ESTIMATE OF LEIBNIZ'S PHILOSOPHY IQI 



interpretation of * thought ' is very different from that of 

 Hegel. Although he expressly repudiated the suggestion 

 that he is to be counted as a follower of Herbart, Lotze's 

 position as regards thought and the reconciling of its 

 contradictions is more akin to the view of Herbart than 

 to that of Hegel. Like Herbart he regards thought as 

 essentially analytic, as interpreting rather than constituting 

 reality, and the work of science or philosophy is thus not 

 that of laying down an absolute all-comprehensive system, 

 expressing the whole evolution of reality, but that of 

 unifying our knowledge, resolving the contradictions that 

 appear in common experience. Thought cannot pierce to 

 the inner nature of things, cannot understand them so 

 thoroughly that it could make them. To use a distinc- 

 tion which has become a commonplace among writers on 

 natural science, thought can describe but it cannot explain*. 

 It can give an account of what happens, can express in the 

 form of general laws the relations between things, so as to 

 be able to calculate occurrences, and can possibly reduce 

 these laws to one general system ; but it cannot tell what 

 the things themselves really are, how they originally came 

 into being, and why they are so and not otherwise. In 

 short, thought is governed solely by the principle of 

 contradiction ; the principle of sufficient reason (in 

 Leibniz's sense) is beyond it. ' Reality is infinitely richer 

 than thought. . . . We know that in fact the nature of 

 reality yields a result to us unthinkable. It teaches us 

 that being and not-being are not, as we could not help 

 thinking them to be, contradictory predicates of every 

 subject, but that there is an alternative between them, 

 arising out of a union of the two which we cannot construct 

 in thought. This explains how the extravagant utterance 

 could be ventured upon, that it is just contradiction 



1 For a fuller account of this distinction, see Merz, History of 

 European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, vol. i. pp. 337, 382, 383, notes. 

 Venn (Empirical Logic, ch. 21) minimizes the distinction, holding 

 explanation to be generalization. 



