664 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



but also in its contingent manifoldness and diversity. 

 This contingent character, which in the idealistic 

 systems appeared accidental and inexplicable, must 

 have a uniting plan or meaning. It must be 

 significant of some underlying purpose. But for us 

 human beings such a plan or meaning finds its fullest 

 expression in that which to us is of interest or value, 

 in that which deserves to exist for its own sake and 

 the realisation of which is the beginning, the purport, 

 and the end of its existence. It has its psychological 

 abode not so much in the intellectual as in the moral 

 and emotional side of our nature. 

 42. In this way Lotze considers it to be the task of 



Philosophy 



a reconciiia- philosophy to reconcile the results of experience and 

 science with the demands of our emotional nature, or, 

 in more philosophical terms, to show how the world of 

 values or worths finds its realisation in the world of 

 things. That such a reconciliation is possible is ulti- 

 mately entirely a matter of belief. To uphold and 

 cling to such belief in the face of the manifold contra- 

 dictions and difficulties which life and experience present 

 to us, and which philosophical reasoning can only very 

 partially remove, is the real function of religious faith, 

 and as such a resolution of the character. 



In placing the idea of Personality in the centre, or 

 rather in making it the sustaining foundation of his 

 thought, Lotze really begins where the system of Hegel 

 should have ended. That Hegel never arrived at a clear 

 conception regarding this important point was a defect in 

 his system which was pointed out by many of his followers 

 and critics. From the side of the religious interest 



