410 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



first by Lotze, has been independently treated by original 

 thinkers in this country.^ 



Indeed, nowhere has the change which has come over 

 philosophical thought in the course of the nineteenth 

 century been more conspicuous than in the science of 

 Logic. According to a well-known dictum of Kant, this 

 had remained stationary for two thousand years. Shortly 

 after this expression the very fact that Kant himself, in 

 his first ' Critique,' introduced a section under the title 

 of transcendental logic as an integral part of his theory 

 of knowledge, gave rise to various attempts to remodel 

 the traditional logic of the schools to which Kant had 

 65. so contemptuously referred. A real advance was, how- 



Hegel's new 



conception ever, not accomplished till Hegel boldly conceived of 

 logical and metaphysical notions as forming the stages 

 of the development of the Absolute — i.e., of the Spirit 

 or Thought which lives and moves in the progress of 

 the individual human as well as in that of the uni- 

 versal mind in nature and history. This development 

 gave a deeper sense or meaning to the otherwise lifeless 

 forms of logic, connecting them in the dialectic process 

 of thought which moved in the orderly rhythm of 

 thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, as suggested already 

 by Fichte. 



of Logic. 



— to use a popular phrase — Lotze 

 was driving at. Tlie first light 

 that came to the writer was an 

 expression of Heinrich Ritter, 

 Lotze's elder colleague, that the 

 central idea of his system was 

 the Werthbegriff, the conception of 

 Value or Worth. Before Lotze, 

 Herbart had already separated 

 aesthetics and ethics from meta- 

 physics by introducing the idea of 

 valuation or judgments of value 



which are concerned, not with 

 realities, but with the relation that 

 exists between realities. From 

 this view, the influence of which 

 on Lotze deserves to be appreci- 

 ated, Lotze's idea of a world of 

 Values or Worths, as distinguished 

 from a world of Things, differs in 

 principle. 



1 Notably by Bradley and Boa- 

 »uquet. 



