be conceived either as a material unity or as a mental 

 unity. Which of the two we elect is to some extent a 

 matter of subjective choice : for Wundt it is the idea of 

 a universal collective Will of which the separate wills 

 79. are only manifestations. This idea of an Infinite Collec- 



Ideaof . . 



Infinite tivc Will Wuudt identifies with the Divine principle, and 



Collective ^ ^ 



Wi^i- in this way he approaches a conception of a Divine 



Order not unlike that of Fichte's earlier speculation, but 

 distinguished from it as being a process of development. 

 The imaginary transcendency of this conception renders 

 further definition impossible. 



Thus the idea of Personality, so important in Lotze's 



