500 



SCIEN'TIFIC THOUGHT. 



24. 

 Lotze's 

 Physiology 

 of the soul. 



which an exact or scientific treatment of mental phe- 

 nomena could meet with any success at all. It was in 

 the schools of physiology, in those of Johannes Miiller 

 and of Weber, that philosophers had to learn how to 

 attack the borderland of bodily and mental phenomena. 

 The first who approached the subject from this point 

 of view was Hermann Lotze. He was a disciple of 

 E. H. Weber, and had been led to psychological re- 

 searches from two independent starting-points : first from 

 the study of the medical sciences which, under the hands 

 of his great master, had largely benefited by the ap- 

 plication of the exact methods of the physical, the 

 measuring, and calculating sciences, but also from an 

 entirely opposite quarter.^ " A lively interest in poetry 

 and art had led him to philosophy." He was attracted 

 by that great body of ideas which, through the systems 

 of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, had become permanently 

 domiciled in German culture. In this great realm lie 

 could move " with some freedom," for it had not be- 

 come crystallised into a definite system of doctrine ; 

 exact studies had, moreover, easily convinced him " how 

 absolutely untenable was the form into which Hegel had 

 cast that valuable possession." 



I 



^ The quotations in the text are 

 taken from Lotze's polemical pam- 

 phlet, ' Streitschriften ' (Leipzig, 

 1857), pp. 6, 7. As already men- 

 tioned (supra, p. 407 note), Lotze had 

 been misunderstood bj^ his critics, 

 of whom some represented him as 

 a materialist, others as a follower of 

 Herbart. In refuting the latter 

 charge he explains his position to- 

 wards the idealistic sj'stems of the 

 first half of tiie nineteenth century. 



He acknowledges two great personal 

 influences, that of C. H. Weisse, 

 which, as it were, touches the 

 kernel of his convictions, and that 

 of the study of medicine, which, 

 in his case, was intimately con- 

 nected with that of the physical 

 sciences. He admits, as did Her- 

 bart, having passed through the 

 magnificent portal of Leibniz's 

 Monadology to a general arrange- 

 ment of his philosophical opinions. 



