618 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



many times exposed as such, — nowhere more clearly 

 tlian in Prof. James Ward's celebrated lectures.^ More- 

 over, the pushing back of the definite collocation of 

 things which is taken as the basis of mathematical or 

 evolutional reasoning introduces further difficulties. As 

 it was clearly recognised that, according to scientific dis- 

 coveries, a period must have existed when our planetary 

 system, at least, was without life, the problem arose to 

 explain, on purely mechanical principles, how life, and 

 later on conscious life, have been evolved out of dead 

 matter. In fact, the manifest discontinuities which the 

 liistory of creation presents had to be somehow ex- 

 plained away. This forms the second problem implicitly 

 contained in Lotze's formula. To put it concisely : the 

 problem of Nature involves, besides an explanation of the 

 festhetical or poetic value or meaning of her aspects, the 

 two problems of the " Contingent " and the " Discon- 

 tinuous." Lotze's own view as to these two cardinal 

 questions may be shortly stated as follows. 



The question of the Contingent — i.e., of a certain 

 collocation or arrangement of things in space, exhibiting, 

 as Schelling had already stated, an element of freedom or 

 choice, or, as others would state it, an element of chance 

 — refers to the way in which, at any definite moment in 

 time, things are spread out before us in space. And it 

 may here be noted that it really does not matter very 

 much what moment of time we choose as the basis of our 



^ ' Naturalism and Agnosticism ' 

 (2 vols., 1st ed., 1899). This im- 

 portant publication has been fol- 

 lowed in 1911 by a furthei- series 

 entitled 'The Realm of Ends or 

 Pluralism and Theism.' I shall 



have an opportunity of dealing with 

 the systematic view developed in 

 these writings in a future chapter 

 of this section, which will be 

 entitled "Of Systems of Philo- 

 sophy." 



