I Q2 INTRODUCTION 



which constitutes the truth of the real. Those who used 

 it regarded that as contradictory which was in fact 

 superior to logical laws which does not indeed abrogate 

 them in their legitimate application, but as to which no 

 sort of positive conjecture could possibly be formed as 

 a result of such application 1 .' 



The revolt of Lotze against the idealism of Fichte, 

 Schelling, and Hegel was due to the bad treatment which 

 the ' Philosophy of Nature ' had received at their hands. 

 The self-confidence of a thought which had found itself 

 absolute resulted in a Naturphilosophie which despised 

 facts ; and Lotze, as a scientist, felt it necessary to bring 

 down thought from 'the high horse of idealism,' and 

 assign to it the humble work of observation and descrip- 

 tion. ' The study of medicine, which I had chosen as my 

 life-work, made it necessary for me to acquire a knowledge 

 of natural science, and hence (in brief) I came to see how 

 completely untenable is a great part of the views of 

 Hegel, or rather the whole of them, in the form in which 

 they are put 2 .' It was to a large extent through his 

 medical studies that Lotze arrived at one of the chief 

 doctrines of his philosophy, viz. the universality of mecha- 

 nism as an account of the relations between phenomena. 

 'The father of modern physiology,' Johannes Mtiller 

 (1801-1858), had changed the whole aspect of biological 

 science by extending the conception of mechanism to all 

 the phenomena of life 3 . Lotze took a further step in the 

 same direction when he defined mechanism as * the con- 

 nexion of all those universal laws, according to which 

 every individual in the created world acts upon every 

 other 4 .' The sphere of mechanism is thus extended so as 



1 Lotze. Metaphysic, bk. i. ch. 6, 76 (Eng. Tr., vol. i. pp. 178, 

 17.9). See the whole chapter, in which the views of Leibniz and 

 Herbart are discussed. 



8 Lotze, Streitschrift, p. 7. 



3 Merz, History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, vol. i. 

 pp. 216 sqq.; cf. Lotze, Metaphysic, bk. ii. ch. 8, 224 sqq. (Eng. 

 Tr., vol. ii. p. 128). 



4 Streitschrift, p. 57. 



